The air whooshes past as Mitchie Brusco slips headfirst into 150 mph winds funneling through a cylindrical tunnel, but it’s just another day at the “office” for the 22-year-old X Games gold medalist. Indoor skydiving might not be typical for a professional skateboarder, but it’s how Brusco trains for Big Air.
After winning gold in Skateboard Big Air during last summer’s X Games Minneapolis—a competition in which skaters drive down a ramp at 40 mph and then launch 20-plus feet into the air—Brusco was even more electric this past weekend when he returned to the same venue and landed the first 1260 (three and a half revolutions in the air) in skateboarding history.
American @Mitchiebrusco84 just landed the first 1260 in skateboard history at #XGames! pic.twitter.com/aHpeT3mGYq
— X Games (@XGames) August 3, 2019
Brusco has been competing in the X Games since he was 14 and has racked up 10 medals, including two second-place finishes at Minneapolis 2019. First appearing on the scene (and onto Tony Hawk’s radar) at age 5, Brusco’s career has been defined by a sizzle reel of record-breaking attempts, highlights and podium appearances. He was given the nickname “Little Tricky” as a preteen for his gumption on the ramp, and he’s amassed 67,000 Instagram followers, 50,000 Facebook followers and 16,000 Twitter followers. He’s also an avid gamer of Fortnight, Rocket League, Apex Legends and Rainbow Six, and streams on Twitch as “m_tricky.”
At 15, he became the youngest skater to land a 900 on the MegaRamp. At 16, he was the first to pull off a 1080 in an X Games Big Air competition. A massive 1080 trick won him his first gold medal last summer at Minneapolis, and earlier this year he attempted failed to land a 1260 at the Shanghai X Games. After sticking the landing in Minneapolis he said, “Today was a pretty wild experience … I’m kind of trying to process everything now.”
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His actual process had a lot to do with the crowd-stunning maneuver. In the sky, and within the confines of the wind tunnel, Brusco has been using skydiving to master his body control in the air, which helps him execute major moves in skateboarding.
Brusco, who is from Washington but now lives in Southern California, trains out of iFly Oceanside and iFly San Diego; he’s a licensed skydiver with more than 900 freefall jumps and 100-plus hours of training in the wind tunnel. Earlier this year, iFly became an official sponsorship and said that he plans to begin competing in national and international indoor flying competitions in the near future.
Brusco entered the skydiving world the way many people do: via a tandem jump on his 18th birthday. He was instantly hooked. Today, he credits skydiving for honing his spatial awareness. “Once I started diving into the technical aspects of it, I noticed how much I was genuinely pushing myself mentally, physically, spatially,” Brusco said in a phone interview last week after completing the X Games Minneapolis Big Air qualifier. “I was breaking through huge barriers … I always used to cater to my strong side. I wasn’t quite used to going every which way. But then I started pushing myself really hard and when I’d get back on the skateboard, I’d have those same mental cues. It was easier to work my weak side because I already was, and then I noticed things start to shift and having that awareness to go whichever way I want.”
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Skydiving, like Big Air skateboarding and snowboarding, is a study in physics. The skydiving wind tunnel requires careful, precise movements. If Brusco’s shoulder is too far forward in one direction, he could involuntarily spin or slam into the glass of the cylinder while traveling 100 mph or faster.
“There’s no denying gravity: it’s going to be a constant force,” says Brusco. “So if you’re standing straight up and you think you’re standing straight up—but in reality you’re leading 10 degrees forward without knowing it—the air is going to show you by pushing you the opposite way that you want to go until you really align yourself with exactly where you want to be.
“Now I know when I hop on a skateboard that if I pitch two degrees toward my back, I’ll be able to finish this rotation and stay over the board. Once you get used to going 150 MPH, going 15 or 25 or 35 mph starts to feel really manageable.”
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