An elusive motocross trick may give the X Games its next big moment

Frontal flip could be next big X Games thing

LOS ANGELES — The X Games has lately won more attention for its crashes than its stunts.

The action sports showcase, which is promoting its 15th anniversary with a celebration of its biggest moments including Tony Hawk’s skateboard 900 in 1999 and Travis Pastrana’s dirt-bike double back flip in 2006, could use a similar moment this year.

Enter the motocross front flip.

The name sounds so basic for an X Games trick, whose names are so often studded with terms such as “twist” and “whip” and “double” and “triple.”

But the move has yet to be landed in an official competition.

Several riders are likely to try it Friday night at Staples Center in the Moto X Best Trick event, and judging from the number of backyard landings and near-misses to be seen on YouTube, its moment appears to have come.

“We’re going to see two or three guys pull the front flip off,” Brian Deegan, leader of the Metal Mulisha motocross team and the man who pulled the first dirt bike 360 in competition, said Thursday.

It was in Best Trick two years ago that Pastrana pulled off his eye-popping, oh-no-he-didn’t double back flip, five years after Carey Hart had pioneered the single back flip.

But while the back flip is a natural, elegant move for a rider to launch into off a steep ramp — Pastrana has called his feat “not that hard” given the will to go “high enough and far enough” — attempts at the forward flip have been awkward, odd and even ugly.

Instead of accelerating and rising up through the ramp, a rider instead locks the bike’s brakes on the lip and tucks into a head-over heels tumble, an absolute no-no in any other situation.

“It goes against everything you’ve learned on a dirt bike,” said Deegan, who has switched from motor bikes to rally cars and will be working as an ESPN commentator for Best Trick. “I think guys that don’t have a motocross background have a better chance at it.”

If inexperience is the key, then Paris Rosen may be the perfect candidate.

The 21-year-old from Apple Valley, Minn. has no professional experience and hasn’t even landed a back flip. His lone claim to fame is a viral Internet video of him front flipping into a foam practice pit. That bit of self-promotion earned him an invitation to the X Games.

Charles Pages of France, who uses a more twisting style to create forward momentum and flip himself over, has won similar fame and has actually landed the trick in his own Web videos, but will face a far larger spotlight on Friday.

In last year’s Best Trick competition, Jim DeChamp tried the front flip but crashed on the landing of his first attempt. He compressed a vertebra and could not return.

Two-time defending gold medalist Kyle Loza won the 2008 competition with a bizarre trick in which he flipped his body but left the bike upright. The trick had no name and he joked that he would call it “the Electric Death.”

Loza will return, as will Pastrana for the first time since his famous double two years ago.

Deegan and others have said that once the front-flip precedent is set, like the four-minute mile, it will become more common. Hart’s back flip had observers saying it wouldn’t be done again — now it is virtually a required part of every freestyle routine, and children can be seen flipping into foam pits.

“There’s nothing like being the guy who gets to claim it,” Deegan said. “But if it can be done once, it can be done all the time.”

There is reason to think that some of the competitors will have an extra edge of fear and caution this year when trying such a risky move, though.

Skateboarders Jake Brown and Danny Way took horrific and highly publicized spills on the Big Air ramp in the same arena the last two years.

And last year’s silver medalist in Moto X Best Trick, Jeremy Lusk, died in February two days after crashing during a back flip at a competition in Costa Rica.

Lusk is believed to be the first freestyle motocross rider to die from injuries suffered during competition.

He will get a lengthy tribute from the X Games and his fellow riders at the regular freestyle competition, in which he won a gold medal last year, at Home Depot Center on Saturday night.