nothin Extreme Sports Come To College Street | New Haven Independent

Extreme Sports Come To College Street

Rob Jarman pushed his mountain bike to the top of a rock-strewn hill in Yorkshire, England. After spending weeks in the hospital recovering from a near-fatal brain injury, itself exacerbated by head trauma from years of stupid, exciting, and jaw-dropping bike stunts, Jarman was looking to return to his vocation — and bolster his shaken confidence — by attempting to set the British record for downhill speed on a mountain bike.

I woke up and asked myself, am I going to die today?” Jarman’s voice sounded confident and condemned as he looked down the steep, jagged, pathless descent. Somehow, I don’t think so.” He leaned into his bike, barreled over stones and roots and other natural debris, all the while staying upright and emphatically alive. At the bottom of the hill, he hollered with joy and relief. He had done it, setting the downhill record at 96kps, proving to himself that he still could, and had to, perform outrageous stunts on his beloved bike.

This sense of fatalism, adventure, and physical triumph defined the short films screened last week during the New Haven stop of the Radical Reels Tour, an annual showcase of the best high-adrenaline, outdoor sports films submitted to the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. All My Own Stunts, which told the story of Jarman’s painful and exhilarating return to professional mountain biking, was one of eight films that played to a sizeable, transfixed audience at College Street Music Hall.

Each year, 350 to 400 films about sports and the outdoors are submitted to the Banff film festival, which takes place in Alberta, Canada and celebrates its 40th anniversary this November. Sixty of these films play at the festival itself. A jury of filmmakers and athletes hands out prizes. Then eight films are chosen to travel around the U.S. and Canada on the Radical Reels Tour.

In addition to the extreme mountain biking featured in All My Own Stunts, this year’s Radical Reels Tour included films that showcased ice-climbing in the Zion desert (Desert Ice), high-altitude skiing combined with paragliding (The Unrideables), and a brief history of a countercultural revolution in rock climbing that took place in Yellowstone in the 1970s (Valley Uprising: Stone Masters). While the films themselves ranged from hasty actualities to character portraits to fully developed narratives, each movie sought to capture in some way the surprise, fear, and thrill of extreme outdoor sports as performed by people too talented and headstrong to want to do anything else.

Photo by Thomas Breen.

Debra Hornsby, “Road Warrior” for Radical Reels Tour.

As the night progressed, the audience gasped, laughed, and cheered as the athletes on screen stretched to achieve near-impossible feats of physical prowess.

Our audiences share a common passion for the outdoors,” said Debra Hornsby, the Road Warrior” and Banff media liaison who emceed last week’s screenings. Most of our audience members don’t climb extreme routes. They don’t bike extreme routes. They don’t go to Alaska and ski. But they do have their own personal outdoor goals. Watching these films, where these athletes achieve other goals, beyond their limits, is inspirational in a way. That’s what unites audiences around these films: a passion for the outdoors and some sense of personal adventure.”

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