Dog joins display jumpers

PARIS (Reuters): Parisians looked skywards recently as 75 parachutists and a dog staged a traffic-stopping display of jumps around the Eiffel Tower, marking two centuries of the sport.

The Belgian shepherd Jex was among the TV personalities, soldiers and masters of the sport landing in a wave of color on a patch of lawn slightly larger than a fair-sized swimming pool.

The display was staged to highlight the fact that it was a Frenchman -- or strictly, his dog -- who made the first jump 200 years ago.

Andre-Jacques Garnerin achieved the then highly controversial feat from a hot air balloon over a nearby field on Oct. 22, 1797.

That was a few months after he had completed a successful experiment with the dog, attaching the pet to a hemispherical parachute before ditching him from a balloon and proving that the idea worked.

Jex jumped in tandem with his military minders, landing safely in what was his fourth jump as part of a regular program for animals trained in rescue.

"He's as calm in the air as he is on the ground," said his handler, Jean-Paul Demengeat.

Children shrieked and giggled on the grass below France's most famous landmark as some of the 75 or so brightly colored canopies loomed out of a crisp blue autumn sky perilously near to their heads.

The crowd gasped at a less than smooth landing for film star Jean-Paul Belmondo's wife Natty, jumping in tandem with a military instructor, who veered with a crash into the branches of a tree.

She briefly appeared stunned, but soon posed smiling for photographers and explained that she had experienced a bout of butterflies.

While Garnerin jumped from 582 meters (1,900 feet), the parachutists in Wednesday's display bailed out of an army supply plane at about 4,000 meters, landing in six separate waves.