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Sports

Tony Hawk Builds and Skates a Wooden Spiral of Death, Eats a Bit of Shit

The man old enough to be pulling off these tricks in a wheelchair.

Tony Hawk is good at skateboarding. Tony Hawk is also old at skateboarding. At 47 years, the man has seen almost a half a century—most of which was spent jumping off of things and falling down and wearing his body down. Which makes things anxiety-producing, say, when he decides to construct and execute a wooden spiral of death.

The ever-commercial Hawk paired up with Sony to promote something called an Action Cam, which is only peripheral to the fact that Hawk was given enough money to have people build him this one-of-a-kind spiral-shaped casket to skate around. At first, Hawk leaves some pads down toward the bottom, which is helpful, as the physics of this circus-trick-like loop are unpredictable, only chartable by way of some mobius strip logic. And the result, predictably, witnessed Hawk falling down a good bit. Like, a lot.

Thankfully Hawk's bones are not hollow, like the bird he is named after, but rather durable from scarring, allowing him to bounce back up and finally pull off a trick like this at such an age. It's pretty impressive. At this rate, we fully expect him to see him pulling the same kinds of tricks in a wheelchair a couple of years from now.