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France mourns sports stars killed in Argentina helicopter crash
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France is in mourning after three of its leading sportspeople were killed along with their film crew and pilots when two helicopters collided in Argentina during the filming of an endurance-style reality TV show.
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Camille Muffat, the swimmer who won three medals at the London Olympics in 2012, yachtswoman Florence Arthaud and the boxer Alexis Vastine were among 10 people killed in the crash in the western province of La Rioja near the Andes mountains.
Related: Argentina helicopter crash: the sports stars who died
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The helicopters collided in mid-air just after takeoff while filming the adventure show Dropped for France’s biggest private TV station, TF1. The programme, an adaptation of a Swedish format, took famous sporting figures blindfolded by helicopter and left them in the wilderness, having to use their skills to find their way back to civilisation.
Eight French nationals were killed, including crew members, and two Argentinian pilots. There were no survivors.
The French president, François Hollande, said he was stupefied by the crash, which was an “immense sadness” for France.
The crash happened at about 5pm near the town of Villa Castelli, about 700 miles (1,100km) north of the capital, Buenos Aires. It was not immediately clear what caused the collision, although weather conditions were said to be good.
Shooting of the TV show began in late February in Ushuaia, at the southern tip of South America in the glacial terrain of Patagonia. A cast and crew of about 80 people, mostly French, had been filming the series.
“The whole of French sport is in mourning because we have lost three huge champions,” the sports minister, Thierry Braillard, told RTL radio. He described how Arthaud was affectionately known as the “fiancee of the Atlantic”. She was one of the first women to carve a place in the world of sailing and in 1990 secured the record for the fastest solitary crossing of the North Atlantic.
Muffat, 25, was regarded as one of France’s most promising swimmers and won several medals at the 2012 London Olympics, including the 400 metres freestyle gold. She retired last summer. Vastine, 28, won bronze at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
Some of the country’s top athletes offered their condolences and expressed their grief on Twitter. Muffat’s fellow swimmer and London medallist, Yannick Agnel, tweeted: “Not her”.
Sylvain Wiltord, the former Arsenal footballer and fellow cast member, tweeted: “I am sad for my friends, I’m shaking, I’m horrified, I can’t find the words, I don’t want to say anything.”
Je suis triste pour mes amis , je tremble , je suis horrifié , je n'ai pas de mots , je ne veux rien dire #Tristesse #Pleurs #JesuisàParis
Nonce Paolini, head of TF1, said: “We’re in shock and very sad.”
One of the helicopters was piloted by a veteran of the 1982 Falklands war between Argentina and the UK. Juan Carlos Castillo was an experienced former pilot with the Argentinian air force who had flown more than 20 Antarctic missions, his wife, Cristina Alvarez, told the TN television news channel.
“I understand the crash happened at a very low altitude – under 100m,” said Alvarez. “It’s very difficult at that height to re-establish [control over] the machine and perform an auto-rotation emergency manoeuvre to land the helicopter without this happening.”
Castillo was a regular pilot for reality shows, the Dakar rally, as well as floods and other emergencies in La Rioja, she said.
One of the helicopters was letting off “explosions that were out of place”, according to David Ocampo, who was about 100m from where the helicopters landed. “It was like the earth moved when they fell,” he told a local news channel.
Ocampo said the helicopters seemed to be flying “five metres apart” and it looked like “the first one stopped in the air and the other one swerved to try and avoid it but crashed into it”.
Ocampo ran to where the aircraft hit the ground. “I ran to see if I could help anyone but all I could see was fire, it was all fire, fire,” Ocampo said. “I felt so bad I couldn’t help anyone because of the fire.”
Police arrived 20 minutes later and ambulances 10 minutes after that, Ocampo said.
The bodies were removed from the crash site on Tuesday morning, La Rioja judge Virginia Bordón said, and taken to a hospital at the nearby town of Villa Unión. They were then moved to the judicial morgue at the provincial capital city of La Rioja.
Representatives from Airbus, which made the Eurocopter AS350 aircraft involved, and Turbomeca, which manufactured the motors, were expected to arrive at the scene, said La Rioja governor, Luis Bedder Herrera.
It is the second time in two years that a reality show produced by the production company ALP for TF1 has been hit by tragedy.
In April 2013, during filming for France’s longest-running reality show, the desert island challenge Koh-Lanta, a 25-year-old contestant died after one of the on-screen challenges, having complained of heart pains. The show’s doctor was later found dead in his hotel room near the set, leaving a suicide note in which he said his name had been sullied by insinuations that not enough was done for the contestant and he could no longer stand the media pressure.
