ESPN: Being Robbie Maddison

11 December 2009

ESPN published a great article recently about where Robbie has been and where he's heading, check out the full article here or check out some excerpts from the article below.

"In Australia, Maddison was a teen racing phenom known for banging bars with Chad Reed before he missed out on the growth spurt that the rest of his competitors enjoyed. At 16, he traded his bike for a career as an industrial electrician and may have never ridden again if he didn't pick up a magazine four years later and see some of his former competitors making a go of it as freestyle riders."

"A freakishly quick study, Maddison learned many of the basic freestyle tricks on natural jumps that he and his friends rode in the bush. By the time he arrived at the Planet X Summer Games in January of 2003, the freestyle community was buzzing about an unknown rider who was supposedly one of the few people in the world with a backflip. Maddison had one -- at least, he had one off his friend's rickety jump. He'd never hit a super kicker like the one at Planet X, but that didn't stop him from pulling flip after flip through practice and right to the top of the podium."

"On New Year's Eve [2007], just three weeks after Knievel was laid to rest -- and 40 years to the night that Knievel jumped the fountain at Caesar's Palace -- Maddison blew through the parking lot of Las Vegas' Rio Casino at nearly 95 miles an hour. His goal was to jump a football field, and the millions of people watching the ESPN broadcast of the jump didn't care that a stiff head wind would wreak havoc with the attempt. Maddison came up short of his 360-foot goal, but at 322 feet he nevertheless shattered the existing record by nearly 50 feet."

"Maddison's jump on December 31, 2008, was completely without precedent: 100 feet straight up to the top of the Paris Casino's Arc de Triomphe, followed by a U-turn and a 70-foot plunge down to a landing ramp. The only thing that even came close was decades-old stunt by a peer of Knievel named Spanky Spangler, who used to jump into nets held aloft by cranes, which would lower him gently to the ground."

"Finally, at the end of August, Maddison came to rest. He spent six weeks back in Australia and surfing in Bali. He assessed his major injuries -- the two shredded shoulders, the missing ACLs in both knees, the countless deep tissue contusions and sprains and tears -- and accepted that it's time to let things heal. As he stares down the rest of 2009, there is no ground-breaking stunt to plan and no dance with death to mentally prepare for. There's just rest."

Read the full story over at ESPN