Daredevil high-wire artist set numerous world records
In his career as a high-wire artist, Freddy Nock, who has died at the age of 59, walked between Alpine peaks, above Swiss lakes and up and down steep cables that carried gondolas, always without safety nets and often without even the traditional balancing pole. Sometimes he walked the wire backwards, other times he rode bicycles on wires.
He first entered the Guinness Book of World Records in 1998 when he walked 730m up a static cable car wire, which supports a skiers’ gondola, in the Swiss ski resort of St Moritz – without a harness or pole. In 2006, he beat that record by walking up a gondola cable at Santis Schwebebahn in Hundwil, Switzerland, a total distance of 1220m.
The records kept tumbling while he remained perfectly balanced on the wire. In 2011, he reached the top of Germany's largest mountain, the Zugspitze, by walking up a gondola cable for 90 minutes, at times with a 57% gradient – again with no balancing pole or safety harness. In the same year he set a record for the longest high-wire walk backwards, covering 160m at a height of 2400m on the Jungfraujoch mountain in Switzerland.
He admitted to feeling nervous as he was poised to start a high-wire walk, but fine once he started: "Not much goes through my head," he said. "I just take another step and when I feel comfortable I start looking to the left and right and see what's happening around me."
Nock was partly inspired by the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who famously walked a wire between the roofs of the World Trade Center Twin Towers on August 7, 1974, performing some tricks for the crowds below, in what has been described as “the artistic crime of the century”. Petit was 410m above the ground in Lower Manhattan. He was briefly arrested by the NYPD, but released in return for giving a free high-wire show for children in Central Park.
In 2015 Nock beat Petit’s height record by walking a wire between Swiss Alpine mountain peaks – Biancograt and Piz Prievius, reaching 3531m above sea level for a distance of 346m on a 39-minute walk with a balancing pole but no safety harness. Guinness World Records ratified it as a high-wire height record above sea level. Had he fallen, it would have been for 1000m on to the snow-covered valley below.
A member of the extended Swiss Nock circus family, dating back to the late 18th century, who gained fame not only around Europe, but also by travelling across the US with the leading Ringling Barnum Bailey circus, Nock also broke records for the fastest wire walk between hot air balloons, and the longest time on the so-called “wheel of death”, a rotating contraption.
In Europe, he was also a daredevil master of the motorradkugel (motorbike bullet, also known as the death bullet), in which he rode a motorbike inside a narrow spherical steel cage, upsidedown half the time and often with up to six other bikers defying gravity in a choreographed dance, with the riders’ lives depending on the perfect match of their speed and direction within a sphere with a radius of just under 4.8m.
His great uncle, Pio Nock, was in the Ringling Barnum Bailey circus from the 1950s and 1960s, both as a clown and a high-wire performer. He appeared in the 1964 Hollywood movie Circus World starring John Wayne, Rita Hayworth and Claudia Cardinale, when Pio performed clown stunts on a high-wire, although an actor played him in close-ups.
At a Ringling Barnum Bailey circus performance in Madison Square Garden, Pio once fell almost 6m from his wire into a cage containing 17 lions. A lion tamer saved his life by breaking his fall and fending off the lions that had started to attack him. Yet such family folklore only seemed to spur on his great nephew to more outlandish high-wire deeds.
Lithe, superfit and with well-honed core muscles, Nock always said he did not need a safety net or harness because he had trained for many years to grab the wire, without dropping his pole, if he started to fall. His core muscles allowed him to pull himself back on to the wire.
Alfred Nock, known since childhood as Freddy, was born in 1964 in Granichen, best-known for its 12th-century Liebegg castle, in the canton of Aargau. His father Alfredo became a trapeze and highwire artist in Zirkus Nock, with his wife Margrith (nee Gautschi) as a back-up performer. Young Freddy first walked a wire between high chairs when he was 4. By the age of 11, he was walking high wires in the family circus – without safety nets.
Swiss police found Nock's body on February 7 at his home in the small town of Uerkheim in Aargau. One of his daughters, Kimberly Nock, told the Swiss newspaper Blick: “His broken heart unfortunately couldn't hold out any more in this world.”
She was believed to have been referring to his anguish after his second wife, Brigitte, left him and took their young son with her. The son survives him, as do his four daughters from his first marriage.
In 2019, Nock had been charged in Switzerland with the attempted murder of his second wife and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
The case was overturned by a higher court a year later and he was awarded 23,000 Swiss francs in damages for lost earnings. His defence lawyer told the court that Nock and his then wife had “a toxic relationship” and had had “a wild marriage”.
With Nock’s death, the most famous family members are the Nerveless Nocks, who have appeared on America’s Got Talent, giving Simon Cowell the jitters. However, there was little doubt among the global high-wire community that the family has lost its greatest talent. The Hungarian performer Laszlo Simet Jr, who last year became the first person to cross the Danube – a distance of 300m on a 22mm wire without a safety harness in Budapest – wrote on Facebook: “I see Freddy as the best of all of us, the greatest high-wire walker of all time.”
– The Times