It was 7:45pm on April 20, 2002, but at the northernmost part of the world, the day shone bright like a burnished copper coin. From the Barneo Ice Airport, a group of skydivers had been flown to Point Zero at the North Pole. Rachel Thomas was one among them and she was on a mission: To create history by becoming the first woman skydiver to plant the tricolour on the North Pole. As she awaited her turn, she could see the world unfurl below her. To her, it seemed like it had all been building up to this moment. She could almost picture her life’s story scribbled on the surface of the frozen ocean. “The visual was cloudy and blurred, but my memories were as transparent as crystal, as indomitable as the nothingness I was about to jump into,” she writes in Limitless, her recently-released autobiography. As the jump-master cried ‘go’, she got up and did what she was born to do: Fly.
This story is from the April 02, 2023 edition of THE WEEK India.
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This story is from the April 02, 2023 edition of THE WEEK India.
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