France's Pagès brothers are in a league of their own
May 5, 2009, 3:35 PM
By: Ryan Leyba
The buzz has been floating around the Internet for the past few days, but until now, there has been no physical proof that Charles Pagès had successfully landed the front flip. But thanks to my good friend and Pagès Brothers manager Sebastien Billault, I was able to get my hands on the original video. Watch in amazement.
Now, what makes these front flip attempts so much different from that of Jim DeChamp's at X Games 14, is that both Charles and Thomas are riding their normal Suzuki RM250's. These are the exact same bikes that they use to put an entire freestyle run together. As for Jim DeChamp, his front flip attempt was performed using a specially modified Suzuki RM125 — a bike setup strictly for the front flip.
Now, I'm not trying to take anything away from Jim DeChamp because he deserves all the credit for getting the front flip to the point he did (even landing it in MTV's Nitro Circus), but there's just something so much more legit about the way the Pagès brothers went about it — not to mention, they pulled it on a 66 ft. jump compared to Jim's 45 ft. gap. Stay tuned for more as I'm working on getting an interview with both Charles and Thomas. Vive la France!
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Contributors
Ryan Leyba
Leyba is a bitter, retired FMX rider who likes to sit in his cubicle and call the professionals of the sport wussies for not pulling 360s and double backflips. He claims he quit riding FMX before flips were even invented ... yeah, right.
Cliff Talley
Making FMX videos exciting is easy. Making them look good is not. Cliff Talley does both of these well and still manages to find enough time to piss off his neighbors with his Travis Barker-esque drum skills.
Chris Tedesco
You've seen his photos on the covers of Transworld, Racer X and more. You've also seen his tequila shooting skills at your local dive bar. Ladies, Chris is single and looking to mingle.
Grant "Goba" O'Brien
FMX in Australia wouldn't exist if it weren't for Goba. Well, maybe it would, but it wouldn't be nearly as cool. I don't know why, but we can't quit calling him gobalobadingdong — it just rolls off the tongue.
Tes Sewell
Tes is the dude who's always involved in everything that's going on in FMX. How he does it, we don't know, but that's the reason we hired him to share his plethora of FMX wisdom in the form of a monthly column.
