THE RACE TO LAND THE FIRST BACKFLIP
Words by Nicole Dreon | Illustrations by Tomas Pajdlhauser
There was perhaps no era more exciting for action sports than the years before and after the turn of the millennium. ESPN’s X Games first touched down in Rhode Island in 1995, followed by NBC’s Gravity Games in 1999, and with the mainstream exposure from major TV platforms, alternative sports began to receive the kind of recognition normally reserved for traditional sports.
Athletes like Tony Hawk in skateboarding, Mat Hoffman in BMX, and Kelly Slater in surfing were just a few of the personalities who were becoming household names. Slater had won six of his 11 world titles by 1999 and was a recurring character on the popular TV show “Baywatch.” Hawk cemented his status as an icon when he landed the 900 the same year and then used the “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” video game series to become a global sensation. Nike even started to feature skateboarders in ads alongside golfers and joggers.
For most of the 1990s, the motocross industry revolved around the clean-cut world of racing. Jeremy McGrath made Supercross go mainstream by winning seven AMA SX titles between 1993 and 2000. Some even credit him with sparking the freestyle movement when he began throwing the Nac Nac during races. With his compelling personality, McGrath’s popularity appealed to fans well beyond racing.
By 1999, both the X Games and Gravity Games added freestyle motocross to their events lineup. Up until that point, freestyle was a rebellious counterculture of mostly older racers performing BMX tricks. It was an incredibly exciting time for the sport, and the level of tricks was progressing rapidly, but freestyle motocross needed something (or someone) to put it on the map the way Hawk, Hoffman, Slater and McGrath did in their respective sports.
From 2000 to 2002, the world of freestyle motocross would be turned upside down with a series of exciting, dramatic and heartbreaking moments in the race to land the first backflip on a full-size motorcycle – a trick that would unlock a whole new realm of possibilities and ultimately define freestyle motocross as we know it today. Here is that story.
Late 1999
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
Carey Hart had recently moved back to his hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada. He was two years into an unexpected freestyle career and enjoying an income that he had never experienced when racing. As a racer, Hart was one of the most successful privateers on the circuit but was always scraping to get by. “People barely even looked at me in the pits,” he said.
Then, in the small window of three or four months, he went from barely being recognized to becoming part of what he calls “that group of eight … the group of guys who started this thing [freestyle], and made it so popular. It was quite a bit of culture shock at the time, and it was extremely exciting to be a 23-year-old kid getting that kind of attention, and not as a racer.”
Longtime motocross journalist Eric Johnson remembers when he first started hearing Hart’s name. “I knew he had lined up at some supercross races,” Johnson said. “He was this handsome kid from Las Vegas. Carey had that bad-boy look. He had the tattoos. I remember thinking that he was the first purpose-built freestyle guy.”
With some of his early freestyle earnings, Hart started building a house next door to BMX pro T.J. Lavin. While he waited for his house to be finished, he lived with Lavin for six months. Every day the two would ride BMX bikes together in Lavin’s backyard and spend time on dirt bikes at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where Hart had a little jump set up.
At night, they would hang out on the roll-in in Lavin’s backyard and talk about the future. With the Vegas skyline in the background, it was the perfect place to manifest dreams. Just a few months earlier, Hawk had landed the first 900 on a skateboard. With one signature trick, he cemented his reputation as an icon in the world of action sports.
“I just felt that the next progression of the sport was to start flipping and getting upside down,” said Hart. “But nobody was even talking about it. I had a feeling it could be a monumental thing for the progression of freestyle motocross, but I had no idea about the global and mainstream impact that it could have.”
Hart said that he and Lavin talked about the backflip nonstop. One night in particular stands out to Lavin. “We were just sitting there and talking, and Carey was like, ‘I’m going to do a backflip on my motorcycle at Gravity Games.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m going to win the Gravity Games.’”
Early 2000
WOODWARD, PENNSYLVANIA
On a whim, the two caught a red-eye flight from Vegas to State College, Pennsylvania. Lavin was convinced if he could teach Hart to flip a BMX bike, he could parlay that knowledge to a motorcycle. It was a dark, cold and lonely night in the dead of winter when Lavin and Hart arrived at Woodward PA near Penn State University, the first Woodward Camp devoted to training for sports such as gymnastics, cheer, skateboarding and BMX.
When they arrived at Woodward, the compound was dead. It was only Hart and Lavin out at Lot 8. Hart had only been on the BMX bike for about 45 minutes when he started landing backflips perfectly on the Resi-Mat. “It wasn’t even really that big of a deal for me to teach him,” said Lavin. “He just did it. He was very, very natural on the bike.”
Up until 2000, freestyle motocross had adapted tricks from BMX, like the no-footer and can-can, and invented small variations of its own. While progressing tricks in BMX was aided by foam pits and Resi-Mats, those weren’t an option on a dirt bike at the time.
Hauling a 225-pound motorcycle out of a foam pit wasn’t practical, not to mention the fire hazard. The first backflip on a dirt bike would have to be learned the hard way—onto dirt. Ouch.
There were other guys who could have done it first, too. Riders like Travis Pastrana, Mike Metzger and Brian Deegan were all right there.
“All those other guys were very good,” said Lavin. “They could easily have done it, no problem. But nobody had the vision that it could really be done. Everyone was like, ‘there’s no way that we can flip a 225-pound bike.’ Carey just had the gut. I mean, that’s really all it took. Somebody committing 100 percent, and that was Carey.”
Summer 2000
GRAVITY GAMES, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
The day of the freestyle final at Gravity Games, the stands were packed. Hart remembers being a mess. Each time the start order circled back to him, he would just ride around the course, hitting jumps but not doing anything. Brian Deegan sat atop the leaderboard.
“I went to Gravity with the sole purpose of doing a flip and hopefully not killing myself,” Hart said. “I planned to do it on my last run, so my first one or two runs were a disaster.”
Lavin, who had just won the BMX dirt contest, helped Hart dig out a run-in on the backside of one of the landings. “I built him a BMX lip for the jump,” Lavin said. “I wanted to make sure that he got around. We weren’t positive that a dirt bike would get around yet.”
Lavin said he also warned Hart not to hit it in second because it was going to send him to the moon. Hart insisted that he wanted to go as high as he could because he was nervous that he wouldn’t clear the rotation.
On his final run, Hart almost looked like he was just going to ride around the course again and not doing anything. Finally, he aimed his bike at the takeoff that he and Lavin had just built. He accelerated up the face in second and committed to the rotation. He went huge, overshot the landing, and his body blew off the back of the bike. Still, the wheels touched down and hung on briefly. He claimed it by throwing his arms in the air, and the crowd went wild.
With so much adrenaline, Hart didn’t realize that he had compressed a vertebra and pulled some ligaments in his lower back—an injury that would bother him for the next 20 years.
“As far as I’m concerned that was the first backflip on a dirt bike,” Lavin said. “Nobody knew it was possible, except for him. He opened up that channel for everyone who came after him, and now they all knew it was possible.”
Hart’s name was now synonymous with the backflip, but it also opened up a whole can of worms. Since he didn’t ride away clean, it left the door open for someone to still be the first to technically land it.
“There was this black cloud over me for the next few years, because it was just constant chatter of the flip,” Hart said. “The pressure was brutal.”
X GAMES, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
After missing Gravity Games because he was in the middle of a busy race season, a young Travis Pastrana showed up at the X Games in San Francisco two weeks later. In a lineup of former and current racers throwing their hats in the ring for freestyle, Pastrana was undeniably the most talented rider.
“Pastrana could actually race,” recalled supercross legend Jeremy McGrath. “He was really good at it, but I think it was difficult for Travis to stay focused because he’s just all over the place. In a good way. He was just a wild, wants-to-do-everything kind of kid. I think freestyle was just good timing for Travis because it fit his type of personality really well. He was just made for freestyle motocross.”
Pastrana had won the inaugural freestyle contest at X Games in 1999 and gained notoriety when he jumped his bike into the San Francisco Bay on his last run. At only 16, he had a reputation for being fearless and spontaneous and certainly someone who wouldn’t be afraid to attempt the backflip.
Before the start of the second run of the freestyle prelims, Lavin came up to Pastrana and asked, “Are you going to let Carey beat you?”
Pastrana was already qualified for the final and reasoned with himself that he had done hundreds of flips on his mountain bike and smaller bikes before. He then got caught up in the moment and went for it in the middle of his run.
“When I pulled on the handlebars, my hands came off,” Pastrana recalled of the ill-fated backflip attempt. “I kind of over-rotated and landed on my feet, but without the bike. I actually broke my talus.”
When Pastrana collected himself and scanned the crowd, he saw his mother Debby’s face and knew he was in trouble. “My mom was so pissed,” he remembered.
He then put the flip on the backburner and went on to win the freestyle final the next day. By season’s end, he had captured the 125 AMA Motocross Championship title. He was the only rider dominating the two genres.
“My main focus was racing at the time,” Pastrana said. “Freestyle was always a hobby, then X Games started getting bigger than racing.”
After Hart and Pastrana attempted the backflip in 2000, there wasn’t a lot of talk about it for another year.
“After Carey ‘kind of’ did it, we thought, ‘Where was the incentive? We can die doing this,’” said Pastrana.
Still, freestyle motocross continued to grow in popularity, with racers like “Cowboy” Kenny Bartram and “Mad” Mike Jones being drawn to the discipline and the freedom it gave them for personal expression.
“Everyone wanted to be part of it,” Johnson recalled. “Everybody was talking about freestyle.”
Riders like Brian Deegan were among the first to capitalize on personal branding with the likes of Metal Mulisha gaining traction. His bad-boy image also lent itself perfectly to the times.
“Freestyle motocross needed the good guy and the bad guy,” said McGrath. “They needed Travis, and they needed Brian. They needed Larry Linkogle. They needed a Mad Mike Jones. They needed these wild personalities to create fireworks. If everyone that moved into freestyle was super calm and had a racing type of mentality, there wouldn’t be any rivalries, fighting or wildness in the things they were doing, and it probably wouldn’t have lasted.”
Summer 2001
X GAMES, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Eric Johnson remembers the moment he got off the plane in Philadelphia and people were already whispering. “Carey is going to do it,” they were saying. “He’s coming back to do it.”
Johnson, who was there as an X Games judge, was down on the floor of the arena right before Best Trick. “I was talking with [Carey] and watching him,” Johnson said. “I remember thinking, ‘He doesn’t want to do this.’ I could tell.”
Just a week before, Hart got hung up on a trick and destroyed his right collarbone.
“I was going into X Games with the sole purpose of just watching,” Hart said. “I had no intention of riding at that point because I was a week out of surgery.”
But then when he got there, all the chatter started. The energy at X Games that year was electric. Stephen Murray had just landed a double backflip in BMX Dirt for gold, and Bob Burnquist earned an almost perfect score in Skateboard Vert.
“There was all this chatter and all the pressure,” said Hart. “I bought into it.”
Hart made the impromptu decision to keep his name on the roster. He committed to the backflip on his first run and used the dirt takeoff next to the ramps, similar to the dirt step-up he had used at Gravity Games.
The minute he took off, his right hand—weak from the recent shoulder surgery—pulled off the handlebar, and he had to eject from his bike. His body dropped from 35 feet in the air and slammed dramatically onto the floor of the arena. He ended up with another 16 broken bones and was bedridden for eight weeks.
Kenny Bartram went on to win Best Trick, while Pastrana captured the three-peat in freestyle. No other rider even thought about attempting the backflip that week.
Spring 2002
INTRODUCING CALEB WYATT
Caleb Wyatt was a mostly unknown rider from Oregon, far away from the action sports scene. He was riding in the back of a tour bus heading to a freestyle demo when he heard about Carey Hart’s backflip attempt. “My career had basically just started, and it was clear to me if I didn’t do a flip, it was pretty much going to end before it started.”
As the industry debated whether Hart’s first backflip attempt counted or not, since he didn’t ride away clean, Wyatt saw an opportunity. “I thought, ‘Here’s my ticket to beat everyone to the punch.’”
Wyatt grew up doing gymnastics and flipping BMX bikes into ponds, so he was comfortable getting inverted. He made his first attempt to get upside down on a full-size bike at the Spokane Speedway in the summer of 2001.
Utilizing a huge pile of debris as a landing and a dirt takeoff, he almost pulled it off on the first attempt. On the next, he panicked while he was upside down and jumped off the bike. The bike came down on him and knocked him out. He was sick for weeks with a concussion.
“The flip isn’t something you really learn,” said Wyatt. “You just have to do it. It’s a commitment. Every ounce of your body tells you to get off the dirt bike. It’s not normal to be upside down.”
Still, Wyatt remained committed to being the first to land it. He plugged away with different setups near his house in Medford, Oregon, for the next nine months. One spring day in April, Wyatt told his agent, Carter Gibbs, he was ready to do it. He didn’t actually think he’d have to follow through anytime soon, though.
Eighteen hours later, Gibbs, along with a cameraman, unexpectedly drove up from a San Diego. It was time for Wyatt to make good on the flip.
“I wasn’t expecting it to happen like that,” said Wyatt. “And I was scared. I was like, ‘Oh, man. I have to at least crash trying, for the sake of him wasting all that time and money dragging up here.’”
Using a step-up style jump, it took Wyatt five tries into a pile of mulch for him to ride away clean. But he did it. He wrote his name in the history books. What happened next, Wyatt could never have predicted.
“I lost sponsors. I got hate mail telling me I ruined the sport and that ‘people are going to start dying,’” said Wyatt. “It was kind of weird at first. I didn’t know how to react; it totally blew me away that people reacted negatively.”
Then, a few weeks before Gravity Games and X Games—events that could have put cash in his pocket if he landed the backflip—Wyatt dislocated his hand.
Summer 2002
PASTRANALAND, MARYLAND
Kenny Bartram was at Travis Pastrana’s house in Maryland when they got the word about Mike Metzger. Metzger had landed about 25 backflips out in the desert in California in one day.
“We both went, ‘Oh, crap. If he did 25 in a row, it’s a consistent thing. It’s going to become necessary,’” Bartram said.
Immediately, the two started going through the progression: BMX bike to mountain bike in the foam pit, to minibikes on a small dirt step-up, and then finally the big bike on the bigger dirt step-up.
For Pastrana, it was easy. As soon as he figured out how to do one, he did another 30 that day. For Bartram, who was one of the hottest freestyle riders at the time, it was a different story. He’d never even done a backflip off a diving board.
“I had literally convinced myself I was going to die, and I was okay with it,” he said. “I called home and told my mom and dad I loved them. I didn’t tell them what I was doing but told everybody I loved them. I don’t even know what happened the first couple of times. I don’t know if my hand flew off or if I was uncommitted or whatever, but I landed it on my fourth attempt.”
When Gravity Games rolled around a month later in Cleveland, Bartram’s backflip was still shaky, so he didn’t throw it. Both Metzger and Pastrana did, though, landing it in their qualifying runs. Since Pastrana ran first in the start order, he technically landed the first one in competition.
Gravity Games didn’t air on TV for another month, though, which meant the backflip had yet to be revealed to the world when riders showed up to the X Games in Philadelphia.
Summer 2002
X GAMES, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Kenny Bartram had just attempted his first backflip in competition during X Games Freestyle and was lying crumpled on the floor. After using a dug-out step-up on one of the landings, Bartram rotated sideways in the air and came down on his leg. Medical was trying to cart him off the course and to the hospital when Bartram said he told them, “No, no, I’m not leaving. I know what Metzger’s about to do. I’m not leaving.”
Bartram was sitting in first when Metzger dropped in for his last run. With 30 seconds left on the clock, Metzger floated a backflip off the super kicker and landed in the sweet spot, setting himself up perfectly for the next dirt hit. Going for his second consecutive backflip, he slowed the rotation in the air to account for the bigger gap and landed perfectly.
From the talent booth, Pastrana, who had injured his knee at Gravity Games and wasn’t competing, called the run. Wyatt looked on from the sidelines with his dislocated hand, and Bartram, who was icing his leg near medical, threw his arms in the air in celebration. The crowd went ballistic. Metzger’s back-to-back backflips were the first to be aired to the world.
A day later, Metzger captured his second gold and third medal of X Games in Best Trick. But it wasn’t the Godfather who stole the show this time—it was Carey Hart. After putting the backflip on the map with his attempt two years prior, Hart watched as riders like Pastrana, Metzger, Wyatt and Bartram all successfully landed it. He desperately wanted to finish what he had started.
For two years, he had yet to ride away with anything but broken bones. His confidence was low. During practice, he didn’t hit the ramp once, and then he sat out the first two passes as the start list kept circling back to him.
Finally, on his third and last chance, Hart rolled down from the start and hit the ramp. He rotated the backflip perfectly. When he put the wheels down and rode away, the emotions of the crowd were overwhelming. He was bombarded with celebratory hugs on the arena floor, including his father and his then-girlfriend-now-wife, Pink.
“For me, it just put a period on the sentence,” said Hart, who earned silver. “I just wanted to finish what I started.” And the rest was history.
