I’ll bet that was a real rush. But when someone prone on a few roller skate wheels passes a motorcycle you know it’s got to be a case of insufficient mylenation (another example can be found in the third paragraph here). Notice how he bleeds off speed by swerving side-to-side when coming up behind the motorcycle? I’ll bet he doesn’t have real brakes. It’s still awesome:
Update: A friend of mine owns a roller skating rink. I asked him if he had ever done anything like this. He replied:
Joe, Back in the “GOOD’OL” days when all my knees worked I skated down 3 of the then MAJOR hills in Lewiston which were Fifth St. Grade, Eighth St. Grade and Twenty-first St. Grade, in Clarkston the biggie was Beachview Park Grade, the trouble with it was it ended in a parking lot with curbs a strip of grass, and the Snake River. It’s a bitch to swim with roller skates on……………! I passed a car on the Eighth ST. Grade deal he was doing 25 or 30 and he said I was still accelerating, but I sure the first thing he did was let off so it seemed faster then he thought. We did clock the Twenty-first St deal and top was about 42 MPH-…….,use REALLY good Bearings
IIRC the way his knees stopped working was when he and his motorcycle parted company while they were both traveling at about 50 MPH. He tried running to avoid getting a road rash. His knees got messed up in addition to receiving numerous other injuries you might expect from a separation of man and machine of this type.
When I watched the video I immediately knew that road. It’s in Switzerland and is a route I used to travel by motorcycle between Germany and Italy. The road goes through the Grimsel Pass and the big dam you see is for Grimsel Lake (Grimselsee). The video really does not do justice to how steep and curvy that road is.
All I can say is just “WoW”, that dude is crazy with big brass ones.
For any U.S. military readers in Europe it’s a couple hours from the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in Garmisch, Germany.
Two things: When luge riders do this stuff (the guys riding luge boards on skateboard wheels) at least they go feet first, so any impact will break their ankles, legs, pelvis, etc. BEFORE the skull is destroyed.
Second: remember when Americans did this kind of high-risk stuff for the fun of it? Strap on some wings and a couple of microturbojets? Run down a mountain road with rollerblade wheels all over your body? Go over Niagra Falls in a barrel?
Oh well. We’ve still got guys building sub-orbital rockets in their garages.
Stepping back a bit and thinking about it I suppose using kitchen blenders and mixers to make thousands of pounds of explosives for people to shoot at probably sounds a little wacky too.
Well, we motorcycle people were horrified when someone stuck an engine in a wagon. Didn’t handle for crap, brakes were a joke, they can roll over. Crazy idea that caught on, somehow.