Bike jump over a house

[mcteague]

What can I say about this??? Amazing... but pretty insane IMO. Hope he doesn't end up in a wheelchair some day.

I built a huge ramp and jumped OVER my house!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i03ciIOTwU

Tim

[jamesdak]

Crazy good fun!

[benb]

We only hear about the Red Bull guys who haven't ended up in a wheelchair. They seem to disappear if they do. Really the wheelchair isn't even the serious outcome as obviously there are a lot of Red Bull sponsored athletes in some disciplines who have died doing their activity. (Especially Wingsuit/BASE)

My son had this video on last night. It is pretty dang cool how much of an artform they have these ramps to. The way they contoured that ramp to the shape of the roof of the house is amazing.

They also clearly operate in a way more intelligent way than say Evel Knievel did back in the day... calculating how fast they have to go and how far they need to slow down.

It is entertaining but especially since my son is super impressed with this stuff I am constantly reminding him there is a long tail of seriously injured athletes behind all this.

His friend is big time into snowboarding and his parents push that pretty hard sending him to all kinds of big air camps and such and he's already dislocated his hip and had a really catastrophic arm break. (11 years old). This stuff is no joke. My son loves snowboarding too but there was never ever any chance we were buying a house at the mountain so he could do the super intensive program his friend does or sending him away for the summer to a full immersion jump off stuff camp.

I have a huge "nope" reflex built in when it comes to big air.

[Davist]

yeah, he overshot the landing as well, so 43mph (I think) tow was a bit "hot".

There are some BMX acquaintances that had catastrophic injuries from much less dramatic instances- Eddy King landed on his shock pump while working on his suspension on a dh course, paralyzed. Tara LLanes crashed in an MTB race got similarly paralyzed. Colin Winkleman massively miscalculated takeoff speed and ended up something like 30' high to flat and destroyed his ankles, led to depression and sadly suicide.

If you get the chance, 30 by 30 "birth of the big air" (being towed by a moto, below pic of the apex in '91 26+' above a 24' quarter pipe) profiles Mat Hoffmann who was basically the pioneer of this stuff. A good watch.

[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.