Jean-Marc Boivin

Jean-Marc Boivin, born April 6, 1951 in Dijon and died February 17, 1990, in Venezuela near Salto Angel, was a French mountaineer, extreme skier, paraglider, caver and base jumper. He has directed several award-winning films. He holds altitude records in hang gliding and paragliding; he was also the first to descend Everest by paraglider.

This "adventurer of modern times" as he has defined himself is of Dijon origin and made his debut as climbers in Fissin and the difficult limestone cliffs of the Cormot rocks. A true jack-of-all-trades for adventure, Jean-Marc Boivin stands out for the diversity of his talents: climber, mountain guide, glacier climber, paraglider, steep slope skier, this man, known for his kindness and warmth holy energy! His twenty years of adventure know the major stages that punctuate his career. The winter of 1977 was conducive to extreme skiing: he succeeded in his first 8 descents. The following summer, he opened a new route on the Extremely Difficult side of Mont Blanc du Tacul. In 1980, his lightning ascent of the north face of the Matterhorn in solo leaves dreamer: 4h10mns. On September 26, 1986, "the bird-man" flew from the summit of Everest, to descend from the roof of the world in a paraglider for 12 minutes of "happiness" in his own words. But the general public has especially remembered the fantastic spectacle played by Jean-Marc in March 1986 when he succeeded in chaining the four winter north faces of Mont-Blanc in less than twenty hours, combining both his talents as an extreme skier , mountaineer, parachutist and delta wing virtuoso. In hang-gliding, he holds several world records, notably jumping from the summit of Aconcagua and covering some 34 km in a paraglider from the summit of Mont-Blanc.

On February 16, 1990, followed by a television crew filming for the show Ushuaïa, the extreme magazine, Jean-Marc Boivin managed a jump of nearly 1,000 meters in base-jump from the Salto Angel waterfall, the highest waterfall in the world, on the Auyan Tepuy, in Venezuela. The next day, he decides to repeat the feat from, this time, the top of the fall itself, at 979 meters. Or, a woman, Catherine, who had jumped just before him having injured herself after his fall, Jean-Marc Boivin jumped just after to help him. But, at the end of the jump, he collided with a tree. To the team that came to rescue him by helicopter, he told them to go first to rescue the person who had jumped before him. When the team returned to him, he had died of internal bleeding at the age of 38. He is the first Frenchman to die in Base Jump.