Classic Bond stunt provides the inspiration for a new extreme sport

For the 1977 James Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me" stuntman Rick Sylvester skied off a 3,000-foot cliff, deployed a parachute in mid-flight, and floated to safety. Like all things Bond, it looked incredibly cool and utterly implausible, and the stunt became one of the most memorable in movie history.

Men`s Journal report that a kid named Shane McConkey watched that scene and spent the next 20 years fantasizing about duplicating it. McConkey is now a 33-year-old pro skier and avid BASE jumper (which means he parachutes from fixed objects), and this past January he finally realized his dream, hucking himself off a snowy 420-foot cliff in Lake Tahoe, California, called Lover`s Leap (pictured here), and inaugurating the sport of ski BASE-ing.



Since then at least three more skiers have flung themselves from cliffs in Tahoe and New Zealand. And in April McConkey took his act to Bella Coola, British Columbia, where he found a bounty of technical ski descents leading to massive freefalls. He made six successful jumps, including his biggest yet: a 500-vertical-foot ski approach to a 600-vertical-foot drop - a Bondworthy effort indeed.

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