Robbie Maddison is a badass. This is a guy who has pushed the limit of what is deemed possible on a motorized bicycle, from cranking out more than a dozen backflips in one session to setting distance-jump records to crushing world-class competitions. His latest stunt, however, is just dumb: cruising some of the world’s greatest surf breaks in Tahiti—Teahupoo and Papara—on his gasoline-fume puking motorbike. Even when taken in context—as an ad for tribal-tattoo frat-boy skate-shoe company DC—it’s a new low on the “Why?” scale.
Call it the blowback of the GoPro generation. We’ve reached peak X-Game Bro-lympics adrenaline junkiness, and gunning your dirt bike down the face of a wave is (literally) jumping the shark. Dude couldn’t just take a break and grab a surfboard like a normal person? C’mon.
Sure, it’s a gimmick, and we live in a culture that demands new gimmicks to click and share every few seconds or so, but here’s hoping the whole thing is just some CGI cooked up by a pasty programmer’s Red Bull-fueled frenzy in DC’s basement.
