Motorsport July 2008

X-rated thrills in Madrid

Dukes of Torque

By John MacDonald

Jaw-dropping, breath-taking, heart-stopping. For a seamless adrenalin rush, there’s nothing to match the Red Bull X-Fighters – and that’s just the fans’ response.

For the daring young men on their flying machines (that were never meant to fly in the first place), it’s a gravity-defying combination of skill, coordination, and timing – when one false move could mean serious injury. Or worse.

Imagine powering a motor-bike up 60-degree ramp, launching into mid-air, doing a back somersault (with bike), and landing hands-free on the side of a compacted dirt mound just 20 metres away – while still in the saddle. Not a good idea? No, I didn’t think so.

For X-Fighters, such stunts are routine – bread-and-butter tricks in a dazzling repertoire that gets ever more daring. On 250cc bikes, with modified suspension, they never get out of second gear – hitting a seemingly modest 40 km/h at takeoff.

But in the seconds between launching and landing, the riders cram in an awesome array of aerial gymnastics.

Among the crowd pleasers are the ‘Superman Seatgrab’ (in which a rider leaves the bike entirely, extends his legs and moves backwards horizontally before grabbing back the tail of the seat and somehow getting astride again in time to land.

The aptly named ‘Tsunami’ has the bike in a vertical position with the rider hanging from the handlebars. Like a puzzle-ring, bike and rider magically reconnect in mid-air to a conventional posture and touch down intact on two wheels. As with a magician’s conjuring trick, the spectator is left wondering “How the **** did he do that?”

Not surprisingly, X-Fighter events – or freestyle motocross as the sport is officially known – are sweeping the world.

We were in Madrid for the fourth round of the 2008 series, where 12 of the best exponents went head to head in the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, the Spanish capital’s most famous bullring.

And not since the days of El Cordobes and Manolete did fans have so much to cheer about. A capacity crowd of 23,000 thrilled to death-defying feats that even the great matadors would acknowledge as their equal.

Against a backdrop of fireworks, live band, and a non-stop manic commentary, the Red Bull X-Fighters competition unfolds in the form of knockout rounds in which two riders go head-to-head, each having 90 seconds to pull off the slickest tricks they can come up with inside the four-ramp arena, which allows for jumps as high as 15 metres.

Once the time’s up, riders are allowed one final farewell jump, usually reserved for their strongest trick. Five judges decide which man progresses, until there are only two riders left who face off in the 120-second final.

Going into the Spanish round, Switzerland’s Mat Rebaud led the championship. He’s been riding motor-bikes since he was four and is the third generation of a family of competitive bikers. It shows.
But Rebaud was not going to have it all his own way, especially with home crowd favourite Dany Torres – at 19, the youngest rider on the X-Fighter circuit – threatening Rebaud’s supremacy.

There was more at stake than one event and the race for the 2008 title: there was also a mantle to be claimed – who is the genuine successor to Travis Pastrana?

At age 24, Pastrana was the closest thing to a household name in freestyle motocross before he retired at the end of the 2007 X-Fighters season.

To this day, he remains the only rider to pull off a gravity-defying double backflip. That was during the 2006 X-Game, and nobody, including himself, has ever pulled the trick off ever again – not in competition, not in practice, not for sheer bragging rights before landing upside down into a foam pit.

The foam pit is the proving ground for X-Fighters, a large pool filled with custom-made foam blocks of about 10-15 cubic feet of volume each. The foam pits are essential in enabling a rider to attempt new moves time and again and still manage to emerge – most times – unscathed.

“Before foam pits, something like the double backflip was simply impossible,” Pastrana recalls. “In a way the foam pit has made the sport even riskier, because it’s raised the level of competition dramatically, since you can just try out so much more stuff.

“But you can’t really call this sport ‘safe’ because of it. Sure it’s safer than dirt, but I’ve broken a leg and a collarbone falling in foam pits.

“I practised the double backflip for three years and only once did I manage to pull it off in practice. It was one time in practice, one time in competition, and that’s it. I mean, I crashed in practice some seven or eight times trying to pull it off the week before the X-Games. And I didn’t.

“I’ve had 18 surgeries, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Get this thing wrong and you could die.

“I’m sure some of the guys will be double-backflipping in the future, but to me it’s just not worth it anymore since my focus is now on rallying.”

Pastrana’s switch to four wheels opened up a gap at the top of the X-Fighters’ pecking order. And there’s no lack of pretenders to his throne. Hence the added edge to the Madrid showdown.

The six-round global trek had already taken in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Fort Worth in Texas, with Wuppertal in Germany to come, culminating in September at Poland’s Stadium X-lecia in Warsaw.

The journey to the Plaza de Toros was strewn with fame and glory – and also, as with all things X-Fighter, not a few broken bones.

Japan’s Eigo Sato was walking – well, hirpling – proof of that in Madrid. On crutches and with his leg in splints after an injury in Mexico, he was there to give moral support to his fellow X-Fighters and help out as interviewer/translator for Japanese camera crews.

Home favourite Torres had recovered from injury in Spain, but France’s Charlie Pages was competing with a damaged knee – getting icepack treatment in the pits between practice sessions.

Australian Robbie Maddison, who made global headlines after jumping over a football field in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, breaking a world record for longest motorcycle jump ever, smilingly says:

“I’ve had 25 fractures, one for each year I’ve lived.”

Even the smile testifies to that. His gleaming grin is a masterpiece of orthodontic reconstruction – the original were the victims of many crashes.

“First one was when I was three, already doing daredevil stuff on my bicycle. I had another one less than a year later, when I already had a mini-motorcycle.

“Over time it got to a point the nurses at the hospital next to my home would say ‘Hi again Debbie, hi Robbie’ to my mom and I every time we came back. I mean, my file there had its own drawer.”

But when the X-Fighters get going, injury is the last thing on their mind. “It’s a distraction and you just can’t think about it,” says Rebeaud. “You must concentrate on what you’re doing, and doing it right. That’s the way to avoid injuries – not by being defensive.”

Torres agrees. “I have to push it to the very limit if I’m to beat guys like Mat and Maddo. You can’t do that if you’re thinking about the risks all the time.”

He proved it on the first night in Madrid, sending the hugely partisan crowd into raptures by winning the ‘Best Trick’ competition.

Torres was in the lead right from the first round and had the fans on their feet and waving their Red Bull neckerchiefs. Although his opponents saved their best stunts for the second round, Torres too had a trick up his tailpipe and sent the crowd from rapture to delirium as he held on to claim victory.

Into the final night’s head-to-head competition, fans had even more to roar about as stunt after seemingly impossible stunt saw the field whittled down to the last four. Torres was not among them – despite an awesome performance – and the home crowd were not shy in making their displeasure known.

We had watched close on three hours of non-stop action without even a hint of mishap. Tempting fate even to think on these lines, and sure enough, Charlie Pages took one risk too many in attempting to reach the semi-finals.

After pulling off trick after trick, he tried a new 360-degree mid-air turn and crashed on landing. The crowd were suddenly silent as Pages lay face down below his bike and the medics rushed into the arena.

Fortunately, he wasn’t badly hurt. Although his already damaged knee took another knock, he was still able to make it to the after party.

The first semi-final came down to America’s Jeremy Lusk of the USA, and Andre Villa – a Norwegian with a Spanish name who immediately took over as home fans’ favourite.

Lusk badly wanted to reach his first final and paid the price of taking extra risks. After a big flip combo he could not land cleanly. That left Villa needing just a solid mistake-free run but he did not hold back, flying through the Madrid night sky like an apocalyptic horseman.

Maddison and Rebeaud fought it out to join him. The Australian pulled out all the stops – from heel-clicker to underflip can-can, no hand flip and one hand landing. But the Swiss maestro was unimpressed and simply jumped perfect trick after trick and proved that he is at the moment in a class of his own. It was an outstanding performance by Maddo – good enough for third place – but not good enough to beat Rebeaud.

After two days of X-Fighters action – what an event, what an ending. The grand finale was a showdown between the best two from the ranking session – Villa and Rebeaud.

Villa, in his first ever Red Bull X-Fighters final and in the form of his life started strongly, going through a complex series of flips and turns before finishing even better with an impressive no-hand flip to no-hand landing. But with the crowd on their feet and cheering madly, misfortune intervened.

Villa got his bike wedged in the sand next to a ramp and needed at least 30 seconds to get it out and ready again. With that, his chances were gone. He finished his run and even showed all his tricks but time had run out.

It was an easy task for the best rider on the planet to claim victory in Madrid and his third X-Fighters title this year. But Rebeaud did not take the opportunity to coast. He was able to show all his great tricks without any pressure and finally had the crowd behind him when he made his bike flip on its own while he raised his arms in celebration on top of the mound.

Rebeaud won in impressive style, but Andre Villa was the winner of the hearts. And Red Bull X-Fighters’ thousands of fans around the world were the biggest winners of all.