Evel Genius

My cousins were the cool kids. It was the seventies. They had skateboards and Raleigh Choppers. They had leather sofas and crazy paving and their dad drove a Jensen Interceptor.

But it wasn’t these totems of seventies aspiration that made me want to be like them. It was their Evel Knievel toys. They had the whole set – the standard hand-wound launcher with which they would fire the Evel up makeshift ramps in the cul de sac – through to the dragster and the insane rocket bike thing in which the real-life dipsomaniac stunt rider would attempt to cross the Grand Canyon.

I remember the heartbreak when my cousin’s dad took him to Wembley to see the man perform. There was no ticket for me.

From the perspective of the post-ironic 21st century, Knievel looks like a weirdo. He gathered the dreams of a legion of teenage kids and traded and sold them back and forth in plastic leather and rhinestone.

And he probably created more petrolheads than the bones he broke by a factor of ten.