Category: Extreme
THE COMMENTATOR
Ray ”Warren is best known as the voice of rugby league. The legendary broadcaster will be calling the swimming for Channel Nine at the London Olympics and itfair to say hedone his homework
We hear this is your first Olympics?
Itthe first, and it may also be the last, that I do. A lot of people think Idone the Olympics before but I haven. I was supposed to host the Games for Network Ten back in 1984 but, through a fear of flying, I pulled out and didngo to Los Angeles. For a period of time there my career was like a train wreck. I realised Imade an awful career move and in the five or six years I was out of the business I had time to think about whether I wanted to get on a plane or not. The answer was obviously yes and I took that chance when I joined Channel Nine.
A REAL CLIFF-HANGER!
TWO MEN are trapped on the side of a 3,000-foot-high cliff in Yosemite National Park. One of them has just lost a thumb. Who are you going to call? THESE GUYS.
The phone call came in just after 3 p.m. on September 26,2011. It concerned a severed thumb. The caller alerted Yosemite Search and Rescue that an Austrian mountain climber named Michael Schmoelzer was at that moment dangling from the face of El Capitan, the 3,000-foot sheer wall of granite at the western edge of the park. Schmoelzer, an experienced climber and instructor, had just lost his right thumb when a rope ladder he was using came loose from its anchor as he stepped on it. He tumbled several feet down the slope until his safety rope snapped tight. Unfortunately, during the fall the rope ladder wrapped around his thumb and sheared it off, leaving a jagged mess of exposed bone and tendon. Miraculously, the thumb landed on a ledge 80 feet below, right next to Schmoelzerpartner, Richard Edelsbacher. Still, Schmoelzerwas no longer capable of going either up or down on his own. He was calling for a rescue.
