Never too old to risk it

Maybe you once stood, knees knocking, way up on the platform of Tarzan’s Bungee Jump in Phuket, announcing loudly that this was the biggest risk you’d ever taken in your life. Maybe Ian Jamieson was standing off to one side smirking.
Fair enough, because Jamieson – who owned that attraction for amateur aerialists through most of the 1990s – took far greater risks when he was a professional daredevil.
Now 60, he was among the world’s luckiest stuntmen, even if he did sustain multiple serious injuries. “Jamo”, as he was billed, says it wasn’t so much luck as his “unique internal radar”, but just the same, onlookers insisted on calling him “Jamo the lucky bastard”.
The Australian from Adelaide never chickened out. And he gets upset when people presume to say, “Old guys don’t do stunts.” Well, stick around, because Jamieson is planning another string of shows that will take him from Thailand to Singapore, the Philippines and the US later this year.
He’s coming out of “retirement” to promote his second book, “Kaskader”. The title means “stuntman” in Poland, where he enjoyed particular success. Now he’s going to do some more “cascading” from lofty heights.
Jamieson always aspired to be a film producer, and stunt work was a way of getting into the movie industry. Jamieson ran a firm called Australian Stunts in the 1970s, training hardheaded people how to bounce around film sets, and in the following decade performed around the world himself.
He did later make several documentary films, including “The Pirates of the South China Seas”, which was partially shot in Thailand. Soon after his first book, “Bring on the Stuntman”, was published, he settled down in Thailand and opened Tarzan’s Bungee Jump. He expanded the franchise to six countries and made a fortune when he sold the business in 1997.
“Thailand is the best country to live,” he declares from notyetretirement. “Age doesn’t really matter here. Once you’re 40 in Australia, people don’t want to hire you because of the health risks.”
“Kaskader” was difficult to write. It took him three years. “To launch this book, I need to do five stunts again. I want to sell this book and make it into a movie – if someone is interested,” Jamieson says.
“I’m 60 and I know I can’t fly on a motorbike across five buses like I used to do. Young guys do those stunts. No one could pay me enough to hurt myself. But this is one of the challenges in life – how far do you push yourself?”
“Kaskader” centres on his threemonth tour of Poland in 1986, which he calls the adventure of a lifetime. He was there at the ascendancy of the Polish pope, John Paul II, and at the nadir of Soviet influence, when Moscow tried to hide the fact that Chernobyl’s radioactive gas was floating across the border from Ukraine.
“Jamo” was also there to see the trade union Solidarity take Poland to the brink of war with the USSR. “My story is a snapshot of Polish history. I was there as a stuntman, and I got caught up in all this.”
Jamieson’s stunt team arrived in Warsaw in late May 1986, just weeks after the explosion and meltdown at Chernobyl, 600 kilometres away. Poland, he writes, got the worst of the “invisible rain” of nuclear fallout.
The Soviets allowed that there had been “a minor accident”, but Jamieson got hold of a Geiger counter and could read the danger. He alerted a local neurosurgeon. Nevertheless, while the rest of the world remained sceptical about Moscow’s reassurances, Poles heard only the reassurances.
“When the government controlled all the news media, how could the people find out anything?” says Jamieson, who blames the fallout for a lump that developed on his back.
Meanwhile the Soviets dreaded the liberalising influence of Pope John Paul, “a cancer” that could spread to other Warsaw Pact countries. “The USSR feared the pontiff that much,” he writes. “The KGB was given approval to arrange his assassination.”
(Investigators probed a possible Soviet link via Bulgaria to the 1981 attempt on the pontiff’s life, but found no proof.)
Meanwhile President Ronald Reagan had just demolished Moammar Khadafi’s residence in Libya, a Soviet ally. And here was Jamieson – not American but close enough. Washington and Canberra were best mates.
Regardless, the stunt tour went ahead, “because of the people”, Jamieson says. He became something of a celebrity, and obliged the fans with a spectacular accident.
He was supposed to dive 35 metres from a platform on a crane boom. He’d asked for a 50tonne crane but ended up on a much lighter one, teetering in the wind. “I should have said no.”
He leapt from the platform and felt it move backwards, robbing him of the forward momentum he needed to get out above the landing cushion. “Till that time, I had never had an accident.”
The spectators watched in horror as Jamo almost completely missed the cushion. His legs made contact with it, but the rest of his body hit the ground. He bounced hard.
Amazingly, the diagnosis wasn’t as bad as expected: a cracked sternum – not even a broken bone. However, he writes, “There’s the emotional stress when you’ve nearly killed yourself and you can’t blame anyone else.”
Two and a half decades on, Jamieson is swimming a kilometre every day in the Andaman Sea to build up his muscle strength for the risky 2012 “book tour”. He’ll be doing some of the old stunts – that high fall, the “Tunnel of Fire”, “Exploding Coffins” and something about flying a motorcycle over the whirling blades of a helicopter.
“I’ll pull it off, no doubt, no question!” he brags. “My body strength isn’t a problem. I have the muscle density to support the body. I don’t do any other training. I just have to gear up.
“People say, ‘Your bones are more brittle now, you’re too old!’ It’s really only about focusing on what I have to do, being aware for those four crucial seconds it takes to get from the start to the landing.”



Do you dare?

Read all about it: www.IanBJamieson.com