Three men in wetsuits took a running leap onto a giant water-filled airbag on the shore of Lake Lucerne on Aug. 9 — and sent a fourth man rocketing 92.58 feet into the air, shattering a world record that had stood since 2012.
The stunt, staged in the town of Brunnen in Switzerland's Schwyz canton, is known as "blobbing": jumpers cannonball in sequence onto one end of a massive inflatable bag floating on water, and the resulting shockwave launches a person stationed at the other end skyward. Swiss jumper Robin Steiner was the one launched this time, reaching an apex roughly level with the roof of a nine-story building and spending about five seconds airborne before splashing down, according to UPI.
Launching him were Swiss jumper Luc Siegenthaler, German jumper Lennart Florczak and American jumper Tristan Kuhn, who timed their jumps onto the blob in sequence to maximize the catapult effect. Organizers erected a 46-foot scaffolding tower on the lakeshore so officials could measure the height, and a crowd gathered to watch the attempt, which Unofficial Networks reported cleared the previous 72-foot mark, set in 2012, by more than 20 feet.
Blobbing began as a summer-camp novelty and has since developed a small competitive following in Europe and North America, with enthusiasts chasing ever-greater launch heights through bigger bags and more precisely timed jumps. The previous record, set in 2012, had gone unchallenged for 14 years before Steiner's team decided to take aim at it this summer, gathering a crew with complementary weights and timing to maximize the combined splash and rebound force.
The Brunnen attempt was recognized as a Guinness World Record, capping a run of offbeat outdoor stunt records set in Switzerland this year alone. Video of Steiner's launch and slow-motion descent circulated widely online in the days afterward, drawing comparisons to a human cannonball act.
Steiner's team said they plan to keep experimenting with jump sequencing and bag pressure, with an eye toward pushing the record past 100 feet at a future attempt.