Nate Adams: King of Freestyle Motocross | Extreme Sports Documentary | Only Humann

A dangerous sport, probably one of the more dangerous sports. It's not if you're going to crash, it's when you're going to crash. In the high stakes world of freestyle motocross, Nate Adams is king. One of the greatest riders in FMX history, he's won an astounding 12 X Games medals, including the gold in 2004. He's placed first overall at the AST the Red Bull X Fighters and the Gravity Games. He was one of the earliest pioneers in FMX and has since come to represent the very definition of success. Whatever I was doing, I just always wanted to, you know, be good at it. Definitely to date the top three names ever in freestyle. I was impressed with him right off the bat. Like I was like, wow, this kid is small and skinny and going. But in this sport, the best can sometimes suffer the worst. I just kind of had a gut feeling that it wasn't all going to go as smoothly as we thought it might. It was August 2004 at the Summer X Games in Los Angeles. The first round of the freestyle motocross contest was about to begin. The headline story was a showdown between legendary FMX champion Travis Pastrana and a 20 year old from Glendale, Arizona. Nate Adams. Nate had only been able to beat Travis once at the 2003 Gravity Games. It had been a huge upset. The first time Travis had ever lost in head to head competition. The following year, Travis had been injured and Nate had racked up a string of victories, becoming the overall champion in the Vans Triple Crown and the LG Action Sports Series. As his medals piled up, Nate became known as the best freestyler never to win the X Games. As Nate was preparing for his next shot at X Games glory, Travis Pastrana announced he would be back for the contest. Everyone knew Nate's winning streak was in serious jeopardy. I didn't know if it was even possible to beat Travis. You know, I think Travis has more talent in his pinky finger than I have in my whole body. Anytime those guys show up to a contest, it's going to be a head to head battle. And you're guaranteed to see something ridiculous go down. All I was doing was riding and practicing as much as I can. And, you know, I was just kind of showing up and seeing how it goes. They'll come out with something that nobody else has seen or that nobody else has done. They've only done it in the foam pits. It's amazing to watch it. The big buzz at these X Games was that a slew of new tricks were going to be unleashed. Yet in practice, neither rider showed anything out of the ordinary. In the preliminary rounds, the rivals were closely matched, with Nate holding just a slight edge. As Travis went into his final run, the crowded stadium was on its feet. He was rumored to be going for the 360 backflip. Travis attempted it, but the difficulty of the trick prevailed. 360 to dirt now. Concussion is the result. Travis under-rotated, slammed into the ground and was knocked out cold. He broke bones in his wrist and ankle. His final score was 92. Travis Pastrana has always been his kryptonite, so to speak. Can Nate Adams conquer finally at X Games? I knew that he wanted so badly to win the X Games and always followed second behind Travis. It had nothing to do with money or fame or any of that stuff. He just wanted that medal so bad in the most pierced form, you know, and just just wanting to win, like being a natural competitor. This kid's got three silver medals from X. He hates that color. He wants gold. Nate knew this was a golden opportunity to take his first X Games crown, although he would need to bring out the very best from his arsenal of tricks. In the finals, Nate was spectacular. He thrilled the sold out crowd with a backflip to no handed lander and a backflip knickknack, ending with an unbelievable 360 flat spin. Nate's score was 93.8. He had finally won the biggest title in FMX. The bridesmaid finally becomes the bride. He's the gold medalist. He has finally taken down Travis Pastrana. He just pulled off a better run than Travis. He just did it. And it was great. To see the run that he put in to accomplish that goal was amazing. He rode so well and did everything that he wanted to in his run. To beat him, you know, straight up fair and square. It was like probably the best I've ever felt in my entire life. He is the king of freestyle motocross. The 20 year old Nate Adams is here for glory. Everything worked out perfect for him that afternoon. It was it was really cool to be a part of that. Getting to see him do all those things and have that for himself was really special. That was awesome. That was like, I'm going to cry. It was such a good feeling to be there and to be with him through that. Nate's family could appreciate more than anyone what this X Games win meant to him. They had seen firsthand all the hard work and determination he had put into riding. It had all been leading up to this moment. Nate Adams was born on March 29th, 1984, and grew up in Glendale, Arizona, just outside Phoenix. He was the youngest of three kids. Nate, his sister Katie and his brother Josh had an active childhood, including boating, skiing, camping, and when they were old enough to handle the responsibility, riding motorcycles. I started riding dirt bikes when I was about eight years old. My dad got my first bike, an 83 CR 60. I loved it. He loved that motorcycle. It's pretty crazy to think about. Yeah, he absolutely, even from a young age, when he had that, would not part with it. What? By the time my dad got me a bike when I was eight, it felt like I'd been waiting forever. It was like finally, you know, the day came that I got a bike. We're just a motorcycle family. It's a good family sport. We go to the races. We go to the desert and go ride and spend the weekend out in the desert riding and stuff. That's some of the like my best memories when I was little is out in the desert camping, you know, for the weekend and just riding all day. And just some of the things like some of the things that I learned through it, just riding and like my dad teaching me this or that or, you know, crashing. And, you know, we're there all weekend. So even if you crash hard, it's like you just got no other choice but to get up and keep riding with everyone. Nate's dad, Tandy, had raced motorbikes himself when he was a kid. Both Nate's parents were comfortable giving Nate a motorbike despite his age because they knew they could trust him. Nate is a great kid. He was I tell people he wasn't low maintenance. He was no maintenance. He was an honor student in school, very bright, did everything that he was supposed to do. After he finished his homework, riding motorcycles was Nate's new favorite passion. But his parents were careful not to let it become a full time obsession in the early years. When I was young, you know, I was probably only riding like once a week, you know, on the weekends, if that. But I thought about it. Oh, that was like what got me through school. What got me through the week was just thinking about going riding. His mom's an educator. So, you know, there were certain rules in the house. You don't get to go play or do anything until your homework's done. She's would always tell me if my grades dropped, she'd sell my bikes. And I believed her. So I always kept my grades up. Nate's dedication was about to pay off. He got into motorbikes just in time to witness the birth of a brand new motorsport in the mid 1990s. Freestyle motocross or FMX. John Disler was one of the first FMX pros. You know, my brother just started going out 16, 17, going out with my cousin and just doing tricks for fun. It just all started as fun. And I kind of met them just kind of through we rode at the same spots and I kind of run into him every now and then. I had just come back from my first contest where I broke my thumb and I was watching everybody ride. And I saw this little kid on a RM 125 or 250. We should have been on a 125 because he's tiny going out and doing all the tricks that my brother and I can do. And we didn't, you know, like, whoa, who's this? Once I kind of got close to them on their level, they said, well, why don't you come and compete? And I was like, well, how do I do it? And they said, we just start sending in like a video or, you know, send pictures or write a letter to somebody and and, you know, we'll we'll vouch for you. And I did. And that's how I got into my first contest. So I don't even know if my parents knew I did it, but I knew that's what I wanted to do. The wheels were in motion for the next phase of Nate's motocross career. John Disler was injured and couldn't ride in a huge show in Houston in January 2000. Nate's name came up in the right circles. He was about to get his first call up to the big time. Nate Adams had been working hard to learn the skills he needed to compete in the new sport of freestyle motocross. He loved motorbikes and rode with passion. In January 2000, at age 15, he was about to see the results of all his hard work. Thanks to the help of his friends and to the surprise of his parents. Nate got the opportunity to enter his first contest in Houston, Texas. The guys from the contest had called and wanted me to show up. I said, I'm hurt. They were bummed out because they needed riders. And I threw in Nate's name. Oh, he's good. He'll jump everything. And, you know, he's a very good rider. FMX competition requires riders to travel a course consisting of multiple jumps of varying lengths and angles for 90 seconds. Riders must perform two routines in a contest and have little time to practice on the ramps before putting together the strongest program they can. Judges give each performance a score out of 100 based on the variety and difficulty of the tricks. The highest score wins the cash prize, which can climb into six figures. Nate was excited about attempting his first contest, but it was not going to be an easy ride. When we got there and I saw how big these takeoff ramps were, they were all 75 or 80 foot gaps. These dirt hits are like 15 feet tall. And so I was actually pretty nervous at that moment because this is something totally different. You know, what do we kind of got ourselves into? These things are big. And this is where you break bones. It was my second contest I've ever ridden professionally. And then I walk in and I see this little kid he's 15 years old and he had this green work shirt on and just bleach blonde hair, some little kid from Arizona and his bike. I mean, he was like holding the handlebars like this, you know, pushing it around. My first competition, it was a little rough, but I mean, it definitely could have gone worse. I crashed in practice. First jump, you hit the seat in the man area. That's not very pleasant to hit really hard and put them down on the ground. I've never really ridden in front of a crowd. I was like 20,000 people there. So I was nervous, beyond nervous. And I told him, I says, Nate, you know what? We don't have to do this. We can pack it in and we can go home and we can try this again some other day. And he goes, no, dad, I know I can do it. He was able to regroup, come back and jump all the jumps. He went out for his second practice session and nailed it. And just all the way around, just hit everything perfect like he'd been doing it all of his life. He was doing tricks that no one else had ever done, like seat grabs. There was only a handful of guys doing seat grabs. And he was just this little 15 year old kid running a 250cc dirt bike, like doing these huge jumps. It was a huge moment. So it was scary at first, but it was a huge moment. Getting through that, it was a huge learning experience, just learning how to pretty much the crowd shouldn't affect you, you know, when you're out there doing your thing, like if the crowd's loud and they're excited to watch your ride, it should do nothing but just make you enjoy it more. But the fact that there's people watching shouldn't affect you, you know, affect your performance. So that first contest was a big learning experience. He finished seventh out of 15 riders. That contest was the start of a new life of travel and competition for Nate and his dad. Tandy was a carpet layer, and he was able to arrange his schedule around Nate's itinerary. It was a major disruption for the family, but the Adams decided this was a sacrifice they were all willing to make. And it was a sacrifice. I mean, Josh was the older brother, was very understanding. And, you know, dad can't always be at everything that I'm doing. But this is this is how we're going to do it. My dad was gone, you know, Thursday night through Sunday, usually. And I always had something waiting for him when he got home. You know, usually my standard deal was I would thrash his room like I just completely ruined his room. You know, for like three years, I was traveling every week with my dad. I wouldn't have been able to go compete without my dad there, you know, until I turned 18. One of the other of us needed to be there with him because I'd been on these things where kids got hurt really bad and their mom and dads weren't there. And I just told my wife, I said, you know, whether it's all good or Nate's laying there drawing his last breath, I felt like one of us needed to be there. It wasn't something we were just going to pack him off and good luck. Nate and his family have strong ties to each other, and they also have strong ties to their faith. Both are equally important in Nate's life. My faith is so much a part of me that I really haven't ever known anything else. You know, it's like I think it's definitely keep me or kept me grounded and levelheaded and humble. I know that's what keeps him really centered and really narrowed with what what the choices are that he makes. You know, I think Nate and I hit it off so well because we have the same faith. We're both Christian. And, you know, we I think God plays a huge Jesus plays a huge emphasis in our lives. The way I've lived and been brought up has definitely kept me on on out of trouble, pretty much kept me out of trouble. From the very beginning, Nate's dad, Tandy, insisted that he travel with Nate to all of his contests. Nate and his dad hit more than 70 events in 2000. Nate's first year as a pro. They were on the road every weekend. It was a grueling schedule, but a vitally important time for Nate to learn. This is completely different to ride in a contest than it is to ride just out. It's like it's not even the same at all. So through those years, I would say the most important things I learned was just how to compete. Like the only riding I did for probably two years was contest. Just show up, ride a course for 10 minutes, you know, do tricks, play a bam bam, compete, do that two days in a row and then fly home. It was like all that constantly only riding in that type of environment, I think pretty much made me a competition rider. Nate finished in sixth place in the 2000 series standings and was named Rookie of the Year by the International Freestyle Motocross Association, or IFMA. By 2001, Nate Adams and his dad, Tandy, had become fixtures on the FMX competition circuit. But as a young sport, freestyle was still finding its identity. The old school motocross racers felt the freestyler spent so much time learning tricks that their riding skills were weak. They had a nickname for them, Ramp Kids. A lot of people thought of Nate at the time as being just a ramp kid, someone that would just, you know, he could hit the ramps and do the jumps off ramps. But if he hit a dirt jump, you know, they couldn't do the same tricks. It didn't really, I mean, I guess I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me. I said, listen, you have all the talents, you have everything put together. But the thing that you need to do is you really need to just spend time on your bike and not jump so much. He started riding motocross so much and he actually went and did a bunch of races, he actually did some amateur nationals and really became a much better, well-rounded motorcycle rider. And when he did that, he went to this super level of being the best everywhere. Once I started competing against all those guys, I was beating them. Like all the time. So that nickname was kind of like, you know, Nate completed the 2001 season in second place in the IFMA standings. He had achieved some wins and strong finishes in the Vans Triple Crowns events and X Games qualifiers. Nate's work ethic set him apart from the rest of the pack in FMX, but even his dedication was about to be stretched to the limit. Other riders had been working on a trick that had never been successfully landed on a motorbike. If Nate wanted to stay in the game, he would need to find the courage to pull it off too. In 2002, the entire FMX world was turned upside down, literally. The backflip was an idea that had been kicking around since the first days of FMX. But as exciting as it sounded, most riders were convinced it was impossible. For me, one of the hardest tricks to go for is the backflip. I'd say for all of us growing up in the generation where no one had ever done a backflip, it was like a big mental thing. It's the biggest mental game you can play with yourself. It's not one that usually comes easy to people. It was years in the making, pretty much. There was so much talk and debate over whether it was possible, if you could even do it. The whole time on a motorcycle, you learn to keep the front end down. And now you've got to go off a ramp and just look back and hope that it comes around. 2002, three guys decide over the summer of that year to start flipping their bike and, you know, riding it away on dirt. Then, out of the blue, Kerry Hart performed it in competition. Once one person did it, it was like a free-for-all. Everyone started doing it. When we started learning, like the first handful of guys, there was no foam pits. You know, they had foam pits for BMX bikes, but no one had built a big one for a motocross bike. Nate sensed the backflip was the future of freestyle. He knew he had to perfect it to remain competitive. Learned the flip on a BMX bike into a foam pit and then learned it on a little XR70 into a foam pit as well. But when it came to the big bike, you just had to just go for it. That same winter, you know, Nate went for the backflip and almost killed himself. Definitely a learning curve. My first one, I landed upside down. I broke my collarbone and separated my shoulder, then came back and a few weeks after I healed up, I went to Travis'. Ironically, it was his future rival who gave Nate the opportunity to learn the backflip in 2002. Nate and Travis Pastrana both liked to win, but they also respected each other. Travis had already mastered the manoeuvre and was happy to give Nate some tips to help him get over the steep and painful learning curve. Other riders were amazed that Nate could tackle the trick again so soon after such a bad crash. If I would have crashed the way he did trying to backflip the first time, there's no way I would have got up and gone right to Pastrana's as soon as I was better. You know, I would have taken my time and taken the baby steps to get even back to where I was, and he just, like, jumped in headfirst. Although they became fiercely competitive on the FMX circuit, Travis and Nate remained good friends. Travis was nursing a knee injury at the time and welcomed Nate to his training facilities. Having him there was awesome because he's a cool enough guy to, you know, have me come out and stay at his house and give me pointers to learn how to flip and stuff. So we're rivals, but, you know, we're buddies too. It's not like we hate each other or anything, so... Travis had designed some ramps that made it safer to practice the backflip. Nate was determined to conquer the trick. He had a big kind of like a take-off built to a step-up landing where we had a bunch of... Or he had a bunch of bark mulch and soft dirt up there, so it was soft, but, you know, no foam pit, so if you can jump up and kind of land on a step-up, then there's less room to fall, less impact, and that's pretty much what I learned to flip on. Nate's perseverance prevailed. With Travis Pastrana's help, he successfully landed his first backflip. It was quite a rush. I was actually, like, screaming and yelling and hollering and stuff, and that's pretty unusual for me to get that excited, but it was, like, at the time, it was, like, the craziest thing I'd ever felt my entire life. Just the feeling and everything, how it went and how smooth the first one went. It was, like, I was more nervous for the second one than the first, because the first one, I did it and landed perfect, and then I was, like, rolling back to do it again. I'm like, damn, what did I do? I was so nervous the first time, I don't even really remember doing it. And it wasn't like I had it down. You know, I had to keep doing them every day, like, as many as I could a day. I probably crashed 50 times through the week learning them. Once I had it down, it was worth all the pain and the broken toes and the broken collarbone and all of that. Flip changed everything in FMX and added to its growing reputation as a serious sport. But many freestylers still had a very casual approach to competition. They dressed more for the street than for riding and thought more about having a good time than winning. Most of the guys, when I first started, it was party time. The early years of freestyle, it was partying and going out and having fun. You know, just, you could stay out till six in the morning before the contest. Shoot, they could go out, drink beer all week, do some tricks, clear more money than they would in a couple months of racing. And so they were having a blast. It had been clear from Nate's first appearances on the circuit that he would never fit the title of a typical mole on or off the freestyle course. Back in the beginning, Nate certainly had the reputation to just being the quiet kid. I could just tell from the moment that I met him that he was a serious cat. When I came in, it's like, you gotta look at it from a 14 or 15-year-old kid's perspective. Like, I'm going up against Deegan, Kerry Hart, Metzker, Pastrana, all these guys that I've watched on TV my whole life and have posters on my wall. And I wasn't just serious. I was probably just shy and quiet. There were times when he was coming up through the ranks that people would say to me, you need to tell Nate to be a little bit more showman. He needs to get up on the top of that mound when he's done and shake his fists and, you know, throw his helmet or do something. And Nate just said, mom, that's not me. When I ride, I am serious. I'm not joking around. It's dangerous. So I gotta, you know, take it somewhat serious. But I didn't just come in with this, like, hard-ass attitude, you know? He's himself. And I think nothing in this world can change him. I think there's, Nate's not willing to really compromise on who he is as a person, his integrity, morals, or values. Nate's faith prevailed in a world that presented him with many opportunities to get himself into trouble and shed his nice guy image. I think Nate's faith has kept him stable and focused. It's allowed him to recognize the opportunities that he has and the opportunities that he has that he doesn't want to partake in. There are times when things are temptations, but I don't think it's really that difficult for him because I think he's more concerned with the positive influence that he can be versus having fun. Nate's different approach to life had a profound impact on his fellow riders. Although many of them were older than Nate, they looked up to him. Some even going so far as to change their own lives to fall in line with Nate's beliefs. It's funny now that a lot of the metal militia guys, you know, the deagons and the vice and the twitches of the world, which before were the bad boys of the sport, they go to church with Nate now. Just the scripture to meditate on today is, the Lord isn't slow to do what he promised, as some people think. Rather, he is patient for your sake. His very clean, good persona, his influence, has now started changing the lives of other people. God gave him a gift and he's thankful for that and he's taken that and he's made the best of it. Guys have been my friends for a while, but, you know, just certain things in their life, they made the changes and I'm not gonna sit here and take credit for it. They saw something that needed to change in their life and they changed it. Nate's faith and focus clearly contributed to his success. The year of the backflip became Nate Adams' year. In only his second season as a pro, 18-year-old Nate was crowned WFA World Freestyle Champion. He came first in the 2002 ESPN Motocross Championships and had strong results in a number of X Games qualifiers. His hard work was paying off. But just as Nate was climbing his way to the very top of the sport, everything was about to come crashing down. After a strong finish in 2002, Nate Adams had rolled into the 2003 Gravity Games as an underdog and left as a champion. He handed Travis Pastrana his first loss ever in that contest. But despite this huge upset, no one saw Nate's victory as a changing of the guard, yet. It wasn't until the Summer X Games in 2004 when Nate beat Travis Pastrana again to win the gold medal that it became clear that Nate the Destroyer was now the best freestyler in the world. He's the gold medalist, he is Travis Pastrana. Travis just was the guy to beat and I ended up beating him a few times and once I started beating him here and there, it was like all this attention just came and it was like, kinda like once I beat him, it was like sponsors, kinda all this stuff started happening, so I can thank Travis for like half the sponsors I have now. Thanks, buddy. Nate was on top of his game. With success came incredible opportunity and big money. Soon after his Spectacular X Games win, Nate was offered five figures to demonstrate a 360 flat spin at the halftime show for a Supercross event in Italy. It was an event I set up for him. He was in Genoa, Italy for the Genoa Supercross. This is right after Nate won a gold medal. You know, he's the greatest freestyler in the world. So he was contracted to do a certain type and a certain number of tricks. And I just thought, I just don't really feel good about that. You know, if he wants to be able to say, I don't wanna do a 360, this isn't a good landing spot or I don't get enough catch off the ramp or whatever. I wanted him to be able to say, I'm not going to do this. Not that he couldn't, but I just kinda had a gut feeling that it wasn't all gonna go as smoothly as we thought it might. That was probably one of the wildest nights of my freestyle career. Standard kinda Supercross race with a freestyle show kinda afterwards. And wild crowd, you know, just the way you like. Kind of a reason why we do this, you know, just wild crowds. And Nate was paid big bucks to be there and do a 360. He did do 360. And it went good. And then it was last jump, one more jump. And I was kinda like already, I thought I was already kind of done riding. We decided, yeah, let's do a couple of trains for the fans, have some fun. The good old thing, you know, let's just go do one more. I was like, oh, I'll just do an active heel kicker flip. I'll do them all the time. Went into my trick. My foot slipped off the peg. The one foot that grounded me to the bike. And pretty much once that went, it was no leverage to get back on the bike. The bike basically upside down. And, you know, landed, you know, landed from basically probably 25 or 30 feet straight to the ground. He hit the ground really hard. You know, I mean, there's kinda no way around that. If you hit the ground the wrong way, you're gonna get messed up. Spectators say it was the worst crash they have ever witnessed in the sport. It was pandemonium. You know, he hit the ground. The medics are trying to take his helmet off. And, you know, first thing we're taught here is don't take somebody's helmet off. You know, it could be spinal injuries, who knows what. If you see in the footage that, you know, we've all seen from the event, you know, the second he hits the ground, you see the leg just snap in half. All hell broke loose. We're, you know, trying to be respectful to paramedics. We're stoked they're there, but there's a language barrier, all kinds of problems. And it was sad, man, to see your buddy in pain there. People not doing their job right. The paramedics wanting to fight other friends. I was throwing people off. People are trying to get us out of there because we're telling the paramedics kind of what to do. And it got ugly. And, you know, eventually they got Nate out of there and in an ambulance. Nate was rushed to a hospital. This was his fifth concussion of the year. So it took him hours just to regain consciousness. When he woke up in the hospital, he was confused, alone, and in intense pain. Still hazy from the concussion, trying his best to understand the doctors in a foreign language. Nate's family was desperate to be with him, but it would take days to get there. Definitely made it harder just being in another country. Can't understand, you know, what anyone's saying, you know, why they're working on you. It's like a panic. And I was just coming out of being unconscious. And, you know, they're just loud. I can't understand one person. I can't tell them, you know, what hurts, you know, stop doing that. You know, you can't do anything. And you just basically have no control over the situation. The damage was assessed. Nate had a broken femur, a torn knee, and a damaged shoulder. The Italian doctors also worried about the injury to Nate's head and kept them under observation as they contemplated surgery. They wouldn't set his leg. They hadn't determined who was going to, if they were going to have surgery there, if they were going to transport him. There was just a lot of different things that came into play. He was in a bad situation. You know, no one really knew what to do, how to do it. Nate's top priority was getting back into an American hospital. But in his condition, it was obviously not going to be straightforward. He checked in with his doctor at home. Nate and his manager called from Italy saying, can we come home? And I did not recommend flying home with a fractured femur, the upper thigh bone. And so he had that stabilized there at the University of Genoa with what's known as an intermediary rod of the femur, putting a rod down the center of the femur as a load sharing device, fixating on each end with screws, which allows the hip to keep moving, the knee to keep moving, and actually allow the patient to bear weight on it earlier than it would otherwise. The surgery was completed four days after the accident. When Nate woke up, reinforcements from home had finally arrived. And when we came over there, he still had the tractor that was all still on him while he was laying in the bed there. And he just really needed an intercessor to be able to talk and speak for him because he was just physically and emotionally drained. I had my surgery, and I was doing fine after the surgery, no infection and all that. And they wanted to keep me. And my mom pretty much just put her foot down and said, we're leaving. I got plane tickets. We're leaving. Nate and his mom eventually got on a commercial flight home. It was an excruciating trip in his state, but Nate was still relieved to be back in familiar care. His doctor mapped out a heavy regimen of physical therapy, and Nate presumed that with some hard work, the worst was over. He couldn't have been more wrong. The best year of Nate Adams' career had just turned into the worst year of his life. After winning X Games gold in 2004, he was invited to do some tricks at a halftime show at a Supercross event in Genoa, Italy. He had been paid a small fortune to demonstrate the very difficult 360 flat spin and had landed it without a problem. But the crowd was eager for more, and Nate and the other freestylers were happy to accommodate. They planned to jump one more trick, and Nate chose one that he could land in his sleep. Unfortunately, this time, it turned into a nightmare. Most of the time when people get hurt, it's not because they're out doing their hardest tricks. Because that's when you're the most focused and you're the most dialed in. It's when you're out doing one of the tricks that you've done a million times before. You're not quite concentrated as much, and sometimes it just goes wrong. It's a trick, you know, to date that's probably taken out more guys. It's real easy for your foot to slip off the pegs. And that happened to Nate. Nate crashed from an incredible height in the middle of the jump. He broke his leg, tore his knee, separated his shoulder, and suffered his fifth concussion of the season. After a rod was installed in his femur to stabilize his broken leg in Italy, he was able to fly back to the US. Nate's doctor placed him in a rigorous rehabilitation program. But despite Nate's hard work, the recovery was not going well. The recovery for him, you know, from what I saw in my perspective of it, was tough. He was immobilized for a period of time, then put into rehab. Fairly what we, in medicine, we call a stormy rehab. He continued to have pain in his leg. I was doing physical therapy every day. I'd just go, like, walk in pools. And pretty much worked on my flexibility in my knee. We did some external things for it, such as electrical stimulation, looked at his nutrition. It took, like, three months for my heel to be able to touch my butt. That's how, like, locked up my knee was. Looked at the exercise program he was doing to try to get it to heal better. We were unsuccessful in doing that. It was lined up well. His bone was just not healing. If you break a leg, and you start healing, and you come back at a normal pace, it's not that bad. But when you go, you know, months, two or three months, and nothing's happening, what are you supposed to think? Nate had a lot of ups and downs. Because Nate, like many athletes, both in his field and at his level, was very motivated to get back. He worked extremely hard with rehabilitation. His leg was, it looked like it was healing. Everything looked like it was going right. But he was still in pain. He still couldn't ride. Though he was not feeling any better, Nate felt he should try to ride four months after the accident. It was a disaster. I mean, I had to. I had to try, because it had been like four or five months. And I got on a bike, and I couldn't even stand up on the pegs. Like, I couldn't. I didn't even have, like, the strength for, like, left-hand corners to, like, hold my leg out straight. I couldn't even, like, hold it out. And that was very frustrating for him. And as it would with any of us, would get us angry, would get us somewhat depressed, and going back and forth and saying, I've got to do something, and not knowing what to do to try to get it better. When you're on the couch, and, you know, a doctor can't tell you why your leg's not healing, you know, and can't tell me why, you know, after three months, I should be riding, but I can barely walk. I start to think about things and just wonder, like, am I going to ever be able to ride again or compete? Nate and his doctor continued to experiment with ways to promote healing in his leg. Five months after the accident, they removed the screws in his knee, hoping that his bones would begin to fuse together. When there was still no healing six weeks after that surgery, Nate was getting desperate. But as depressed as he was, he chose to remain at his home in California, away from his family in Arizona. His parents supported him as best as they could from a distance, but both family and friends could see the effect that the ordeal was having on Nate. I just remember him and seeing a different Nate, you know, not joking around, not happy. You know, just kind of bummed and distraught, really almost depressed, you know? As it progressed, you know, we get to, like, the three, four, five, and six month mark, you know? And I'm calling a couple times a week, hey, how's your leg doing? You know, you working out? You riding? You cycling? And he's kind of like, no, it's killing me at the beginning. And then towards the end of that, it's kind of like, I can tell he doesn't want to talk about it. And me just asking him irritates him. Femur is supposed to be, like, three to four months max. And it was eight and a half. And it was, like, this constant throbbing in my knee that that rod was causing. And don't ask me how the rod in your leg makes your knee throb, but it does. Nate's frustration with his injuries continued to build as his spirits declined. His faith was being tested to the limit. And yet, he believed that everything that was happening to him was all part of God's plan. Despite those difficult times, Nate held true to his beliefs, no matter how challenging his circumstances had become. The times when you're the weakest is when you're forced to have faith. You're forced to, you know, you don't really have a choice, but to just be patient and have faith and see what happens. When he was going through that situation, he knew that God had a plan for him and that that was part of it, you know? I'd had, like, five concussions that year, like, three in one week. And for probably a solid month after I'd broken my leg, I would get dizzy spells. I'd just sit there, be standing there, and just get dizzy, just have to lean up against the wall. Like, my head wasn't right. So, you know, I don't know anything about concussions other than they suck, but I know that they can affect your brain and there's second impact syndrome and all that stuff. It was one of the most horrific experiences he hopes to ever encounter, because he just had a great deal of fear about just everything in general. This fear stemmed from the fact that his injury was not healing as it should. Nate's doctor was telling him that things would improve with time. But at this point, seven months after the accident, Nate could tell something was still seriously wrong. He pled his case to his doctor. My knee's still killing me. My femur still hurts. I can't walk. And then I pretty much just went to him and said, we need to do something else. Like, there's something wrong. I just know that there's something wrong. So it was taking multiple x-rays. We did request another opinion from another surgeon to get another set of eyes looking at it as well. We got a CAT scan on my leg, and the rod was two millimeters too skinny. So back in for surgery again. The CAT scan showed that parts of the break that appeared to be healing had, in fact, not even started to bond. Dr. Ryman decided that installing a larger rod in the femur, along with strategically placed bone chips, would help promote the growth necessary for Nate's recovery. In May 2005, Nate prepared for his fourth major surgery of the year. Took him back to the operating room, took out the rod that was put in in Italy, and put a rod that was much larger. The rod that was put in in Italy was 10 and 1 half millimeters in diameter, and we put a 15 millimeter rod in. I just know that that's part of the game. It's nothing you can do. It just happens. Motocrossers make mistakes. We crash. Doctors make mistakes. Put the wrong size rod in your leg, so it happens. The rod replacement was a success. Nate felt a remarkable difference almost immediately. I woke up from surgery in less pain than I had been in for months. Every day, it was like a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. So it's like, when you're healing like that, and you can see that things are going the directions you want them to go, and you can see, like, if I'm healing this fast, oh, in like four weeks, I'll be riding. It's not that bad. You have a goal, and you can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Nate set a goal to compete again at the Red Bull X-Fighters in Madrid, Spain on July 21, 2005. His doctor couldn't make any guarantees. I knew he had the goal of the Red Bull competition in Madrid, and I really gave him a very guarded prognosis that he was going to make that or not. Nate tried to ride just weeks after the rod replacement surgery. He was still in a lot of pain, and his friends worried that it was too soon. Physically, as well as mentally. I remember I actually rode the first day with Nate, and, you know, usually he barely warms his bike up and hits all the jumps like that, you know, like, super quick. Coming back, I was cautious, because I couldn't really mistime anything. I had to be, like, spot on. Like, if I came up short on a jump and took a bounce, or went long, or, like, pretty much took my time, through any left-hand corners, I just didn't want to fall over. So, yeah, I was timid for a while, for sure. He had serious reservations or doubts about, you know, like, his ability to perform again, or, like, you know, could he be healthy again? I kind of wondered in the back of my head, I'm like, I wonder if Nate will ever 360 again, or backflip C-grab again, or, you know, learn these tricks as fast as he used to. I had the worst injury in my career doing a trick that I do every day. It put me on the couch for eight months, and once you go through that, and, you know, you go through, like, eight months on the couch, and five surgeries, and all this crap, and you get back the next time you get on your bike, and you're kind of thinking of something, and you're like, you know what? It's not worth eight months out of my life, and all this money, and medical bills, and, you know, just all the stuff that you go through when you're hurt. It was with great fear and trepidation that Nate began hitting jumps again on his dirt bike. But he had set a goal for himself, and with the X-Fighters contest less than three months away, Nate knew that a successful comeback depended on his ability to overcome his fears and move forward. Even though he had been sidelined for almost nine months, Nate was quickly back to where he was at the time of his devastating crash. Within, you know, a few minutes, he was doing all of his tricks minus the backflip, and then the next day, he started doing the backflip, and the next day, he started doing the 360. There's only a few guys in the world that do 360s, and that was the first week back on his bike after eight months of unpaid vacation. He's out doing 360s, backflips. And literally within a week, he was back to where he was when he had been hurt like eight or nine months ago, and it was just, it blew me away. Didn't even look like he'd ever been hurt until he got off his bike and started to walk, but it was amazing to see. I was dumbfounded. By the end of the summer of 2005, almost nine months after he broke his femur, Nate and Jimmy Button boarded a plane to the Red Bull X-Fighters contest in Spain. Nate kept his expectations in check. Even though he had been the top freestyler in the world before his accident in Italy, he felt lucky just to be able to ride again. And it was his first contest back. He had only been back on a bike a couple of weeks. I think Nate went there with the expectations of just riding, you know, and having fun. I just kind of went there and through practice, I was kind of getting some tricks back still that I hadn't done since my injury. The day just kind of went really well, and I just kind of took it like little by little, hour by hour almost. Nate's hope was that the X-Fighters would get him back into the competition group, but this contest went greater than anyone could have imagined. Nate won it all. And by the end of the night, I had won. Just one of those things that just worked out. It was crazy. Even more when he beat Travis for the first time at X Games. The greatest highlight would be at the Red Bull X-Fighters in Spain when he came back after his broken femur and just blew doors on everyone. It was incredible. It was kind of a reassuring thing for him that, you know, yes, I can do this. I am supposed to be here. I can bounce back from injury. In writing again, he practiced, and you get through the first round, I think he realized, hey, I can still do this. You know, in fact, not only can I do this, I'm still good at this. Give it up for Nate, the Destroyer, Adam! In the years following his comeback win in Spain, Nate has consistently placed top three in all major FMX events. I think he's going to be remembered as Babe Ruth or the Hank Aaron or the Joe Montanas of the world. And I like these people that are big, significant figures in other sports. And he's gonna be one of those guys. I think Nate's legacy in freestyle motocross is bringing a professionalism that a lot of guys didn't have. His success and clean image helped him to score sponsorships with Target, Thor, DC Shoes, Ogeo, and Monster. To be the best is what gets him out of bed every single morning and makes him work as hard as he does. Today, Nate Adams is among the most recognizable riders in freestyle motocross. After surviving one of the most dramatic crashes in history, he has gone on to become an FMX legend. I mean, my hat's off to him. He's the man. He really is. I'd describe Nate as just a really nice, humble guy that is incredible on a dirt bike. Look back as to how I was when I was little. Like, it's all I ever wanted. Like, this is, I had the life that I wanted. And when I look back, it's crazy that it worked out like this, but I couldn't see it happening any other way.