Video of two Russian men climbing into an inflatable ball and rolling down a Russian mountain on a ride that would take them over a cliff, into a ravine, on to a frozen lake and cause one of the men's death, is getting a lot of views today.
And the accident has led to calls from "the New Zealand inventors of zorbing ... for a global code of safe operations to try and stamp out cowboy operators," the Otago Daily Times reports.
"Unfortunately, when you have a new adventure sport like this come out, especially in developing countries, you tend to see a lot of people not following any form of regulation," Zorb Ltd. chief executive Hope Horrocks tells the New Zealand newspaper.
Zorbs need, for example, safe landing zones and tracks or chutes that they can't easily roll out of — as appears to have happened in Russia.
Russia's RT.com says an investigation has been launched into the incident in the Karachayevo-Cherkessia region of the North Caucasus. It says the two men, Denis Burakov, 27, and Vladimir Shcherbov, 33, "came to [the] Dombay ski resort individually, but on Jan. 3 both decided they wanted to take a trip down a slope in an inflatable zorb. The zorbing experience, growing in popularity in Russia, cost each of them less than $10."
Gawker writes that "Burakov sustained a broken neck in the fall and died on the way to the hospital. Shcherbov suffered multiple lacerations and a concussion, but is expected to survive."
The horror experienced by the two men and what it might have been like inside that zorb has generated quite a bit of discussion on Reddit.
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