After the X Games crash, DeChamp says, he wasn't fully mobile for nearly a month.
"You have no idea that your toes are somehow connected to your back," he says. "You move your foot, and it's your back that hurts."
Pastrana began filming the MTV series immediately after the X Games, so DeChamp wasn't afforded much recovery time. Three months after the crash, the crew was in Utah and Pastrana had a gift for DeChamp: a ramp, a track covered in mulch, a dirt bike and a man from the Guinness Book of World Records to verify the feat.
"The last time I was on this bike, I broke my back," DeChamp recalls thinking. But he didn't dwell on it. He couldn't. DeChamp knows Stephen Murray, the BMX rider who took a nasty spill June 22, 2007, in Baltimore and is today paralyzed from the neck down. And he knew Jeremy Lusk, one of the top freestyle motocross riders in the world who missed a trick just last month and died as a result of his injuries.
The risks can't keep you away.
"I could also pull out of my driveway right now and get in an accident," DeChamp says. "The moment you start worrying, you've mentally messed yourself up. If you're second-guessing, that's when you make mistakes. You can't think that way."
On his second attempt, he hit the brake perfectly and rolled over the handlebars, the bike rotated 360 degrees and DeChamp stuck the landing.
"The excitement was very crazy," says Tommy Passemante, known among the Nitro Circus crew as Streetbike Tommy. In addition to subjecting his body to painful, homemade stunts, Passemante hangs drywall around Anne Arundel County. "It was just a very electric moment for everybody."
The way DeChamp describes it, he momentarily captured something he had been chasing his entire life.
"It was a once-in-a-lifetime feeling," he says. "Just craziness. It didn't soak in for a couple of days what I'd actually accomplished. I mean, no one had ever done it, no one knows what that felt like. It was kind of like: 'I'm done. Nothing else I could ever do will top that.' "
Of course, that doesn't mean DeChamp will stop searching.
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