IS IT EVIL TO BE EVEL?
When images of a leather-clad figure launching a motorcycle over a line of buses or a yawning canyon flicker through our collective memory, one name instantly surfaces: Evel Knievel. But now, in an era of high-definition risk assessment and helmet laws, the question isn't just about how one makes such a jump—it's about whether the very act of seeking that airborne moment is an act of inspiration or a flirtation with something darker. As a veteran stunt performer quietly circulates plans for one more record-attempt leap, the motorcycle community finds itself once again confronting the eternal riddle: is it evil to be Evel?
The Ghost in the Leathers: Evel Knievel's Unshakeable Legacy
To understand the moral weight of a modern jump attempt, we have to rewind to the 1970s, when Robert Craig Knievel transformed from a small-town insurance salesman into a global icon of defiance. With his star-spangled jumpsuit, his swagger, and a seemingly endless appetite for broken bones, Evel didn't just perform stunts—he created a mythology. His failed jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace in 1967, which left him with a crushed pelvis and a head injury, might have ended a lesser career; instead, it launched a legend. The public didn't just watch Evel jump; they watched him crash, and they watched him get back up, often against all medical advice.
That pattern of catastrophic failure followed by improbable recovery became the template for a generation of copycat daredevils. Knievel himself was never shy about the commercial engine behind his death-wish: he famously quipped that people paid to see him crash, not to see him land. That raw honesty forces us to consider the ethical bargain at the heart of all stunt performance. Is the performer a willing, informed participant in an act of self-harm for public entertainment, or is the audience complicit in something more troubling? Knievel's own later years—marked by health complications, legal troubles, and a sense of betrayal by the very machine that made him famous—suggest a Faustian pact that left scars far beyond the orthopedic.
Why They Fly: The Psychology of the Professional Daredevil
If Evel Knievel were a one-off aberration, we could dismiss the whole phenomenon as a 1970s fever dream. But every generation produces its own roster of gravity-defying motorcyclists, from the freestyle motocross heroes of the X Games to the record-hungry long-distance jumpers who continue to push the boundaries of what a motorcycle can clear. Psychologists who study risk-taking behavior often point to a complex cocktail of personality traits: an unusually high tolerance for fear, a deep-seated need for validation, and a neurological wiring that interprets adrenaline as pure euphoria rather than panic. For many of these riders, the moment of lift-off is less a calculated professional act and more a transcendent spiritual experience.
Yet the line between calculated professional and adrenaline junkie is razor-thin. Modern stunt coordinators insist that today's jumps are the product of physics and rigorous preparation, not mere bravado. Riders spend months tweaking ramp angles, calculating approach speeds, and reinforcing landing surfaces. They employ mathematicians and engineers. They wear airbag-equipped suits and neck braces. But the variables that turn a textbook trajectory into a hospital visit—a gust of wind, a mechanical failure, a split-second miscalculation—remain stubbornly outside anyone's control. Questioning the ethics of the jump is really questioning the value we place on a human life versus the spectacle it generates. For more on preparing your own machine for less extreme but equally important rides, see our feature Bang For Your Buck!.
The Moral Ledger: Glorifying Risk in a Safety-Obsessed Age
If there is an evil in being Evel, it likely resides not in the jumper's heart but in the cultural echo chamber that amplifies and monetizes his leaps. Every viral stunt video that racks up millions of views silently normalises the idea that a life lived at the edge is the only life worth living. This messaging can have real-world consequences, especially for younger, less experienced riders who lack the resources and judgment to distinguish between a professionally orchestrated jump and a backyard ramp built with two-by-fours and misplaced optimism. Emergency room data stubbornly shows spikes in motorcycle-related trauma in regions and periods following heavily publicized stunts.
On the other hand, defenders of the sport argue that it's hypocritical to single out motorcycle daredevils when society regularly celebrates equally risky pursuits. Formula One drivers, wingsuit fliers, big-wave surfers, and even mountaineers all actively court death in the name of achievement and are handed sponsorship deals and documentary films. What distinguishes the motorcycle jumper is perhaps the perceived closeness of the audience to the carnage; the crash is visceral, immediate, and often horrifyingly visible in a way that a climber lost on Everest is not. That visibility can make us uncomfortable, but discomfort isn't the same as evil. The true moral test might be whether we allow these athletes to be defined solely by their crashes, or whether we honor their courage while still demanding the highest safety standards possible.
A Vet's Take: Scott's Contrarian Wisdom
Not everyone looks at a 300-foot gap and feels the call of the void. Sometimes, the most profound commentary on a lifestyle comes from the other end of the spectrum entirely. When our magazine recently polled readers about their dream professions, one response stood out with its gentle, almost absurdist candor. Scott, a rider from the Midwest, wrote:
"I was thinking, I like animals, so maybe I could become a vet."In the context of a discussion about risk, broken bones, and the lure of glory, Scott's words land like a cool breeze. They remind us that the desire to mend, to heal, and to nurture represents a fundamentally different way of engaging with the world, and one that is no less fulfilling.
Scott's perspective inadvertently highlights the central duality of the motorcycling community. For every rider who dreams of catching air over a set of buses, there's another who finds their bliss in the steady hum of a well-maintained engine on a winding country road. Neither is more valid, but the public narrative tends to disproportionately celebrate the former. The veterinarian fantasy—fixing broken animals rather than accumulating your own fractures—serves as a gentle rebuke to the cult of the daredevil. It asks us to reconsider what courage looks like: is it the willingness to risk one's own body for a fleeting moment of fame, or the steady, unglamorous work of repairing the damage the world inflicts? Both, perhaps, have their place.
The Jump-Master's Comeback: Age, Legacy, and the Need to Fly Again
The immediate trigger for this ethical revisiting is news that a famous jump-master—whose identity remains quietly guarded as final logistics are negotiated—has been scouting locations for a new, record-setting attempt. Sources close to the rider confirm that he is in his late fifties, long retired from active competition, and driven by a complex mix of unfinished business and a desire to close his career on his own terms. His proposed jump: a distance that would eclipse any previously achieved on a production motorcycle, requiring a custom-built ramp and an ultra-light machine stripped of every non-essential component.
This scenario forces a harder look at the question of consent and vulnerability. While a 25-year-old athlete might be presumed to have a full understanding of the risks, an older rider with decades of accumulated injuries and a legacy already cemented in the record books invites a different kind of concern. Medical experts caution that the human body's resilience declines with age, and that the cumulative effect of past traumas makes recovery from a new catastrophic injury much less certain. Yet to deny the rider his ambition would be to strip him of the very agency that defined his life's work. It is a genuine ethical puzzle, one that the rider himself seems to acknowledge with a paradoxical mix of humility and defiance: he reportedly told intermediaries that he knows the jump could kill him, but that a life spent worrying about that possibility is no life at all.
The Bike, The Physics, and The Evolution of Safety
From Scramblers to Airborne Missiles
The machine underneath the daredevil has transformed just as much as the cultural conversation around risk. Evel Knievel's iconic XR-750 Harley-Davidson was essentially a modified flat-track racer, heavy and ill-suited to flight, which made his achievements all the more astonishing—and his crashes all the more violent. Modern jump bikes, by contrast, are purpose-built projectiles. They marry motocross agility with custom geometry: extended swingarms for straight-line stability, ultra-lightweight chromoly frames, and suspension systems that can absorb a controlled-crash landing without immediately bucking the rider into a somersault.
Even more critical are the protective technologies that have trickled down from aerospace and Formula One. Advanced data loggers now capture real-time velocity, angle of attack, and G-forces, allowing teams to make micro-adjustments between practice runs. Neck braces like the Leatt brace, originally developed for off-road racing, have become standard, significantly reducing the risk of spinal injuries. Airbag vests, once the stuff of science fiction, now deploy in milliseconds upon detection of a crash. These are not trivial increments; they represent a paradigm shift in what it means to take a "calculated" risk. Still, no amount of gear can eliminate the inherent danger of a 100-plus-mph launch followed by a descent onto hard-packed dirt. The margin for error remains terrifyingly slim, and therein lies the continued allure for both performer and audience.
Community Response: Divided We Ride
Reactions within the motorcycling world to the proposed jump have been, predictably, polarizing. Online forums and social media groups crackle with debate. Older riders who grew up idolizing Knievel tend to express a cautious, almost paternal support: they understand the itch, and they respect the commitment, but they also worry about the precedent. Younger thrill-seekers, many of whom have been raised on a digital diet of YouTube stunt montages, are more likely to champion the attempt as an expression of ultimate freedom, unmediated by corporate sponsorship or insurance waivers.
Industry insiders are more guarded. Promoters, while always interested in an event that can generate pay-per-view revenue, are acutely aware of the liability and the public-relations nightmare if things go wrong. Track owners and municipal authorities, still nursing the scars of past permits for extreme sports events, are reluctant to sign off on a jump that could bankrupt their insurance policies. The conversation inevitably circles back to the foundational question: who gets to decide if the risk is worth taking? Is it purely the rider's choice, or does a community obliged to scrape him off the tarmac have a moral stake? For a deeper look at how local authorities are handling two-wheeled challenges, see our report There's a new sheriff in town, one two wheels.
Is It Evil? Reconciling the Daredevil and the Good
After peeling back the layers—the psychology, the physics, the market forces, the community ethics—we arrive again at the stark, simple question posed by our title. To label the pursuit of a motorcycle jump as "evil" is to misunderstand the nature of evil itself. Evil requires malice, a deliberate intent to cause harm. A stunt rider, however misguided, does not launch off a ramp hoping to hurt anyone, least of all himself. What he seeks is something far more complex and human: a fleeting mastery over the forces that confine us all, a story that will outlive him, and perhaps an answer to the private question that gnaws at his soul. He is not evil; he is, in some fundamental way, incomplete without the jump.
And yet, to ignore the potential for harm—both to the rider and to the impressionable onlookers who might try to emulate him without the same preparation—would be an ethical abdication. The path forward is not censorship or prohibition, but a relentless commitment to separating the myth from the method. We can celebrate the courage while condemning the recklessness. We can marvel at the image of a motorcycle in full flight and simultaneously insist on airbags, on engineering, on sober consent. The real evil would be to turn away, to pretend that the spectacle has no consequences, or to reduce a complex human being to a crash video we watch while eating lunch. As Scott reminded us, there are other ways to touch the world; but for those who choose the ramp and the gap, our job as a community is to make sure they get the chance to tell their own story, ideally one with a happier ending than history would suggest.