Travis Pastrana, now 40 years old, and looking at a knee replacement surgery in the next couple of weeks, decides he wants to try another World's First, a NBD (Never Been Done), on his motocross bike. The idea is a backflip, up into a nose bonk on this high platform sitting on a scissors lift, and then a front flip out of the nose bonk, into a super-sized airbag. Unfortunately, on the first warm-up trick to test the whole concept, he breaks his hand. It's Travis Pastrana, and that's where things get interesting. Just watch the video.
There are now hundreds of thousands of people, around the world, who got into one of the action sports, or another, in the past 50 or 60 years. All of them progressed as riders, skaters, boarders or whatever sport, at some level. I'm pretty sure most of these hundreds of thousands of action sports people still have things in their head they want to do, wanted to do, or tried, and weren't able to accomplish, whatever their level of athletic ability.
These activities collectively known as "action sports," called "sports" mostly as an easy way to categorize them, are all focused on personal progression. But even among hundreds of thousands of people in the crazy action sports world, there are only a handful who sit there and think, "I wonder if I could backflip a motorcycle, then nose bonk a somewhat wobbly platform 35 feet up, and front flip into an airbag? That's why Travis Pastrana is Travis Pastrana. Like Mat Hoffman, Seth Enslow, and a few others, and all of their hero, Evel Knievel, he's next level. He's actually tries shit most other really talented athletes wouldn't even think of trying.
There's a crew helping him in this video, a local crew from there, in Oklahoma, building the huge take off ramp. Making the platform for the scissors lift, we have Nate Wessel, BMX freestyler from way back, and one of the best ramp builders in the world. Here's Nate's section in Etnies Forward video in 2002. Nate Wessel, in the BMX world , could do technical street riding, but he was known for going big in the 1990's and early 2000's. So when he tells Travis to fully commit in this video, it's coming from someone who really understands about committing to a trick. Then we have Banksy (the MX rider, not the street artist), a really good up-and-coming motocross rider, who has performed in the Nitro circus. In this video above, the guys doing construction and roadie work are amazing riders. That's a hell of a crew working together.
If you've read this far, you must have watched the video by now. Both Travis and Banksy pull off World's First tricks, and fucking insane ones, at that. Progression keeps going.
I first heard of Travis Pastrana in 1999, when I kind of scammed a pass to the X-Games in San Francisco. Officially, I was writing a story about the event for DIG BMX magazine in the U.K.. Unofficially, I was shooting video of the practice riding to try and get back into making BMX videos again. I did actually write an article for DIG, but they had other guys at the contest, and my piece didn't make it to print. And I did make another BMX video about a year later, called Animals, but wasn't able to follow it up and make more videos on a regular basis. Life, and struggling to make a living as a taxi driver, got in the way.
But it was that weekend on the pier in San Francisco, at one of the first Freestyle Motocross events at the X-Games, that I first heard the name Travis Pastrana. I'd heard of Mike Metzger and Brian Deegan, and a few other freestyle motocross guys before that, but hadn't heard of the young racer turned FSMXer from back east. During the finals of the freestyle motocross event, I climbed to the top of a scaffolding platform for the media, so I could get a wide overview of the whole FSMX area.
Standing there with several other photographers and video people, with my dinky Sony Digital8 camcorder, a guy next to me said something like, "Make sure you get Travis' next run, he's going to jump into the bay." I have no idea who the guy was. I said, "Who's Travis?" and he pointed him out. So I moved a bit, and got a view where I could see the end of the pier better, at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Sure enough, in his final run, the little known Travis Pastrana went charging at a berm that was only about four feet high, hit it like a jump, and launched his motorcycle off it, into the San Francisco Bay. I got the shot, thanks to the heads up from the stranger. I also could see the boat and the diver they had hired to pull the motorcycle back up after the trick. I got it all on video.
Travis ended up getting disqualified for jumping into the bay, and supposedly some environmental group got all worked up because his motorcycle might leak a bit of oil and water into the bay. It's the fucking San Francisco Bay for God's sakes, it's a major shipping port. There's a lot of toxic junk in that water. But the jump never was shown on ESPN. I planned to save the shot for some later video. I wanted to do a BMX documentary with all my ten years footage, back then. But the shot of Travis, along with all my other footage from my BMX days, was lost, when I lost a storage unit full of stuff in a move, in 2008.
So that's how I, personally, first became aware of this kid named Travis Pastrana, 24 years ago, when he was about 16. I learned two things that weekend about Travis. 1) If you're around in person, or if he's on TV, and he's riding, watch him! Anything cold happen. 2) If you're around in person, and Travis is riding, and you have some kind of camera in your hand, point it at him. You never know what he might do. That was the only time I, personally, saw Travis ride live. But it made a hell of an impression. I've watched many of his antics, crazy stunts, and other sports things he's done on TV since, like the rest of you.
Now, as most of you are reading this, he's heading into knee replacement surgery, and then into recovery. Will this backflip-nose bonk-frontflip be his last World's First? None of us knows. I doubt if Travis knows. We'll see. But that's one hell of a send, even into an airbag, for anybody. It's really amazing he's doing a trick that nuts at all, let alone at age 40, after all the injuries he's dealt with.
Travis has done so many crazy things in both action sports, and motorsports, and just random jackass-style stunts, that we can't remember them all. So here's another video with a whole bunch of Travis Pastrana's craziest stunts. Thanks Travis for pushing the limits, and motivating the rest of us to try and push a bit more in our own lives, whatever level we live at. Heal up, man!
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