I studied statistics on a manual by a certain Sadowski, whose name came back to my mind while rewatching Alberto Tomba's memorable '94/'95 Ski World Cup season. It was then that Alberto, with his hips and fractions of seconds and unprobable wins, he sent all statistics to the village of Fan Kulo. The subsequent Ski World Cups, in some way, reconciled Tomba and Sadowski, but it was more of a mental than physical issue.

 

Because extreme sports, or extreme situations tout-court, demonstrate how it's always our head leading and telling our body which is the real limit: things may seem impossible just because we believe them to be so. Other times, however, the body can't take it and... waves goodbye.

 

This, after all, is similar to the ethos of a certain heroic rock rethoric, such as the one about psychoactive ODs, and music on the edge of sonic reality played by stray lives. It is summed up by the phrase "He who is afraid of death, is afraid of living. Much more important is knowing what you want from life" which... was not said by Ozzie Osborne or Kurt Cobain, but by David Lama.

 

For some, Lama led a heroic life, for others he was a self-destructive maniac, a dazed 'rocker' meaning the 'rock' that became Lama's raison d'etre: the rock you climb. In Patagonia, becoming a hero, he freestyled Cerro Torre, a smooth 1500-meter vertical slab of granite pinnacled by a hat of frozen snow on the summit.

 

In '18 (solo!) he "opened" the Nepalese way to the Lunag Ri, another straight face of granite with a frozen blade covered in snow on the summit. 

 

Then, in April '19, while descending with two companions - at 2 a.m. - from one of the most difficult Canadian routes (the M16 of Howse Peak), he was hit and killed by a fierce avalanche. 28 years old, twenty of which spent climbing and setting records. 

 

Among the anonymous messages of condolence on his website (david-lama.com), I found a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita: 

 

"He is not born nor does he ever die. Unborn, eternal, uninterrupted, ancient, he will not be killed when the body is killed."

 

This was not a coincidence.

 

When you touch excess, as in the case of the fakir's fast or a night out in the cold in the "death zone" (above 7000m altitude, when cells die but can no longer be born), altered states of consciousness take over and put you in touch with your "true" potential. 

 

This is what ecstatic musicians like Abida Parveen experience. Or Elisabeth Revol, the Frenchwoman who on Nanga Parbat - hallucinating - 'saw' an old woman take off her boots, in reality she took them off and froze her feet. 

 

It is that "strength" that Leonardo Emilio Comici said took possession of him when he was on the wall. Emilio (in the 1930s) played the piano and the guitar but above all he "opened routes" convinced of how

 

"beautiful it is to climb completely free on an overhanging wall, to see that void between your legs and to feel that you can dominate it with your own strength alone. When I climb alone I always look down to inebriate myself with the void, and I sing with joy." 

 

Handsome, bold (and coveted by the rich holidaymakers of Cortina), Comici in 1933 opened the Comici-Dimai route on the Cima Grande di Lavaredo.

 

He was inverting the down/top logic of mountaineering: looking for the routes "that a drop of water dropped from the summit would follow", not going for the easiest ways. (The same creativity of Jimi when he saw in the larsen a friend, not a physical joke to avoid.) 

 

From then on Comici changed the Dolomite from the chemical formula CaMg(CO3)2 into matter that represents us: "creation has imposed itself on matter, the path has become a projection of the self on the rock."

 

Naturally, 'verticality' became a poetic notion that turned the conquest into an extreme territory of fame and risk. Death came, in '40, while practising on a wall behind his doorsteps.

 

Lama replicated Comici's pioneering on impossible peaks, certain that mountaineering "has something in common with the arts. Taking (...) an idea that exists only in your head... you draw a line on a mountain and once you have climbed that line, it has become reality."

 

These days, the New Twenties, have seen the gentrification of extreme feats brought to you by tourist operators. On mount Everest, bundles of abandoned ropes remind us that Comici's creativity has been turned into a shallow poetic of repetition.

 

A BBC broadcast's title "What's it like to queue on Everest?" says it all. On the highest mountain in the world, you may end up climbing it and queuing, like at the post office, to enjoy the summit for two minutes, with "mass-extreme-tourism" pushing you from behind. 

 

The gentrification of extreme sports is inextricably linked to music. You can see it at the "Annual Powder Awards", a sort of Oscar night for those who excel in extreme skiing: daring descents ("best line"), reckless jumps ("best air"), "urban skiing" ("best jib"). 

 

Behind the films, pumping energy, there is plastic, gap-filling, beat-thumping, already-heard music: Rival Consoles, or Spindrift, even the exciting electric-pomades of Kasabian; in any case an intrusive music, a sound manipulation. A rhythmic mush that transforms triple somersaults on fresh snow or vertical descents into an “erotic show.”

 

The parallactic gap becomes evident when the radio broadcast airs an advertisement by "High Fives:” an association for paraplegics that lets us have a glimpse into the unspeakable waste of this massified extreme ethos: the inevitable "Other" bridging Sadowski with von Masoch, possibly an unconscious death-wish, running through the artistic risk-taking of Enrico Comici and the current (pop) star rock-climbers. 

A whole world per se, well summarized in four plain words by the parents of "Hoji" Hjorleifson, himself one of these “cherished madmen” with rich sponsors: "So far so good."

 

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