We mentioned in an earlier news item that Mitchie Brusco, an American skateboarding prodigy turned virtuoso, broke an X Games and a world record as the first person ever to complete a 1260 (three-and-a-half turns) on the MegaRamp in Minneapolis, USA. He attributed his success to skydiving.
Brusco didn’t start skydiving specifically to improve his skateboarding. In February 2015, when he turned 18, he did a tandem dive, loved the feeling and decided the air was a “genuinely good place to spend my time."
Four years later, Brusco has close to 1,000 jumps to his credit and he has flown a few hours in a tunnel too. “My spatial awareness and overall awareness has been challenged so much,” he says. “Getting on a mega ramp or spinning a different way on a vert ramp — those things just started to make sense."
When you spend enough of your time 13,000 feet above the ground, or several hours in a column of accelerated air that gives you the exact same sensation, the prospect of hurtling down a 65-foot ramp, over a 65-foot gap and then up a 27-foot quarter-pipe — as skateboarders do in big air — doesn’t seem so daunting.
Outside the scope of skateboarding, Brusco thinks that primarily indoor skydiving has the potential to change the way other action sports athletes train — say, snowboarders who do quadruple corks at the Olympics. “You just get comfortable,” Brusco says. “You don’t touch the ground for five minutes at a time. You live in the air.”
Good thing that Brusco has recently signed on with iFLY. That should make his training more affordable.