Skydiver jumps at birthday feat
A ‘‘throwaway comment’’ and a desire to beat his Auckland mates has driven a Canterbury skydiver to complete 30 back-to-back jumps on his 30th birthday.
Christchurch man Steve Gregor said ‘‘there was no way’’ he and fellow Ashburton-based Skydiving Kiwi members were going to let an Aucklander hold his club’s record after one recently visited and made 10 jumps in a day.
‘‘For a normal day of skydiving that’s a lot of jumps ... so I threw out as a bit of a joke: hey, my 30th is coming up so I’m going to do 30,’’ he said.
‘‘It was a throwaway comment and then it turned into an obsession. It was really all I was focused on for the last couple of months, just making it happen.’’
With more than 450 jumps under his belt, the sales representative was ‘‘considered a baby of the sport’’.
He said skydiving ‘‘not only changed my life but saved it’’ after a marriage break-up ‘‘and a pretty rough time’’.
‘‘I think it’s very easy to get stuck on the treadmill of life ... skydiving was my thing where I got to escape the real world.’’
Eight hours
He made his latest 30 jumps over about eight hours on Tuesday and said he succeeded thanks to the help of ‘‘a team of about 15 people on the ground, four different parachutes to cycle through and a determined pilot’’.
It followed months of prep- aration and ‘‘making sure I was physically fit enough to complete it safely and without my many injuries becoming a problem’’.
The result was 30 successful jumps ‘‘without even so much as a rough landing’’.
‘‘I used to get paid to do silly things on motorbikes and I broke 13 bones over five years of doing that
‘‘Luckily I had a great trainer who whipped me in to shape pretty quickly.’’
He wanted his feat to encourage anyone thinking about skydiving to ‘‘stop thinking about it and book it because you absolutely will not regret it’’.
‘‘Thousands and thousands of skydives are happening every day in every country in the world.
‘‘It’s incredibly rare that anything doesn’t go to plan and I think [Tuesday] was pretty good proof of that – when you can do 30 back-toback jumps almost without stopping, without even so much as a sore ankle at the end of the day.’’