#spowers

You didn’t really join the Dangerous Sports Club; it was more a loose affiliation of people at Oxford University who enjoyed doing silly, slightly illegal things. They invented bungee jumping, with the world’s first jump off the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol on 1 April 1979.

One of the most fun times we had was our first skiing event at St Moritz. I cooked up an idea with a DSC member, Tommy Leigh-Pemberton: to go down the Matterhorn on bicycles attached to skis, with parachutes on our backs, which we’d engage on the steeper bits.

But the club’s founder, David Kirke, wanted to expand it into an event with all sorts of things on skis. The most memorable was a rowing eight. I’d hired the boat from my college club for £25, with a £75 deposit – the chap knew he wasn’t going to get it back. It was mounted on skis, and stood three feet off the ground: eight rowers and me, the cox. It didn’t get far before it turned over, but I righted it, jumped back in and made it to the bottom of the slope, travelling backwards. We also went down seated at a grand piano; I had seen Elton John in concert and spent the evening working out how I could attach skis to a piano’s legs.

- Hugo Spowers