1,200 attempts, three months and one Bagjump airbag. This is how a trick nobody had ever landed went from an idea to history.

Some tricks take an afternoon to learn. Others take a season. And then there are the ones nobody has ever done, where there is no video to study, no rider to call and no one who can tell you whether it is even possible.

That was where Banks Hovey stood when he rolled his Altis Sigma electric dirt bike up to the kicker at Pastranaland. The goal was a kickflip. Not on a skateboard, but on a dirt bike that weighs around 200 pounds.

He landed it. It took more than 1,200 crashes and three months of trying. So how does a rider get through that many attempts and still come back ready for the next one? In this article, we break down how the trick came together, and what role our airbag played in getting Banks into the history books.

Let us start with the trick itself.

A kickflip on a dirt bike is a different problem

The FMX world has seen plenty of backflips off a ramp. A kickflip is something else. The rider has to spin the bike along its length, underneath him, while he stays in the air. Then he has to catch it and get both wheels back on the ground.

An electric bike adds another layer. The torque is instant, so the smallest twist of the throttle on takeoff changes everything that happens after. Getting that right is less about courage and more about thousands of small corrections, and those only come from doing the trick over and over.

Which means falling. A lot.

Why foam pits were never going to work

Early on, the team looked at the classic option for learning new tricks: a foam pit. It did not take long to see the problems.

The first one was time. Pulling a heavy bike out of a foam pit takes between five and ten minutes for every single attempt. Multiply that by a few hundred tries and you lose weeks. On top of that, the rider spends his energy digging a bike out of foam instead of jumping, and the feeling from the last attempt is gone by the time he is back at the top.

Banks did not need a soft place to stop. He needed a setup that let him drop in, crash, ride off and go again within seconds. That is where Bagjump came in.

1,200 crashes on the same airbag

Over three months, Banks crashed more than 1,200 times onto a Bagjump landing airbag at Pastranaland. Some of those attempts were close. Many were nowhere near. The bike came down sideways, upside down and at angles no bike was ever designed to land at.

“The key for this trick was constant repetition. Trying again, again, and again,” Banks told us.

That one sentence tells the whole story. A trick like this is not learned on the attempt that works. It is learned on the 1,199 that came before it.

Not every landing surface can take that kind of punishment. Some airbags grab the tires on contact. Others have a hard rebound that sends the rider and the bike in different directions. Our topsheet and the way the air releases on impact let Banks land badly, slide off clean and be back on the ramp minutes later. Session after session, the landing felt the same. When you are trying something no one has ever done, knowing exactly what happens when it goes wrong is what gives you the confidence to fully commit.

The day it worked

After three months, all of those repetitions added up. Banks hit the kicker on the Altis Sigma, flicked the bike, watched it rotate underneath him, caught it and put the wheels down.

The first kickflip ever landed on a dirt bike. Channel 199 was there to film it.

Banks is honest about what it would have looked like without the right setup. In his words, he would probably still be out there trying to land it. Without the option to stack hundreds of attempts back to back, a three-month project can easily turn into a project of several years. Or into one that never gets finished at all.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Banks Hovey (@banks169)

Progression comes from repetition

What Banks did at Pastranaland is a world first, but the way he got there is how every rider progresses. Try it, fall, try it again. The only difference is how many times you can repeat that cycle, and how safely.

That is what we build our airbags for. Whether it is an Olympic snowboarder learning a new rotation or Banks Hovey flipping a dirt bike, the idea is the same: as many tries as it takes, and a landing you can trust on every single one of them.

Now that the first kickflip is on film, we cannot wait to see what Banks comes up with next.