What’s amazing about this video, to me, isn’t that some guy is riding his bike off a roof. That I’m used to. It’s that he very obviously pushes his handlebars down to attempt a front flip, and it’s immediately obvious he has never attempted a front flip on a bicycle before.
“Hey, wanna ride your bike off a roof and try to land on this downward slope?”
“No way, man. Too easy. I gotta put my spinal cord at risk if I wanna feel alive.”
Travis Pastrana is one of the more revered figures in motocross, and his career spans several different kinds of life-endangering fringe sports, including rally racing and all kinds of activities that involve doing flips on motorbikes. So it’s not so much a question of “Why would he attempt something as stupid and dangerous as a back flip on a child’s tricycle?” — it’s more “Well, why wouldn’t he?”
Travis Rice had by far and away the best practice run at the Winter X Games. In general, I’d like to see more foreign objects interfering with skiers and snowboarders doing jumps at terrain parks. Telephone poles, hidden punjee pits, American Gladiators with the tennis ball cannon from the Assault event, Rover from “The Prisoner,” swarms of bees, thrown babies — hey, don’t blame me. They’re the ones who wanted to get more EXXTREME.
The Winter X Games came and went this weekend — yeah, I missed it, too — and the big stories were Shaun White becoming the first person to win consecutive golds in snowboard superpipe and the video above, which is the first-ever double back flip on a snowmobile. Except technically, Levi Lavalle’s double-back doesn’t count, because he didn’t stay on the sled. But are you gonna tell that to the FANS, man? The fans don’t care about technicalities, man, ’cause they were there, and that shit was real. So don’t go tryin’ to tell them what’s gnarly and what isn’t.
I never thought a skateboarder grostesquely breaking his arm could be so disappointing (NOTE: I’m serious about this being pretty nasty). Listen, skateboarders. If you severely injure yourself, you can’t just calmly say “I broke my arm.” You’ve got to squeal like a stuck pig and cry like the skinny jeans-wearing excuse for a male that you really are. Otherwise it’s barely worth me watching a fifth or sixth time.
Have you ever imagined what it would be like if you put a sack of potatoes on a snowboard and sent it off a big jump? Well, you can get a pretty good idea from this video. All you have to do is use a person instead of a sack of potatoes, then have him knock himself out on a wedge of ice as he goes off the jump. Good times.
On THAT uplifting note, I’m headed off to Utah tomorrow to go snowboarding for the first time in five years. I’ll be staying away from the terrain park, methinks. Oh, and I’m leaving on a plane from New York. I’ll see if I can maybe walk under some ladders while black cats cross my path at the airport.
Regular fill-in Punté will be running the show tomorrow. I’ll be back on Monday. I hope.
