jumps successfully to the other side. Isn’t all of life kind of like a Snake River Canyon?  In a nefarious episode, my brother Tim and I sneaked into the attic when Mom and Dad weren’t around, to get a sneak peek at what Christmas was like to bring.  One of the most exciting discoveries was one of these.  As fortune would have it, the open hatch to the attic was the perfect place to test the toy, so we carefully removed it from its packing and jumped it several times till, by dint of moving the ramp further and further back, we discovered the practical limits of the toy’s jumping distance, resulting in an intense nose-dive crackup that broke the Sky Cycle into several pieces.  Which we carefully replaced in as much of a piece as we could coax it into into the box.It was my unhappy task to accompany Mom to the toy store after Christmas to see her express her great displeasure to the manager in no uncertain terms.  RIP, Evel.ÂÂ
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LOL, I heard this on the radio and thought, “how is the pw crowd going to react to this news?”
Sad, back around the turn of the 70’s when I was a kid, he was a living legend. I’d bet if you mentioned his name to the younger generation today they’d confuse him with Eva Longorea or what ever the bimbos name is. The man was a lining piece of Americana, and 69 is so young…however he did put his body through hell.
The man was a lining piece of Americana
living, too!
Kanye West had him whacked.
I know he was responsible for a lot of really stupid crap I did on a bicycle as a kid, that’s for sure. I had the little wind-up motorcycle toy, too. Didn’t last long.
Evel Knievel’s Ghost: “That whole Shoemaker-Levy comet thing, with the crashing into Jupiter on live TV? I coulda done that.”
and 69 is so young
On second thought, maybe at 69 a rod got blown..
Jumping the old Stingray bikes was a direct influence from him. Lucky we were that there were no real accessible hills near where we lived.
Although the one time at the lake, I bailed and let the bike go – good thing it was built of solid steel, those rocks would have hurt otherwise.
The moral of the story? Keep your distance from Kanye West.
Thanks to this guy, when we were kids, we would build ramps out of anything. I remember trying to jump my little Honda XR50 and 80. A friend who is a professional motorcross racer has a signed poster of Evel in his RV. What a great/crazy dude.
Still have the Evel Knievel pinball machine I received for my 13th birthday. Really.
JD just said what I was gonna say. Only I was doing it on a hopped-up home-built Yamaha YZ 100, with Wiseco high-comp pistons and Hooker exhaust, on the kudzu covered hills in back of my house. Looking back, I can see why my mom always shuddered every time we started making plans for another ramp. But my dad used to gather the neighbors around to watch. Right proud of his little hellion, he was.
We started out trying to do it on bicycles. Pre-BMX bicycles, lol. Quickly discovered why suspensions are important and how they work, which worked to my great advantage when I graduated to dirt bikes. I think that is what I marvel at the most when I look back on those jumps, is that he was doing on fucking street bikes with incredibly bad suspension. What might he have done with a current dirt bike?
Actually, B Moe, he used the HD XR750 which is a stock racing bike. I’m sure he was pimping his ride for his particular line of work.
That is a flat tracker. Possibly the craziest ass racing on the planet, but if you get airborn in one of those races you are well and truly fucked. He used it because it was relatively lightweight and had wicked acceleration. I had remembered him being strictly a Harley man, also, but in some of the videos ESPN was playing he was on a Triumph, possibly a TT, but that is just a guess.
Yea that V-twin is a torque-y powerful engine, especially a lightweight 750.