The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Freddy Nock
High-wire artist who scorned all safety equipment and broke a string of perilous world records
FREDDY NOCK, the Swiss high-wire artist, who has died suddenly at home aged 59, collected a score of world records for a succession of stomachchurning stunts without any safety equipment.
Notably, he broke a record that had stood for three decades, for highest tightrope walk (ground-supported), set by Philippe Petit in 1974 when he walked a high wire 411m (1,350ft) above ground between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. In 2015, in the Eastern Alps, Nock walked between two snowy peaks on a 349m-long tightrope no wider than his thumb over a drop of more than 1,000m.
The circus was in his blood; the Nocks had established Switzerland’s first official circus in 1840. A century later “The Nerveless Nocks” had wowed the United States, headlining The Greatest Show on Earth in 1954 and performing on The Ed
Sullivan Show in 1964, in the same episode as The Beatles. That year his great-uncle Pio Nock appeared in the movie Circus World, with John Wayne, Rita Hayworth and Claudia Cardinale.
His father Alfredo Nock had split from Zirkus Nock and set up a circus of his own. Freddy walked his first rope aged four, and was proficient on the high wire at 11. By 1994, he had won the Silver Clown (second prize) at the Circus “Oscars” in Monte Carlo. Photogenically chiselled and bronzed, he had a look of Burt Reynolds, with a David Niven-esque pencil moustache.
Among the records he held at various times were the fastest skywalk between two hot-air balloons, the longest cable walk (3.5km up a cable-car rope in Switzerland), the longest time running on a “Wheel of Death” (25 hours), and the longest time spent sitting continuously on a chair balanced on a high wire (8hr 30min 55sec).
He set tightrope records blindfold, on bicycles, at record speeds, and at the steepest ever gradients. He walked backwards in gale-force winds. “No skyscraper, no mountain and no lake is safe from him,” read his flyer.
His philosophy was that “you can’t live your life just focusing on all the dangers. Death is a part of life and when your time is up, it’s up.” But he was not without fear. Curiously, for someone whose motto was “the sky is the limit”, he was scared of flying in aeroplanes, and in the sea he was anxious about sharks.
He drilled himself meticulously to catch the rope with his hands when he lost his balance, as he did in 2010, when a gust of wind blew him off a cable-car wire in Hunan. He only had one major accident, aged 18, when he was thinking more about a blonde girl in the front row than about the rope. He fell and broke his wrists.
His feet were as precise as a Swiss watch but his heart was a less reliable part of the mechanism. His first marriage failed; in 2019, his second wife accused him of trying to kill her, and he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison by the Zofinger District Court. His defence lawyer admitted that it was “a wild marriage” and a “toxic relationship”, characterised by violence, but a year later, at the Argau High Court, he was declared innocent of attempted intentional homicide and compensated for his cancelled performances.
This year he had planned a comeback stunt, walking a high wire suspended under a hot-air balloon at more than 5,000 metres.
Alfred Nock was born on December 10 1964 in Gränichen, in the Swiss canton of Aargau, to Alfredo Nock and Margrith Nock-Gautschi.
At 16, after his father’s circus had folded, he toured with his aunt’s, balancing over lion cages, riding loops in an iron ball on his motorcycle and shooting apples off people’s heads with a crossbow. He set his first Guinness World Record in 1998 by running 734m up the suspension cable of the St Moritz Signal cable car, and went on to raise tens of thousands of pounds for charity with his stunts.
He is survived by four daughters from his first marriage, including the circus performer Stephanie Nock, and a young son from his second, who joined him, aged six, on the Wheel of Death.
Freddy Nock, born December 10 1964, died February 7 2024