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Kagy, Bestwick come through on rough night

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Times Staff Writer

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Chad Kagy won the battle and Jamie Bestwick the war -- and while this may sound like a cliche, perhaps it most aptly describes what happened Friday night.

The scene: PlayStation Pro’s BMX Vert final on the U-shaped ramp inside Amway Arena. It’s the AST Dew Tour finale and first event final.

Setting the stage for what became a violent competition was Dennis McCoy, 40, who fell near the end of his first run, slamming his head and lying unconscious for several minutes, while medical personnel frantically work to revive him.

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Up next was Kagy, whose concentration went awry while watching the frightening scene below.

“It’s horrible when they hit their head and don’t get up and walk away,” he’ll later say, holding the winner’s trophy. “You end up waiting five or 10 minutes and it feels like an eternity hoping that your friend wakes up knowing what’s going on.”

(McCoy was taken to Orlando Regional Medical Center, but later released.)

Kagy’s first run also went awry. He slammed his head and walked away with a low score. And one by one the other riders take to the ramp, some falling but others spinning and flipping their way to the top of the leaderboard.

Bestwick, who qualified first, was the last rider of the first round. His pedal broke as he ascended the opposite wall and he was tossed high over the coping and slammed savagely onto it, sliding downward in a heap.

“When you’re going that fast and a bike part breaks off, it hurts,” he’ll later say, holding the second-place trophy, but ensured the Dew Cup championship as the overall points leader.

“I came down on my neck and landed on my arm and now my arm’s really going to hurt in the morning, and my ribs are thrashing right now.”

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In the second and final round, the riders pushed their limits with more slams, and Steven McCain and Simon Tabron moved to the top.

But Kagy passed them with a graceful series of flairs and bar spins that earned him a 92.67.

Soon afterward Bestwick embarked on a high-flying sojourn that earned him the same score, but he settled for second based on a lower first-run score.

“There were a couple of times where I was up there on my bike saying, ‘Don’t go down. Do not crash,’ ” Bestwick said. “There was too much at stake.”

Bestwick, 36, a four-time X Games gold medalist, became the second athlete to win Dew Cups -- worth $75,000 -- in each of the tour’s three seasons.

“We spend all season riding with these guys and it’s never nice seeing them in pain,” he said. “But on the other hand it was a good one because Chad Kagy came through. I came through. We both had disastrous first runs and we stepped it up and got it done.”

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Another tough break

BMX rider T.J. Lavin suffered a compound fracture of two bones -- the tibia and fibula -- in his left leg after a wipeout during the first run of BMX Dirt prelims.

B.J. Carretta, a spokesman for the Dew Tour, said the athlete, who also is host of the MTV program “The Real World/Road Rules Challenge,” was also being treated at the downtown Orlando hospital.

As their worlds turn

So Ryan Sheckler has become a teen heartthrob, idolized by teenage girls around the country, thanks to the “Life of Ryan” reality show on MTV.

What do other skateboarders think about this? Notably, action sports superstar Shaun White?

“I’m not the hugest fan. Well, I’m a closet fan,” he confessed, jokingly, as he began to work the media room, as has become his trademark.

“Is he going to break up with her? I don’t know,” White asked, rhetorically, in reference to the show’s more melodramatic moments.

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“He cries a lot in it. Is it bad for me to say that?

“I mean, I know him and think he’s a cool guy, but you see him and what do you say? ‘How’s the love life?’ ”

White finally concluded: “To each his own. I’m not, like, for or against it. Each person takes their own route.

“They came to me too and my family is fit for straitjackets and it’d be an insane show, but I just think that my personal life is my personal life.”

What they can do

Australia’s Cameron White, in second place heading into today’s BMX Dirt final, invented what may be the most difficult trick among BMXers: barspin-backflip-tailwhip.

As ridiculous as this may seem, while coming off a jump, he begins the back flip, and while upside down he spins the handlebars, grabs them and applies the breaks, then whips the bike in a 360 -- all before becoming upright moments before landing.

He has not named the trick, saying it’d only confuse people. “I guess you can call it the Cam-White Signature trick,” he added, “because I’m the only one in the world doing it.”

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pete.thomas@latimes.com

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