Kite surfing madness in Worthing?

The sleepy West Sussex town of Worthing found itself the setting for an extreme sports challenge this month. Two local kite surfers received widespread media coverage when they achieved their ambition to jump over the town’s pier. Jake Scrace, 25, and Lewis Crathern, 24, used 40mph-plus winds to carry them over the Victorian pier. The Grade II listed pier – the home to the famous International Birdman competition, where people use various odd mechanical devices in an attempt to fly – did at last witness human flight although the two kite boarders narrowly missed crashing into it.

Jack Scrace, a carpenter, who makes kite boards, and Lewis Crathern, a professional kite surfer, say they’d been preparing for the death-defying event for four years. Many who witnessed the daredevil duo jump 40ft into the air, were heard to ask ‘why?’. And by the pair’s own admission, if the pier-jumping effort didn’t go 100 per cent to plan, they’d have been feeding the seagulls.

So why do people choose to test themselves like this?  There’s a frequently used quote by the US novelist and intrepid journalist, Ernest Hemingway, ‘There are only three real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and mountain climbing. All the others are mere games’. For Hemingway, like many people, the adrenalin only pumped when it mattered.

Many people have attributed the rise in extreme sports to our increasingly comfortable lives. In evolutionary terms, the ‘fight or flight’ adrenalin rush that we used to get on a daily basis when hunting for food with our spears has disappeared.  To feel alive, they argue, we need to reproduce the fight or flight adrenalin rush in other ways.

Former US President George Bush Snr, celebrated his 85th birthday this year by sky-diving out of an aircraft. Was he being any more sensible than the two kite surfers jumping over Worthing pier? Probably not. But, like the Worthing duo, George Bush Snr said he felt more alive afterwards.

Risk, it seems, is part of our make-up; too little risk can make Jack a dull boy, too much daredevil adrenalin and we could end up in looking our local pier in the face. In the end the choice has to be yours.

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