[krilly]

Bear in mind that you wouldn't do a jump for charity if you wanted to it anyway. Their usual clientele would probably be very fit and young, whereas charity jumpers would be more likely to be old or unfit.

So I'm sure their overall injury rates are lower

[VBprogrammer]

That doesn't ring true to me at all. Almost all of the people I've seen do some kind of charity extreme sport event would definitely have done it without the charity part if that was an option.

[krilly]

I was actually chatting to some friends about this the other day.

I personally would love to go skydiving but I wouldn't get sponsored for it because it isn't actually hard. Unlike running a marathon for instance, it doesn't require any preparation on my part or any superhuman effort, just a lot of cash.

I think most people who do feats of endurance for charity (marathons, cycling, mountaineering, etc) would probably like to do it anyway but it's fair to ask for sponsorship money because of the effort involved.

[usrusr]

Why would doing a marathon and pretending to do it for other reasons than doing a marathon be any different? The only reason separating endurance sports efforts "for charity" from a hypothetical "candy crush for charity" or "Netflix binge for charity" is that the athletic efforts apparently impress some potential donors. If the same is true for courage dares like fixed line parachuting then so be it.

An entirely orthogonal question is how event costs are funded: do participants pay out of their own pocket or is it taken from the donations pool? If it's the latter I'd call it borderline charity fraud, no matter if the activity is running, flaggelation, parachuting or smoking weed.

The usual compromise, I think, is clear separation between sponsors (who fund the event) and donors (whose money is given to charity with zero cut or expenses deduction). It's hard to find something to criticize in that model, if someone wants to sponsor entertainment, fine. If tens of thousands of sponsorship dollars yield tens of donation dollars, still fine: the assumption that the tens of thousands would have been donated otherwise cannot be made.

(it still might get muddy if that sponsorship somehow gets different tax treatment than other business expenses or if the main beneficiary of those costs, either as participant or as organizer, is the CEO or something like that but that's totally besides the question of parachuting vs endurance)

[perl4ever]

Skydiving does not require "a lot of cash".

You don't have to buy a parachute! Or an airplane, for that matter.