A deadly BASE jumping accident in a remote Utah canyon took the lives of two people over the weekend — one of them a well-known extreme athlete who once shared the stage with Madonna at the Super Bowl, according to authorities.
The Grand County, Utah Sheriff’s Office confirmed that one of the victims was Andy Lewis, a celebrated daredevil best recognized for his stunts in BASE jumping — a high-risk sport in which participants leap from fixed structures like buildings, bridges, or canyon cliffs and parachute to the ground below.
Lewis had also made a name for himself in the niche disciplines of slacklining and tricklining, sports that blend high-wire balancing with aerial gymnastics, sometimes performed at terrifying heights.
His moment in the national spotlight came when he appeared during Madonna’s halftime performance at the 2012 Super Bowl. Wearing a Roman toga, Lewis performed flips and acrobatic tricks on a one-inch-wide line as if it were a trampoline, all while Madonna performed behind him — turning him from a little-known athlete into an overnight sensation.
“My phone actually rang itself to death three days in a row,” Lewis said during a subsequent appearance on Conan O’Brien’s late night television program.
Emergency crews were sent Sunday to Mineral Bottom, a secluded desert location near the Utah-Colorado border, following reports of injuries during a BASE jumping attempt. Lewis and an unidentified 50-year-old man were both pronounced dead at the scene, the sheriff’s office announced in a news release.
Sheriff’s Lt. Al Cymbaluk confirmed to The Associated Press that Lewis was indeed among the deceased, though he said no additional details about the circumstances of the fatal accident were available.
Lewis ran BASE Jump Moab, a company that took first-time customers on tandem jumps, where the guest is strapped to an experienced guide who wears and controls the parachute. Even so, Lewis never shied away from discussing the very real dangers the sport carries.
“It’s weird to think about how many people are dead, because it’s like a normal thing,” Lewis told documentary filmmaker Ella Warnick in an interview released last year.
As of Monday, calls, texts, and Facebook messages sent to BASE Jump Moab had not been returned.
Lewis claimed four consecutive world championships in competitive slacklining between 2008 and 2011. In 2011, he also set a Guinness World Record for slackline surfing — a technique involving a side-to-side rocking motion that mimics surfing — while maintaining his balance above China’s Diaoshuilou waterfall. Three years later, in 2014, he walked a slackline stretched between two hot air balloons hovering more than 4,000 feet above the Nevada desert.
