FLASHBACK FRIDAY: JODY’S BROKEN ARM & HOW HE LEARNED TO LOVE “ADAM 12”

Jody (lower center) takes a moment to contemplate how steep Mt. Saint Helen really is. His bike is hidden in the dust cloud at the top. It only fell a short distance, but Jody quadrupled its downhill tumble.

BY JODY WEISEL
Photos by Debbie Tamietti, Jon Ortner and Mark Chilson

Like most old motocross racers, my glory days have long since faded. I knew that I would never be on the cover of Cycle News again. I was content to race out my twilight years in the duffer class. So, you can imagine my surprise when my racing prowess made me into an Instagram, Facebook and chat-room sensation decades after any glory had been attached to my meager talent. What did I do to trend on Facebook and become a media darling and an instant overnight sensation? I crashed. No big deal. I’ve crashed many times before without the L.A. Times ever bothering to fact-check the incident. But, as with all news stories, the most important ones aren’t the events with the most social significance; they are the ones with the best photos. And my crash was photographed from every angle by Debbi Tamietti, Jon Ortner and Mark Chilson.

The long walk down the 22-story hill meant leaving his bike at the top. Jody knew his am was broken, but thought it was just a crack and would be better in two months. Boy, was he wrong.

Nothing I ever did on a motorcycle in the 1960s or 1970s had such impact, largely because there was no internet to turn a meaningless crash (except to those of us in it) in front of a small crowd into a big deal. My crash had some interesting features, but it was definitely not newsworthy. I fell at the top of Glen Helen’s Mt. Saint Helen because of the juxtaposition of the season, time of day, steepness of the hill, the positioning of the sun and bad decision making.

This photo from the other side of the crash shows the backlit sun and the riders spread out across the hill. The race was black flagged to keep more riders from driving into the pile. You gotta admired the guy in the middle of the crash waving the yellow flag.

It turns out that during certain months (October and November), at exactly 3:00 p.m., the sun shines directly into the eyes of any racers climbing Glen Helen’s ultra-steep 22-story hill. I ought to know that, because I designed the Glen Helen track. I couldn’t see where I was going, nor could the 15 guys chasing me up Mt. Saint Helen. Blinded, I swapped into unseen whoops at the top of the 220-foot mountain, did Cirque du Soleil backflips down the hill and in the process knocked down the 15 guys behind me. Well, in truth, I never touched a single one of them, but blinded by the sun, they didn’t know what was happening above them. As they raced past the waving yellow flags, which they also couldn’t see, the cameras clicked until there were 16 riders piled up on the hill.

Jody’s arm was so chewed up by the backflips, that he had to wait two weeks before the surgeon would agree to makes the cuts to install the titanium plate. Funny, but they don’t want to cut through cuts.

Luckily they didn’t use Torx.

None of the innocent were injured, but the guilty party—me—broke his left arm in two places. The break in the middle of the arm had to be plated, while the one by the wrist took forever to heal, Amazingly, it was the first bone I had ever broken racing a motorcycle over my 56-year racing career (although I had broken and dislocated the elbow on that arm while pole vaulting in high school. It had to be pinned back to together then also). As Andy Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Now, I’m more than ready to fade away again.

Every racer knows what it is like to go to the racetrack and not be able to ride.

I was out of action for seven months. I was bummed, but not about my broken arm, but that my string of 117 straight races without missing one was broken. I have since returned to racing, but can now claim to have seen every episode of “Adam 12” while sitting on the couch in a cast.