Bike jump over a house

[benb]

We were just watching a documentary on Matt Hoffman.

The scary thing with those guys is they were indeed operating more like Evel Knievel.

Hoffman seems okay, but he seems to have had a very scary high concussion count.

And then there is the terrible story of Dave Mirra.

It seems like a lot of BMXers have paid a heavy price.

This all came up cause we watched a BMX show a couple weeks ago. It was good fun. It was led by a guy around 50 years old who had been in X games 25-30 years ago. He was still doing really great flatland tricks but not doing big air. He had two younger athletes with him who were doing big air stuff via a quarterpipe + two 6' high additional ramps.

Scary stuff, they were wearing BMX helmets but no other gear. And most bizarrely they were not running any brakes at all on the bikes, so they would land from doing a backflip 15-20' up in the air and then brake after the landing by dragging their feet on the ground!

One of the guys in the finale came dangerously close to casing his landing from a very serious trick. Would have been extremely ugly in front of the big crowd. He basically landed his back wheel on the flat portion at the top of the ramp... he absorbed it but if he hadn't it surely would have front flipped him onto his head.

They also had a tire blowout in the show with a 30 minute delay to change the tire because they weren't prepared to change a tire. Instead they had to go get the spare wheel out of the car. But they didn't have the car keys so the rider had to run to the hotel room, get the keys, then to the car, get the spare wheel, then swap the wheel. This is all despite the fact they had a trailer right there at the show. Crazy stuff.