Sometimes, the difference between how we imagine something happening in the warm, damp confines of our heads is dramatically different than the plans reality has for us. I think that has to be what was going on here, where an over-ambitious man with a Can-Am Ryker three-wheeled motorcycle does something at a skate park that had to have played out differently in his mind.
I suspect that in his imagination, Dr. Badass over there must have imagined himself gracefully whizzing around the bowls and ramps of that skate park, likely doing some kind of high jump that would pause ever so briefly at its apogee, just long enough for him to give a little wink and finger-gun to the assembled crowd, then coming in for a solid landing leading to a fast, screeching halt and jump-dismount.
Then, everyone would applaud.
Instead, this is what happened:
What I’m most impressed by is just how quickly everything went to shit. At one solitary second in, you can see that everything has gone off the rails, and that very first slope was enough to get him off-balance and losing control:
From that moment on, he’s boned. The best possible outcome would have been for him to just let go of everything and hit the ground relatively slowly while the Ryker rolls to a halt, but the thing about motorcycles is the throttle is on the handgrip, so as this poor schmuck held on, desperately, he was also continuing to give the motorcycle power, which just made the whole situation escalate.
The hold-on-but-wait-why-is-it-still-going-oh-shit-I-better-hold-on self-perpetuating cycle of fuckuppery is a brutal one, and you can almost feel the poor bastard’s brain trying to process the two conflicting impulses, like an evil supercomputer an the verge of exploding as it deals with being told “this statement is a lie.”
I suppose there’s a lesson here, but, really, I’m not sure anyone who is willing to read and consider that maybe they shouldn’t try to hoon their three-wheeled motorcycle in a skate park is the sort of person to take written advice, so, I suppose, have at it, dummies.
Incredibly, it looks like the rider, nor anyone around him was hurt, which is great. I also suspect that most people got the hell out of the way as soon as they saw this dude wheel that thing to the edge of the park, because not everyone at the skate park is a fool.
UPDATE: A longer version of the video is here:
...and here’s a link with some useful editing and annotations.