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Builderchuting is a combination of two other daredevil sports: buildering, in which a climber ascends an edifice using harnesses and rope, and BASE jumping, which is essentially skydiving off the top of tall buildings. BASE jumping (which stands for Building, Antennae, Span, Earth) claims the highest fatality rate of any sport, although the title of World's Most Dangerous Sport cannot be withheld from builderchuting, as it continues to grow in popularity. The increasing notoriety of the sport is overshadowed only by its most prolific champion, a 24-year-old Sicilian man named Norberti, one of the pioneers of builderchuting and its only unbreakable master.
Norberti is no stranger to astonishing feats. At age 20 he walked the length of the Great Wall of China as an endurance test. After completing the 1,500-mile hike, he headed east, ending up in Hong Kong. While passing the Central Plaza building, Hong Kong's tallest at 1,227 feet, Norberti had a vision: One day he would climb that building. Rationally, he knew such a dream was absurd, yet he was somehow compelled to make this vision become a reality.
Upon returning to his native Italy, he took up rock climbing in the Alps and then became increasingly obsessed with the idea of buildering. He started by scaling a number of freestanding structures in Italy, including a 300-foot church spire in Verona. Then came a close call: A mere three stories from the top of a 61-story skyscraper in Rome, Norberti lost his grip. Whether he slipped or jumped intentionally is a matter of some conjecture. He plunged more than 700 feet, onto a haystack-sized mound of wood chips left in the plaza by a landscaping crew. Unscathed -- aside from some minor abrasions on his hip -- Norberti stood up, walked away, and was promptly arrested by police. The bewildered authorities couldn't fathom how the impact had not killed him. Following a battery of examinations by doctors and psychiatric counselors, the daredevil was simply fined and released. A local mystic called his survival a miracle, but Norberti believed it meant that he was destined "to fly."
Norberti realized that flying was not going to happen without a little help, so he began BASE jumping with a parachute. He worked in seclusion, parachuting off grain silos in the Sicilian countryside. He made his public debut as a builderchuter by scaling Rio De Janeiro's famed Christ statue at night, where he perched before parachuting off the statue at dawn. A series of daring and inventive jumps led to a formal invitation from an Arab oil baron to try the 1,149-foot Emirates Tower in Dubai. Norberti took four hours to scale the structure in 110-degree heat. In danger of fatal heat exhaustion, he decided to leap immediately upon arrival at the top. Nearing the street below, he was so late opening his parachute that the drag failed to slow him sufficiently. He struck the roof of a passing truck with enough force to go through it, landing in the truck's metal bed. Again Norberti emerged unscathed. | |
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