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• Charles Barkley gets bagged in Scottsdale for a DUI? That’s turrible.
• Speaking of Arizona, Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald is accused of raising his hand in anger against his ex-Raiderette baby mama.
• It’s just Ducky that Oregon teams are Blazing a trail of victories to close out 2008.
• Tonight in Vegas, Robbie Maddison plans to get higher than ever before.
Celebrating the New Year has always been an excuse to give in to our more self-destructive tendencies. You willingly go to a bar or a friend’s place, try to ingest as much beer or champagne as possible, attempt to hook up with either random strangers or acquaintances from high school who didn’t get fat, all the while dodging streamers, surprisingly sharp noise-makers, and high school acquaintances who did get fat. But no matter how gracefully you navigate tonight’s treacherous terrain of booze, STDs and shame, you still got nothing on daredevil Robbie Maddison, who will once again be attempting a feat of insanity for your New Year’s Eve viewing pleasure.
(Maddison, during last year’s feat)
Last year on ESPN, Maddison took to the parking lot of the Rio hotel and jumped the length of a football field at 322 feet, 7.5 inches. This year he’s at it again, but the plan is to make things a bit more vertical. He will “go more than 120 feet high and land on top of the 96-foot Arc de Triomphe replica in front of the Paris Las Vegas Hotel. He’ll then freefall 50 feet off the Arc to a ramp.” Works for us.
Video of the last year’s jump after the, uh, jump.
Robbie Maddison’s record-breaking jump was so nice, he did it twice (video link now posted, yay!).
Just after midnight Eastern on New Year’s Eve, outside the Rio casino in Las Vegas, the Aussie motorcycle daredevil went airborne over two football fields - and landed safely, setting a new Guinness world record by traveling 322 feet.
But Maddison had so much fun on the run, he immediately told an ESPN interviewer that he wanted to do it again - much to the chagrin of his fiance-slash-manager, Amy Sanders.
So within minutes, Robbie raced back, revved up and rushed up the ramp - to the same satisfying results.
Maddison must have felt he owed an encore to all the viewers on the Worldwide Leader, who had to sit through the same Trojan condoms pig commercial over and over and over and over while waiting for the jump. The spot (yes, there was only one) actually had us yearning for Frank TV promo spots.
