Nik Wallenda was walking wires before he was born, literally, since his mother performed six months pregnant with him. Sarasota's Wallenda family has performed for seven generations dating back to the 1780s in Bohemia, and Nik was on a wire at 18 months old. But the moment he keeps returning to in this conversation is 2018, when his family was training for an eight-person pyramid at UTC, two nights before a live attempt at a Guinness World Record, and the formation collapsed. Wallenda caught the wire, as he is trained to do, but several family members fell, including his sister, who broke every bone in her face and landed in a coma.
Wallenda got back on the wire the next night and performed for six weeks straight, following his family's motto that the show must go on. It was only afterward, during time off, that the trauma caught up with him: he describes trembling uninvited on a practice wire just six feet off the ground, something he had never experienced before, and eventually telling his wife he was done for good. That crisis produced his book Facing Fear, and Wallenda credits therapy and his wife's insistence that giving up was not who he was for getting him back on the wire for good.
Built on Rejection Wallenda's climb to household-name status was littered with near misses most viewers never heard about. NBC signed him for a TV special after his record-breaking bicycle stunt at what is now the Prudential Center, then pulled it two months before air when a new network president called it too dangerous. Discovery Channel picked up a reality series, aired one episode, then canceled the rest under a new president. Both times, Wallenda pivoted rather than quit, eventually walking across the Grand Canyon in 48 mph gusts with no safety net and, roughly a year and a half after the NBC special collapsed, live over Niagara Falls on ABC, a walk that required getting a hundred-year-old law changed in both the United States and Canada.
Wallenda trains for these walks in Sarasota under conditions harder than what he expects to face live, once practicing on a wire eight feet off the ground in 90 mph winds to prepare for the 48 mph gusts he hit over the Grand Canyon. He is candid that the family's fame skipped a generation before landing on him, joking about an industry saying that the first generation makes it, the second grows it, and the third blows it, crediting his own hunger and the people he surrounded himself with in Sarasota for breaking that pattern. On roundabouts, well-traveled after years in Europe, Wallenda says he likes them in principle but singles out what the hosts call Jess's roundabout as the most notorious in town, joking it sees a crash roughly every three days.
What you'll take away
- A 2018 training accident at UTC caused an eight-person pyramid to collapse, putting Wallenda's sister in a coma and leading to his own undiagnosed PTSD
- Wallenda wrote the book Facing Fear after nearly quitting wire walking altogether following the accident
- Both NBC and Discovery Channel pulled major deals with Wallenda before his Niagara Falls walk, which required changing a hundred-year-old law in the US and Canada
- He trains in Sarasota under harder conditions than he expects to face live, once practicing in 90 mph simulated winds ahead of a 48 mph gust event at the Grand Canyon
- He says he likes roundabouts generally but calls out one specific Sarasota roundabout as seeing a crash roughly every three days
“Life is on the wire, everything else is just waiting.”
“I felt like a fool because everybody's like, yeah right, you're full of crap.”
Places mentioned: UTC, St. Armands Circle