Freestylin'

FREESTYLIN'

The Sky's the limit

JUST HOW BIG IS FREESTYLE motocross? Let’s ask the man who helped get it started, seventime AMA Supercross champ Jeremy McGrath, the guy who made the Nac-Nac famous.

“I hate to say it, but I think freestyle is more popular than motocross,” he says. “For regular people, it’s easier to watch and a lot more exciting. The sport is attracting a lot of outside sponsors, and for short bursts it’s great on TV.”

What started a few years ago as a few crazy racers going for extra bucks in clicker contests at intermission has grown into the banner event at extreme-sports exhibitions such as the made for-TV Gravity Games and X-Games. Riders now dedicate themselves solely to freestyle jumping. Top jumpers Carey Hart, Mike Metzger, Tommy Clowers and Brian Deegan all were talented motocrossers who by bad luck or ill fortune weren’t able make the final step to factory-rider status. Through television exposure and sales of videotapes, all are now more famous (and make more money) than any midpack Supercross racer.

Metzger, at the ripe old age of 24, is considered the Godfather of Freestyle. Ripping open the trick envelope put Metzger on top of the FMX world with a win at the inaugural Vans freestyle championship in 1998. Along came the sponsors and ncome. “Freestyle is going to keep on growing,” he predicts. “New kids start jumping every day, keep pushing it-and bouncing back if they fall. I don’t bounce too much anymore.”

Pushing things to new levels is where Hart comes into the picture. The Las Vegas native went on the freestyle circuit when Super-cross could no longer pay the bills. Armed with a sick sideways whip, Hart proceeded to perfect every trick in the book, throwing in some variations and inventing the “Hart Attack,” a hanging Superman Seatgrab that simply defies physics. He’s best known, though, for his antics at last summer’s Gravity Games, where he pulled off the first-ever backflip on a full-sized motorcycle (see Roundup, November, 2000). “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” he says, which is goin’ some.

Hart, too, thinks the sport will continue to expand. “Hopefully, it will keep growing at a crazy pace,” he says.

“It will stop when nothing unique is happening-like in rollerblading-but that’s not anytime soon. I watch the BMX dirt jumpers and we have a long ways to go still.”

So, from rough scrambles to motocross, from motocross to Supercross, and now from Supercross to freestyle. Fire up the video cameras!

Jimmy Lewis