The Evolution of Big Air

[Voiceover] I'm Ben McGrath,

staff writer at The New Yorker, and this week,

I wrote about the X Games, ESPN's action sports spectacle

which are now in their 20th year.

This year, the X Games were held in Austin

for the first time, and the kind of centerpiece

of the festival was this enormous ski jump-like structure

called the Mega Ramp.

The headlining events on Friday and Saturday night

of the X Games were the so-called Big Air competitions

for skateboarders and BMX riders.

The ramp itself is something like eight stories high,

and the skateboarders start 65 feet above

where they're eventually going to land.

Here you see Tom Schaar, a 14 year old,

who won gold this year.

Now they go over, first, what's called a gap jump,

and then they go up off a quarter pipe.

The Big Air phrase comes in in part because

as they come up the quarter pipe,

you see there's a digital measuring stick

that shows how high, how much air,

how big of the air you get.

Now the origin of Big Air goes back to a,

kind of to a BMX rider named Mat Hoffman

growing up in Oklahoma in the 1980s.

He started building kind of homemade-style ramps

in his backyard, and it was kind of the beginning of

a transition in what we now call action sports,

sort of in the direction of almost stunt jumps

and daredevilry.

Mat Hoffman then became friends with Evel Knievel,

and you see the kind of, the Evel Knievelish influence here.

It was all being a very homemade,

they would build this really long

stretch through his yard,

and in order to get enough speed to clear the ramp,

have his friends tow him on motorcycles.

He would hold a rope,

and finally, let go at the last second, and carry up,

and kind of flair his bike.

Fast forward another decade or so.

The ramps became little more stylized, a little more usable.

There was a skateboarder named Danny Way,

who is sort of the architect of the Mega Ramp

that you see today.

In 2004, I think the ramp at that point

was probably something like 60, 65 feet high,

and there was an expectation that it would

eventually go to a hundred, to higher and higher and higher.

You know, everything is about getting better and bigger,

and, you know, more insane in a way.

Danny Way, for instance, the inventor of the Mega Ramp,

also won the first High Air competition in 1995,

which was the first year of the X Games.

At that point, they were just using the standard half pipe,

and it was how high you can get above the ramp.

From High Air, now we moved to Big Air.

One of the risks that comes with progression,

that comes with ever higher, ever farther,

is safety and danger.

I mean, the higher you go, farther you fall.

In 2007, skateboarder Jake Brown, who you see,

he's got his balance wrong, and the skateboard goes off

his feet, it goes one way, he starts going the other way,

and now you realize he's 45 feet above

the wooden base of the ramp, and it's just a freefall,

and it's pretty shocking.

You see, you know, he lands, his shoes pop off.

Jake Brown actually managed to walk off,

but you get a sense of how frightening this can really be.

The X Games have a winter and a summer component

like the Olympics, and so, you have motorcycles jumping

in the summer, you have snowmobiles jumping in the winter.

Last year, Caleb Moore, a snowmobiler in his 20s,

under-rotated on a flip,

and, you know, it's one of those awful things

where you can kind of see it coming before he feels it.

He lands, and then his snowmobile kind of torques over

and forks down right on top of his chest.

He actually managed to get up and walk off the track,

but on his way to the hospital,

or I think at the hospital later,

he suffered a heart attack.

He then suffered some brain damage, and after the next week,

he died, and that was the first death

directly attributable to X Games competition.

That was last year,

but it also kind of made people think, looking back,

how remarkable it was, in a way, that it was only the first.

How much higher can you go at a certain point?

How much can you progress before

you reach the limits of what the body can endure?

This year, in Austin, the Mega Ramp was, I think,

65 feet above the landing for the quarter pipe.

Several years ago, they were talking about

how it was gonna get to a hundred,

and I think maybe no longer so clear that they'll get there.