Stunt riders defy danger at Harley’s anniversary
The Wall of Death shook as Rhett “Rotten” Giordano ripped around the 30-foot-wide stunt barrel on his vintage 1949 Harley-Davidson.
Spectators peered over the top of the barrel’s 12-foot walls as Giordano went faster and faster, his bike glued to the track by centrifugal force.
The audience wasn’t in danger, but Giordano was.
He’s been doing these stunts more than 20 years, and even with his experience, he’s broken both ankles and cracked his sternum in accidents.
At any moment, his bike’s tire could blow out, the drive chain could break or the engine could stall. With the loss of forward momentum, the bike would drop from the wall at speeds up to 65 mph.
Giordano practices his riding every day but still gets a little nervous before a show.
“You never take this for granted. It’s dangerous,” he said.
The Wall of Death and Globe of Death are part of the Moto-Carnival at Milwaukee’s Veterans Park through the weekend as Harley-Davidson Inc.’s 115th anniversary celebration ramps up along the lakefront.
Thousands of motorcyclists from around the world are coming here, many of them arriving Friday and Saturday, for the party and Sunday’s
parade along Wisconsin Ave.
The Wall of Death is a spectacle that’s been around for about 100 years.
Giordano has been riding it for 23 years, since he was 17.
“I have been hurt in here plenty,” he said, pointing to the board walls marred by scrapes, gouges and other evidence of crashes.
He can ride the wall with his arms spread out, like a circus performer, or with his feet on the bike’s handlebars. His average speed is 40 mph, but with some tricks it’s much faster.
Nobody wants to see Giordano just make a few circles around the wall and come down, so he’s developed a dozen or so crowd-pleasing tricks.
He’s been self-taught right from the beginning. “It’s not to show you what a great rider I am, but it’s to you show you that anything’s possible. With God’s good grace in my life, I can stay safe in here,” Giordano said.
A Philadelphia native, he bought his Wall of Death track in Long Island, New York.
“This was my trade right out of high school,” he said.
His motorcycle stunt show is spectacular, and dangerous, but there’s more to it than going around and around inside a barrel-shaped track.
It takes six strong individuals at least 15 hours to set up the track, according to Giordano.
“This thing is brutal to build,” he said.
Also at Veterans Park this week, a stone’s throw from the Wall of Death, is the Globe of Death.
It’s a 16-foot-wide steel sphere in which bikers zip around inside at freeway speeds, sometimes within inches of each other.
Like the Wall of Death, the premise is fairly simple but the execution isn’t.
“The basic science and physics is the faster you go the more you will stick to the wall. But there are a lot of nuances to be able to control the bike and make it go where you want,” said Erwin Urias, whose family runs the show.
Urias is a fourth-generation Globe of Death rider. The original steel sphere was built by his great-grandfather, Jose Urias, in 1912. It was made with heavy steel strapping, held together by pounded rivets, to give a metal-weaved appearance.
It’s a tough globe. Sixty-eight years after its construction, the globe, motorcycles and other equipment were damaged when the truck carrying everything for Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus was struck from behind by an 18-wheeler semi-truck whose driver had fallen asleep behind the wheel.
Pieces of steel were strewn along the highway for more than a mile. But the globe was gathered up, welded and repaired without missing a single show.
Still, a lot can go wrong during a live performance, and there have been serious injuries.
“We’ve had some incidents throughout the years,” Urias said, including a crash in front of thousands of people at the Dunkin Donut Center in Providence, Rhode Island.
His bike stalled, for a split second, but long enough to cause a crash with the bikes around him.
“My injuries were pretty bad. I tore every ligament and tendon in my right knee. … I couldn’t walk for about a year,” he said.
Worldwide, there are about 100 people who do similar steel-sphere riding, according to Urias.
He’s been riding motorcycles since he was 2 years old. By the time he was 5, he was already in the Globe of Death show.
Everyone riding in the show is a Urias family member.
The group has an aerialist, Olga Surnina, who performs in the middle of the globe as the bikes race around her.
She began her training at age 5, in a gymnastics school in Kazakhstan, and went on to tour with circuses in Europe before coming to the U.S. in 2003.
The family’s original steel sphere is more than 100 years old and has been retired, but it’s still usable, according to Urias.
He’s been in the show for 30 years.
What keeps him doing it, when on any given day he could be seriously injured?
It’s the bikes, the spectators, the motorcycle enthusiasts who cheer him on.
“I am in my environment. I love it,” he said.