EVEL KNIEVEL
Two-wheeled legends don’t come much bigger than this 1970s daredevil
He turned an entire generation onto bikes and was responsible for a million bloodied knees as we all tried to replicate his daring jumps. Evel Knievel was arguably the most famous person in the world in the 1970s. And he rode motorcycles. Or, rather, he jumped them. And crashed them. A lot.
Knievel created his own arena to become famous in. Jumping motorcycles as entertainment was not a thing before he came along, and he’s now fully acknowledged as the godfather of extreme sports. Bizarrely, he became more famous for his crashes than his successes, and he always maintained that a high percentage of his audience actually wanted to see him fail. “I feel that five per cent of the people want me to die,” he admitted, with brutal honesty. “Forty-five per cent want me to make it, but want to be there in case I don’t, and fifty per cent are behind me all the way.”
After shooting to fame with his failed attempt to leap a Triumph T120 Bonneville over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in 1967, Knievel realised he had created a monster. To keep the public’s interest, he worked out that every stunt had to be bigger, and more dangerous than the last and, by 1974, that meant he found himself strapped into a steam-powered rocket aiming over the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. This was Knievel at the zenith of his fame and the world watched as he attempted to leap the three-quarter-mile gap.
He failed. When the safety drogue parachute opened prematurely on launch, Knievel lost control of the X-2 Sky Cycle and drifted down into the canyon wall. There were accusations that he’d pulled the chute on purpose, feeling the attempt was too dangerous but, to his dying day, Knievel insisted it was a technical malfunction.
If anyone ever doubted his courage, Knievel’s only appearance in the UK in 1975 laid that one to rest. Having single-handedly sold-out Wembley Stadium, he attempted to jump his Harley-Davidson XR-750 over 13 London buses, even though he knew he had no hope of landing it. “I just didn’t have enough speed to make the jump,” he said. “I needed to be doing 90mph at the bottom
‘Five per cent of the people want me to die…’
of the ramp, but I was only doing 80mph. I shifted gear three times, but I knew at the bottom of the ramp I wasn’t going to make it. My idiot mechanic didn’t get the gearing right. He was a complete idiot - he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. In the end we couldn’t get the right gearing in time, so we just had to go ahead with the jump. The crowd had paid their money.”
This was the attitude that made Knievel such a legend. It was a gunslinger’s approach – pull the trigger and see what happens, and his audience loved him for it.
The appetite for all things Knievel led to a collection of unforgettable
toys (which grossed over $300 million). Rubber action figures of Knievel (he was the first person to have an action figure in his likeness) and wind-up bikes that could jump over ramps, pull wheelies, and crash with impunity.
When Knievel crashed, it was never with impunity. His list of broken bones made him seem even more outlandish, like some kind of bionic superhero. The Guinness Book of Records listed Knievel as the human who’d broken more bones than any other – 433 in total. While that was grossly inaccurate, he still broke 35 bones, endured 14 open reduction operations, and spent a total of 36 months in hospital. He broke everything from his pelvis to his back, his ribs, arms, legs, hips, shins, ankles, legs, wrists, ankles, and toes.
But no matter how badly he was hurt, Knievel had to keep on keeping on if he was to maintain his exorbitant lifestyle. Lear jets, flash cars, yachts, helicopters, mansions, and a hardcore party attitude that led him to claim he had slept with over 2000 women and “made 60 million dollars in my career and spent 63”.
There were movies too. The biopic Evel Knievel starred George Hamilton as the daredevil, while Knievel played himself in the 1977 flick Viva Knievel! with the legendary Gene Kelly as co-star.
Ultimately, things got out of hand. Knievel badly injured himself in an attempt to jump over a pool of live sharks in 1977 and finally had to call it a day. He still dreamt up ever more daring stunts – like jumping out of an aeroplane over Vegas at 10,000 feet without a parachute and landing on bales of hay – but permission was denied and, by 1980, he had made his last public appearance, pulling a few wheelies at a show in Puerto Rico.
Knievel passed away on November 30, 2007, aged 69 from diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, but not before he had finally received credit for being the godfather of extreme sports. His place in history is assured. Legends don’t come much bigger.