Rider’s Vision of Bigger Ramps Helps Launch Big Air

It started with some math and stolen lumber. Ten years later, and minus a spleen, Mat Hoffman’s pursuit of big air on his freestyle BMX bike led to a ramp the height of a two-story house that sent him flying more than 50 feet above an Oklahoma field in 2001.

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Bob Burnquist’s Mega Ramp (Oct. 31, 2006)

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• Times Topic: X Games

A decade later, Hoffman’s supersize stunts have contributed to BMX and Skateboarding Big Air events at the X Games, which begin Thursday in Los Angeles.

“He was the first guy to do any sort of big ramp stuff,” the skateboard icon Tony Hawk said in the film “The Birth of Big Air,” which chronicles Hoffman’s quest. “Now we’ve got the whole Big Air event in the X Games, and that’s largely because of Mat ever trying it or ever dreaming of it.”

Hoffman’s backyard stunts might have been the birth. But the Big Air events on the 62-foot-high, 293-foot-long Mega Ramp demonstrate a maturation.

On Thursday at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, competitors will start each judged run on their skateboards from an 80-foot roll-in that resembles a ski-jumping ramp and that will launch them over a 70-foot gap.

After landing, they zip up a 27-foot-high quarterpipe ramp that sends them soaring up to 50 feet above the ground, their height measured by a lighted tower that would look at home on the Las Vegas Strip. On Saturday, freestyle BMX competitors will take their turn at Big Air on the Mega Ramp.

“Hoffman kind of started the whole thing,” said Jake Brown, the 2009 winner of Skateboard Big Air. “He’s crazy.”

In 1999, Hoffman, known as Condor for his high-flying aerials, rode off a 3,500-foot cliff in Norway on his bike with a parachute strapped to his back. He has invented more than 100 tricks, and, for a decade, beginning in the 1980s, dominated competitive vertical riding.

Still, the credit and competitive spectacle surrounding Big Air come as something of a surprise to Hoffman, who is in Los Angeles this week to watch the Games with his family.

“I had no idea it would be a competition, because I never thought of it as a competition,” said Hoffman, 38, of Edmond, Okla., who participated in BMX Big Air in 2007. “I talked about doing demos as part of the first X Games, and people were like, ‘No, we can’t do that.’ It’s funny how it’s evolved in the last 10, 15 years. Now it’s become a prominent feature here.”