VIDEO: Confined Spaniard stays safe by skiing in his living room

When Philipp Klein Herrero had to cancel a skiing holiday because of the coronavirus pandemic he recreated the winter sport experience in confinement in his Barcelona flat. The video has gone viral.

"I had a spark of creativity," the 28-year-old video maker and amateur skier told reporters.

The result was a 57-second video called "Freeride at home" shot from a camera attached to the ceiling which has been viewed several hundred thousands times on YouTube and other platforms.

"The day Spain decreed a lockdown for the whole country, I had a bus ticket to go to La Grave, France, for a week's skiing with my family. It was the freeride trip I had saved up for all year, everything was planned," said Klein Herrero, an engineer at Spanish car-maker SEAT, told reporters.

"I could have got on that bus, but when I saw that the situation was getting crazier by the minute, I decided that it was a bit immoral to go skiing while people were dying in Spain," he added.

The total number of deaths from the coronavirus in Spain has passed 11,700.

"The lockdown had me thinking about skiing the whole time, so I started to think how I could ski without leaving my living room," he wrote when he posted the video.

In the video, edited in stop-motion, Klein Herrero wakes on the floor in a sleeping bag in full gear. Shot from above to make it seem that he is standing when he is, in fact, lying on the floor, he climbs a show-capped peak made of white sheets and then skis down.

He finishes with a crash. As his helmeted disappears into the sheets, the message: "Stay safe, stay at home," appears.

"I've seen a lot of funny videos of people doing outdoor sports at home. So I wanted to do the same," he told reporters.

"On Thursday morning, I saw there was good light outside, so I went for it. I moved all the furniture, set up all the lights, hung the camera on the ceiling, and within six hours everything was in the box," he said.

Agence France-Presse