On a bright Saturday afternoon in San Francisco, Red Bull athlete and two-time X Games medalist Sean MacCormac accomplished something unthinkable: he became the first person to ever skysurf down the Bay Bridge’s silver cables.
A cloud-swooshing skysurfer with over 25 years of experience and 22,000 skydives under his belt, MacCormac is among just a handful of humans capable of pulling off such a mind-boggling feat, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t spend months planning, training, and researching for the history-making flight. His mission impossible went as follows: perform a 5,000-foot dive from a helicopter above the Bay, deploy a parachute to anchor the flight path to the bridge, grind on the monument’s metal cables for several seconds, and finally, spiral turn off the structure and float down to a waterborne landing pad. It’s just about the most scare-inducing trick imaginable, but MacCormac said he had little fear due to the amount of preparation that went into the stunt.
Prada
Prada
Prada
“We had to do a number of inspections to determine what it would take to grind the cables,” he told Hypebeast. “From there, we went out to Lake Elsinore and brought in a crane that was to scale with the Bay Bridge that had rails that were the same width of the rails of the bridge. This allowed us to practice in a way that made me feel super confident going into the day of execution.”
There’s no questioning MacCormac’s technical expertise — the guy pioneered the “invisible man” self-propelled spin, a move that includes 12 revolutions per second, after all — so his penchant for style might come as more of a shock for some. To nail the maneuver, the skysurfer descended from the sky on a high-tech board created in collaboration between Prada Linea Rossa and the Luna Rossa team (the House’s America’s Cup sailing squad), while also wearing a full look from Prada Linea Rossa. The daredevil wears Prada, after all.
The board itself was designed to cope with the specific demands of MacCormac’s intense operation. With a honeycomb core and carbon fiber layers, the bespoke build provided maximum reactivity and control during the flight, and its dense-but-lightweight polyethylene base was particularly fortuitous in withstanding the abrasion from the bridge’s cables, a triumph MacCormac said is “really challenging” for skysurfing boardmakers. Meanwhile, his aerodynamic Prada Linnea Rossa garments were simply the cherries on top of such sartorial airborne flexes.
“I have been doing this for a long time and partnered with Red Bull for a long time, so I know what a superpower your team can be for you— constantly raising you up,” MacCormac said. “And Prada came in and did that. They really brought a sophistication and elegance to the project that put it on another level.”
Prada
Prada
MacCormac equates the sensation of strapping on a skysurfing board to that of dropping into a 2,000-foot vertical ramp — a daunting feeling for most, but one that’s particularly thrilling to him. As he waited for the sky to open up over San Francisco’s skyline, he remembered looking down at the empty bridge below him and seeing thousands of people stopped in traffic on either side of the closures, absorbing the cultural gravity of the moment.
“I really felt the pressure to get it,” he said. “But at the same time, I hope it was a moment where a busload of kids could look up and see it happen and have it inspire them to do something way more awesome.”
See Sean MacCormac’s skysurfing feat on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge above.