Garrett called out from the back room, "Guys, put it on channel 10. They're showing that gymnast dude who died at the WAAC." Eddie and I changed the channel - supposedly some guy fell over 200 stories during the World Aerial Athletics Championships. This event was pretty popular due to the danger element - guys and gals doing parkour on cranes and giant robots, called "Grobots", used to build massive skyscrapers in places like Dubai and Shanghai. To date, no one had died. Even though there were several falls, the sport employed a technology where most of the participants wore suits fitted with magnetics. Safety drones with large electromagnets had caught a dozen or more unlucky athletes, usually within the first few meters of the fall. However, in this case, one of the top competitors, a 28 year old Latvian named Ralfs Ozols, wore his own trademark all-white form-fitting suit, which had started a fashion craze all around the world. Ralfs cited the rigidity, the weight, and the slight pull on metal apparatus as reasons for not wanting to wear the safety suit. A well-proportioned man, with high cheekbones and spiky blonde hair, his look was a marketing dream, though he preferred to lead a private life, shunning the media and keeping to himself. His interviews were often very short - one or two words, then gone. He rarely smiled, which added to his mystique; he always seemed so serious - always business. On the courses, he was graceful, like a cat, moving from structure to structure, rarely breaking speed. Sometimes criticized for lack of difficulty compared to some of the other competitors, he won some and lost some, relying on his speed and fluidity to win. His choice to not wear the prescribed safety suit, although adding to his danger element, was not allowed to be considered in his scoring.
"Breaking news - Latvian Aerial Athletics World Champion Ralfs Ozols has died in a fall in Mumbai, India. Sports10 has the footage from a camera drone and warns that this footage is of an extreme graphic nature and should only be seen by mature audiences. Ozols, who refuses to wear the standard magnetic suit, risks death every time he performs, and on this 15 foot drop to the moving crane on your right, he misses the surface and goes into free fall." The long-distance camera showed a falling Ozols, not flailing as you would expect, but instead, dropping straight up and down, as if at attention, arms at his side, as if he was just a kid jumping off a train trestle into water 20 feet below; but in this case, he was falling from over 1000 meters and rapidly accelerating as if we were a missile. The station went to a split-screen where a close-up camera drone, one of several programmed to follow the athlete through the course, was fixed on Ozols' face. What was odd, was the look on his face... not someone who was panicked as he was about to die, but a resolute look, straight ahead. The camera stayed fixed on his face which, despite his tight jaw, was starting to rapidly ripple with the wind resistance. His eyes stayed open and fixed ahead as he plummeted at 20 meters per second, then 40, then 80. The rippling got faster and faster as if his face was made out of crepe paper, and still, he stared without breaking form. But, at about eight to ten seconds into the fall, as he was approaching a terminal velocity of over 100 meters per second, a large tear formed, and over the next five seconds, streaked upward, toward his hairline. Maybe it was just moisture from the abrasion of wind on his unblinking eye, or perhaps, instead, it was a tender memory, finally humanizing him in front of his audience. The close-up camera drone pulled away as it got within 50 feet of the ground, and from the distance camera, the streaking Ozols closed the last 15 meters in a mere tenth of a second as he jackknifed into the ground, still at attention. After the 20 second footage, the announcer returned, "Ralfs Ozols was 28 years old."