Nik Wallenda’s World Records & Tight Rope Victory Walks

Nik Wallenda

Getty Nik Wallenda walks a high wire over Times Square.

Tonight, Nik Wallenda take an 1,800-foot walk over the Masaya Volcano in Masaya, Nicaragua. “Volcano Live! with Nick Wallenda” will be broadcast live on ABC at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight, March 4, 2020.

According to dick clark productions, this will be a record-setting event for Wallenda, being his longest tight rope walk.

The network added, the Masaya volcano has multiple craters and is one of the few volcanoes that has a lava lake. The conditions at Masaya make Wallenda’s walk incredibly dangerous. Throughout the event, Wallenda and his family will give interviews about the what went into the production and the walk itself, including rigging, practice and planning.

 

Wallenda’s previous walks include traversing a Grand Canyon gorge and Niagara Falls, and between skyscrapers in Chicago. In the case of the skyscrapers, the Wallenda siblings walked from opposite ends of a 1,300-foot wire suspended between the towers, crossing each other in the middle. Lijana Wallenda sat on the wire and let her brother step over her on the high wire, reports CBS.

Wallenda holds a number of Guinness World Records for various high-wire and acrobatic feats.

In 2009, he walked on a 1,100-foot steel wire, held up by a crane on the 10th Street Bypass, another in front of 12 Federal Street and support wires all attached to the Roberto Clemente Bridge.

In 2010, Wallenda rode a bicycle along a high-wire 260 feet above the ocean at the Atlantis Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas for a Guinness World Record for highest bike ride on a high-wire. He then took his longest tightrope walk of his career, going 2,000 feet over the resort’s lagoon at a height of 250 feet.

In 2011, he walked a 100-foot wire at a height of 121 feet between two towers of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was a re-creation of the stunt that killed his great-grandfather Karl Wallenda in 1978 when a gust of wind caused him to lose his balance and fall.

The aerialist successfully crossed the Chicago River at a 19-degree incline in a time of 6:52 minutes in 2014. In winds approaching 30 miles-per-hour, he then walked blindfolded between Marina City towers in 1:17 minutes. The Discovery Channel ran the footage on a 10-second delay in case he fell .

Wallenda broke his own world record for longest urban high-wire walk at the Calgary Stampede without safeties. Wallenda walked across the midway on a 1.9-centimeter tightrope suspended some 30 meters above the ground, crossing the entire park in 2019.

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