Bikers and ?boarders perform stunts at skate park

Visitors to Washington?s skate park see bikers and skateboarders perform high-flying and often dangerous stunts. One of those stuntmen is Washington native Donavon Swift. Swift has ridden his bike at skate park for the past five or six years.

?When I was little, I got interested in this by watching the X Games,? he said, referring to the annual event that features skateboards, bikes, Motocross and other extreme sports. ?I didn?t start doing stunts until I was 14, and by that time the skate park had been built here.?

Once he got into biking he never got out.

?It?s basically all I do,? he said. ?If I have free time, I?m riding somewhere.?

Swift rides a small, single-gear bicycle that is designed specifically for stunts. The size of the bike allows him to maneuver it more easily in the air.

?My favorite trick is where you tuck the bike in and you take your hands off,? he said. ?You?ve got the bike tucked in so it doesn?t go anywhere. For me, it was not a difficult trick. The hardest part was taking my hands off. Now it?s easy. I can do it whenever I want.?

Another trick Swift performs is called a ?table,? where the biker turns his handlebars 90 degrees and turns his bike horizontally. The most difficult trick Swift has ever landed is known as a tailwhip. In a tailwhip, the biker holds the handlebars steady while rotating the rest of the bike around them while in the air before remounting the bike before it hits the ground.

?I tried tailwhips for so long and once I finally landed one I was tired of doing them,? he said. ?Now I can?t do them anymore because I stopped. One thing I?ve heard about tailwhips is that once you do one, you?ve got to do 15 more in a row, and they?re scary to do.?

Swift said he has never performed a backflip on his bike and is not about to try one.

?Everybody wants to see a backflip,? he said. ?I think backflips are show tricks for the X games. It?s not my style. I would be happy if I never did one.?

Swift gets pretty high in the air when he rides his bike up one of the ramps. He doesn?t know how high above the eight-foot ramp he gets but he knows that it is ?two rails? above the top of the ramp, referring to the rails more than a foot apart that surround the ramp.

?I?ve wrecked before on that and it?s not fun,? he said.

The worst injury Swift has sustained occurred last Halloween when he broke his foot after catching it in between the frame and back wheel while attempting to perform a tailwhip.

?My foot is still messed up because I never went to the hospital for it,? he said. ?The next day, it looked like there was a softball in the middle of my foot. After three days I was able to walk on it and the swelling went down, so I didn?t do anything because it got better.?

Swift broke his foot just one week before a competition. He didn?t want to back out of the contest and decided to ride through the pain.

?I probably shouldn?t have done that but I did,? he said. ?I felt pain in my foot for a month or two later. It healed on its own and I can walk today, but I don?t know if I would do it again.?

Malachi Goodwin, son of BJ and Bambi Goodwin, rides his skateboard at the skate park almost everyday. He has skated for the past four or five years. He said he gets ideas for tricks from other skaters he sees at the park.

?When I started, I went up the ramps and turned around,? he said.

The first trick he learned was to ?drop? his skateboard from the top of the ramp, steadying it on the ramp with his right foot and then pushing down on it with his left foot to accelerate down the ramp.

Goodwin has since learned several more tricks on his skateboard such as an ?ollie,? in which the skater is able to leap into the air while maintaining contact with the board even though the skater does not use his hands to maintain this contact. Goodwin does other advanced tricks that require him to flip the skateboard while it?s in the air and then land on it with its wheels on the ground.

?Your shoes have to be wide,? he said.

Goodwin said the worst spill he has ever had came at the indoor skate park in Iowa City, where he broke several bones in his hand.

?I was trying to drop a 20-foot ramp,? he said. ?I got to the bottom where the wood is tilted and fell off.?

Goodwin said he went to the hospital but was back on his skateboard as soon as his hand healed. Goodwin said he can often skate through injuries because the adrenaline flowing through his veins prevents him from feeling it.

?If you keep skating, it?s not going to bother you,? he said.