Evel Knievel, eh

The craziest thing I saw during that week in Whistler in 1985, was one of the Canadian guys on the race track. The races had ended for the day, it was early evening, and a bunch of us were hanging out near the track. I think it was the second and third berms of the track that made a big canyon between them. Seriously, the Whistler BMX track built for the Worlds looked more like one of today's boardercross tracks. It was huge, it had a major downhill drop, and was just a gnarly track for the day.
All week guys had been joking about jumping the massive canyon between the two berms. The way they had been laid out, it looked like a jump. Come in high on the second berm, swoop to the inside, then blast straight up the bottom half of the berm, across a huge gap, dropping several feet and land on the third berm. Then carve like hell to the left to stay on the track and slow down.
Now that was nearly 25 years ago, and I know well how the memory can stretch distances and raise heights. But I'd have to say the gap was at least 25 feet, and quite possibly 30. People had jumped that far on BMX bikes. If you look back through the archives, you'll find quite a few photos or videos of guys jumping 20 or 25 feet in the late '70's and early '80's. But the bikes were lighter, the frames weren't as strong, and riders didn't jump with the height they do now. And that berm to berm jump was crazy high. It was a canyon between those two berms, and you'd be fifteen feet up mid jump, probably more, at a time when riders rarely got their wheels more than five or six feet off the ground.
I don't know if beer was involved, but one of the Canadian guys decided to try it. And none of us believed him. He got up to the start, and rode down the track to the berm a couple times scoping out the line. The rest of us stood nearby and kept talking, not thinking he would actually try it. The sun toyed with the horizon and the rider kept rolling up to the edge of the berm and stopping, looking across the crazy gap. We gave up on him and started riding down the hill to the village. A little ways down, a yell came from up the hill, and we saw the crazy Canadian take off from the starting gate again. He didn't slow down. He launched off the berm in the fading light and just barely made the landing on the lower berm. He got all squirrelly, slipped his pedals and weaved a bit, but rode it out. None of us watching from below could believe it. This crazy Canadian guy we'd never heard of had just jumped the biggest jump any of us had ever seen, or even heard of. I don't know who the guy was, and I don't think he was even entered in the race or the freestyle contest. He was just some crazy Canadian rider who wanted to show all these out-of towners what a Canadian could do. And he did. He was the talk of Whistler village that night. Eddie Fiola and Chris Lashua had enough sense not to try that jump. Stu Thomsen and Greg Hill had enough sense not to try that jump. But some unknown Canadian made the gap, and left an impression on the rest of us. I think he got quite a few free beers that night. That was the reward for doing the biggest jump in BMX history in 1985.
Jumping feats that I personally saw later that compared to that were Fuzzy Hall jumping the canton at the first King of Dirt in Palmdale in 1987, Chris Moeller jumping the Cadillac lengthwise in Palm Springs off a two foot high launch ramp in about '91, Guys jumping Death Jump at Mission Trails in 1991, then Brian Foster, Dave Clymer and the crew jumping the Dover Cliff Jump in '93. There's footage of that Dover jump in S&M's 44 Something video.
Sometimes you go to a big event, and the top pros blow your mind with their riding. But over and over, I've seen some guy pop out of the woodwork and just tear it up and amaze everybody. The Canadian guy who jumped that crazy berm jump was one of the first of those guys. And I have no idea what his name was.

The week in Whistler... in 1985

I started writing this earlier, and I just put some Rush on to listen to as I finish it. Hmmmm... maybe Red Fisher would be more appropriate since it's the Left Coast of the Great White North.

As I write this, the Vancouver, B.C. area is overwhelmed with the 2010 Winter Olympics. But on my first trip to that area in 1985, Whistler was almost a ghost town. In so many ways, it was a different world then. People didn't carry phones around everywhere they went, stumbling over things as the text dumb messages to other people not paying attention. The very first car phones were just coming to market then, which were the size of a Kleenex box and cost a couple thousand dollars each. People with pagers were thought to be either doctors or drug dealers. The little biege Apple Macintosh personal computer, with an AMAZING kilobyte or two of memory, had come out the year before. A few rich people had radical VHS video cameras, which consisted of a recorder unit, bascially a VCR that you wore on a shoulder strap, with cables connecting to a shoe box sized camera. Speaking of cameras, most public places didn't have security cameras then. Mountain bikes, basically BMX bikes for adults, were starting to show up in bike shops.
The little village of Whistler, British Columbia was a ski resort then. There were no snowboard resorts then. There were only a handful of snowboarders in California and the Eastern mountains, they even had a few contests, but few of us had even heard of them.
We were at a ski resort in the summer, which was kind of like being at Disneyland when it's closed. There were cool buildings, but only a handful of people wandering around them. Thanks to Jay's parents, we had the amazing condo of a room right in the middle of this biking wonderland. The square in front of our hotel was the gathering ground for the freestylers, most of whom were staying in cheaper motels down towards Vancouver, or camping down the mountain a few miles. We'd sleep in, only until 9 am or so, and have breakfast in the room. Then it was out to the mountain. There were intermittent flatland sessions on the square all day long. Most of the racers, which was a tiny number for a contest called the World Championships, spent the day up the hill at the track. Us freestylers would go up and watch the racers practice, or even ride the crazy downhill track ourselves at times during practice.