Back in the 1970s (and before), parents didn’t stress about our health and safety as much as they do today. It’s not that they cared less – they just didn’t worry obsessively about it. It’s a far guess to say that some of the kids seen bike jumping and being bike jumped (which is the more dangerous?) are parents now – which means that they survived and can recall how less restricted, less supervised, less obsessively safety-conscious things were – and it was fine.
Bike jumping and jumping over things in general was big TV in the 1970s. By the late 1960s, Evel Knievel was the world’s greatest motorcycle daredevil, a man who had jumped over 13 double-decker buses in London, a canyon in Idaho… and sometimes he missed. As he said : “My failures had a lot to do with my fame … You know, I had a couple hundred jumps in my career, and I made most of them, but the ones they show over and over are the ones when I crashed….
“I wanted to fly through the air. I was a daredevil, a performer… Sure, I was scared. You gotta be an ass not to be scared. But I beat the hell out of death. It would all go by so fast, in a blur. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi. You’re in the air for four seconds, you’re part of the machine, and then if you make a mistake midair, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, boy. I’m gonna crash,’ and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“He’s a legend to all of us,” said skateboarder Danny Way, who jumped the Great Wall of China in 2005. “We probably wouldn’t have the opportunities we do without him. There wasn’t a lot of history of people doing 100-foot jumps before him. The motorcycles weren’t made for it. The ramps weren’t made for it. And he went out and just did it.”
Via: Reddit, Vintage Everyday