Josh Bender: The craziest guy you never heard of

Here's another crazy video that popped up on YouTube, since I've been looking all kinds of bike riding for this blog.  I never heard of Josh Bender until last night, when this clip showed up in my feed.  I've watched pieces of the Red Bull Rampage, quite a bit them, lately.  That's the event where the top crazy downhill free ride mountain bikers are invited to show up at some big, burly butte somewhere in the desert.  Utah seems to be the main place.  The riders and their teams figure out different lines from the top of the mountain, and have a couple weeks (I think) to dig out the lines, build jumps, and fortify the landings to some huge drops.  Then the handful of riders get a couple of runs each, to try and put together a line that's huge, progressive, gnarly, and filled with tricks.

I'm not a mountain bike guy, I'm a fat, old, Has Been BMXer who likes watching where the BMX and mountain bike world has gone in recent years.  It blows my mind how insane riding is these days.  But I know, from being around BMX freestyle fairly early, there always has to be a pioneer.  Somebody has to go first.  And often, it's one guy, or one woman, that has some idea that even the most talented riders of the day think is completely freakin' nuts.  I met some true pioneers in the 1980's, people like Bob Haro, Tom Sims, Dave Vanderspek, Rodney Mullen, Mark Gonzales, and A.J. Jackson.  Each one of them either invented an action sport, or took one into an entirely different direction.  Now I know Josh Bender is another one of those people.

The weird thing about watching this is that, even though I was a mediocre BMXer, even at my best, I actually did some small drops back in the day on my BMX bike.  A friend who rode motocross for fun took me out to some MX trails in Hollister, California in 1986.  One spot I found was a dried out pond where I could bunnyhop off the road around the top, and into a steep downhill.  That downhill worked into a small dirt cliff, and got higher and higher.  The way it was set up, I could keep dropping off a little father down the road, and gradually work up to a bigger drop.  After half an hour, I was bunnyhopping off the top, dropping past an 8 foot high, vertical dirt bank, landing 10 or 12 feet down from the top.  It was a blast, and I totally different type of riding than I'd ever done.  The landing was soft enough to provide some cushion, but not suck my tires in. At the time it just seemed like something fun an different to try.  I only did it because I was able to slowly work up to a bigger drop, which fit with my riding style.  I would have never dropped a vertical drop that was an all or nothing scenario.

I'm sure many other riders did similar things as well back then.  Downhill "bonzai" jumps were a big part of early BMX racing.  Those were big, long drop offs to a downhill landing.  I once had BMX pioneer Scot Breithaupt tell me about how he actually went off a bonzai jump in a BMX race, and he jumped completely over another rider's head, and landed in front of the guy.  I knew Scot was crazy, and a very skilled rider, but he also told some tall tales.  I took that story with a grain of salt.

At the race that weekend, Scot not only introduced me to the guy he jumped over, who confirmed the story, but another old school racer sitting nearby said Scot had once jumped over his head in a race as well.  So good sized downhill drops have been done on bicycles for many years.  But nothing like the  jumps we see Josh Bender doing in these videos.

In the late 80's, I worked at Unreel Productions which made videos for Vision Skateboards, and also Sims Snowboards.  In those days, snowboarders were starting to do big cliff drops, mostly in the back country of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, as well as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a bit later Whistler/Blackcomb in British Columbia.  My main job at Unreel was dubbing videos for the whole Vision/Sims empire.  I made copies of all the raw footage that came in from cameramen, and also any finished videos anyone needed a copy of.  One of the best parts of that job was that I saw all the video coming in and being edited.  I remember seeing the early snowboard cliff drops, 10-12-15 feet drops, which seemed pretty crazy in 1988 and 1989.  Then I saw more footage as cliff dropping became a thing, and over a couple of winters, drops went from 15 feet to 20 then up to nearly 40 feet.

Around that same time, mountain biking was gaining steam, and full suspension bikes were becoming a thing.  As I watched some snowboard footage one day, I wondered why mountain bikers weren't doing cliff drops.  Not 40 foot drops, but 6-8-10 foot drops.  Watching this video below, I realized the sport was still trying to find itself back then, as cross country and downhill were diverging into separate genre's.  In addition, the bikes may have had suspension, but they just weren't made for the kind of abuse cliff drops would put them through. 

It took another 10 years, and a crazy young guy living out in the Utah back country, to make big cliff drops into a thing.  Now I know, and you do, too, that guy was Josh Bender.  Here's another video I found, 26 minutes long, from 2009, and filled with burly drop after drop after drop.  So here's a longer look at Josh Bender, the guy who led the way, opened the door to what we now know as the Red Bull Rampage and some of the craziest bike riding anywhere. Enjoy.