Felix Baumgartner: A life in extremes. An obituary

It is a mockery, a bitter point that this life, which should be a single superlative, ended so misery and unglamorous. Felix Baumgartner, the man who once jumped from the stratosphere to Earth, from a height of 39 kilometers, was recovered dead from a swimming pool on Wednesday. Baumgartner had lost control of his paraglider and fell into the swimming pool of a hotel on the Adriatic coast.

For Baumgartner, 56, this flight should have been an easy exercise, measured by what he had dared all the years before.

In 1996 he jumped with a parachute on his back from the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, the world’s largest arc bridge at the time. A year later, he chose the 451 meter high Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur as a jump base – which meant a new world record, but was not spectacular enough. In 2004 he could therefore fall into the Mamet Cave in the Croatian National Park Velebit, through a narrow rocky shaft, 190 meters deep. Baumgartner had had a few torches at the bottom of the cave floor so as not to plunge into a completely dark hole.

A Teufelskerl, this Felix Baumgartner from Salzburg. One who shifts borders. One who puts everything on game to do it that everyone says: that is not possible, that’s impossible, that’s crazy.

At that time, at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, Baumgartner was talked about. But only in the scene, under the base jumpers.

For Baumgartner, of course, a much too small resonance room. And for his sponsor, the brouse company Red Bull, anyway. It had to be a little dared, somewhat wilky, an action that can be described with just one sentence and makes everyone who hears this words. And all over the world. This sentence was: a man jumps from space onto the earth.

Baumgartner, a trained car mechanic, son of a carpenter and a housewife, worked on the project he called Stratos for five years. Only dressed in a thin space suit, he wanted to be carried with a helium balloon at a height of 39,000 meters and then jumped out of the transport capsule to hunt the earth.

The only piece of luggage: a parachute. But he would want to span it as late as possible, because records had to be set up: the highest speed in free fall and the deepest free case. He would already reach the record for the highest jump if he dared to take a step into the stratosphere.

The big day came on October 14, 2012. Stratos should finally become a reality. Already when Baumgartner crouched in his gray capsule, high above New Mexico, one of his greatest wishes had fulfilled: the world watched him on Ascension. 200 television stations reported live, provided with images of 35 Red Bull cameras.

Shortly before he jumped, at 12:07 p.m., Baumgartner spoke a few words into the microphone that sounded as if he had been talking about them for days: “You could only see what I see. Sometimes you have to go really far so that you can see how small … I’m going home now.”

Baumgartner jumped and everything was successful. He did not pull the parachute too early and not too late, he broke several records and landed safely in the New Mexico desert.

Baumgartner immediately explained his resignation from extreme sports, and for a moment it appeared to have actually made peace with him. As if his addiction to validity, which he had always tried to sell as a sporting ambition, was finally breastfed.

The opposite was the case. Baumgartner began with a self -musalization that had to disturb anyone who had thought he was a hero after jumping from space. Baumgartner hardly gave an interview in which he did not measure his own work himself. So he told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” that it was always a dream of him to “leave humanity something” – such as Mozart. In conversation with the “Handelsblatt”, Baumgartner stood in a row with Neil Armstrong, the first person on the moon, and with Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climbing of Mount Everest.

Every self -praise let him shrink instead of making it bigger. But Baumgartner didn’t understand what he was doing, he also knew no pubic boundaries. In interviews, he would like to point out that he could give managers good advice, because they were also on the road at icy heights. The poorly concealed message was: Please book me as a speaker.

It would not have needed all of this. Baumgartner’s story was also so strong enough, without an accompanying comment. Who couldn’t find himself in her? Everyone, not just top managers, probably knows this feeling that in some phases there is no more soil under their feet. Because all of this is one size too big, overwhelming the job, a complicated love, sometimes both at the same time. And you only have a small parachute on your back. Where was the ripcord again?

Baumgartner did not manage to simply let his story speak for himself. That would have been sovereign. However, it became more and more particular and caught with interring from the right sideline. When asked whether he could imagine moving to politics, Baumgartner replied: “You can’t move anything in a democracy. We would need a moderate dictatorship where there are a few people from the private sector who really are familiar.”

In January 2016, he commented on the influx of refugees seeking protection to Austria as follows: “A country in which fishing is punished without a fishing license and people without passing the border can only rule idiots.”

Baumgartner spoke in favor of lending Viktor Orbán the Nobel Peace Prize, because the shooter his country and its people.

During the corona crisis, he attacked the editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper “Falter” because he had written that he owes the mild course of his corona infections to multiple vaccinations. Baumgartner insulted him in a post as a “pharmaceutical whore” and was later sentenced to pay of 5000 euros in pain and suffering.

Baumgartner, whom millions of people had adored a few years earlier, is more and more isolated with his throws. Celebrated only of right -wing groups, no longer a man of the masses.

“Born to fly” had Baumgartner tattooed early on. That was his motto, he said in an interview, and he already knew what tattoo he would get stuck at his end of his life: “I had fun”.

But no, the last career relief was definitely not fun for Felix Baumgartner, who had put himself offside. It was also not fun for those who had been his fans. They only heard a vague talk and no longer the hero who had once jumped from space to earth.