Nik Wallenda - Background

Background

Wallenda is a seventh-generation member of The Flying Wallendas family of aerialists. His ancestors have been circus performers since the 1700s and have been doing balancing acts without nets since Karl Wallenda made the family famous for the feat in the 1920s. Nik Wallenda is a direct descendant of Karl, whom he calls his role model and his "biggest hero in life". Karl "didn’t do the ordinary. He has always inspired me", Nik explained. Nik has called growing up in the Wallenda family an honor and "like standing on the shoulders of giants. They've created a legacy that has gone on for seven generations and I've been able to continue it along."

Several members of the family have lost their lives while training or performing. In 1962, the troupe's famous seven-person pyramid collapsed, killing two family members and paralyzing Wallenda's uncle Mario. In 1978, Karl Wallenda died after falling from a tight rope at age 73 in Puerto Rico.

Read more about this topic:  Nik Wallenda

Famous quotes containing the word background:

    Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
    Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

    They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.
    Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)