Taking Flight at the Olympics

Olympic aerialists are known as a strange sort. These are the people, after all, who regularly catapult down a 72-degree steel ramp at 45 mph, soar several stories in the air while performing twists and turns and tucks and then, if they are lucky, land on their feet.

There are all kinds of stories about these people and what they will do for an adrenaline rush, like jumping over cars and such. And then there are the stories about Weird Eric.

“We’re all a little crazy, but I’m sorry, he’s weird with a capital W,” U.S. Olympic aerialist Tracy Evans says. “He’s W.E. Weird Eric.”

Eric Bergoust is the one who regularly jumped off his chimney as a child, the one who set up trampolines on bridges so he could freak out passing cars by leaping off as they drove by.

He has dyed his hair every color of the rainbow, shaved a zig-zag pattern into his chest hair. Yet the weirdest thing of all about Bergoust might be the way he trains--methodically, obsessively. In a sporting culture where the prevailing attitude is “rip and roll,” the man with the best chance to win Olympic gold is the science nerd, the one who meticulously examines everything from the position of his fingers to the degree he cocks his head. Weird.

“Every little technical aspect is crucial to him, everything,” says U.S. aerials Coach Matt Christensen. “As crazy as his reputation is, he’s the studious one. I can say that everything I know about the sport now is from watching him.”

This will be Bergoust’s third Olympics, and after a seventh-place finish in Lillihammer and a first-place finish in Nagano, he is by far the favorite to take home another gold. Last month, he won his second consecutive World Cup, and for this event, he is preparing a quad-twisting triple back flip that he has been working on for months.

He is known as a constant innovator, changing everything from the way aerialists rotate to the way they approach their jumps. Last summer, he invented a special kind of fiberglass ski in his garage in order to lessen the strain jumping puts on an athlete’s body. His greatest attribute, however, may simply be his work ethic.

“I thought when I was jumping, I was a tough competitor, but then I met Bergy,” Christensen says. “He just wants it.”

For Bergoust, work is just a natural part of growing up as one of six children on a ranch in rural Montana. With a disciplinarian of a father and acres of land to tend to, he learned quickly that excuses weren’t part of the bargain.

“If we ever complained,” he says, “‘my Dad would say, ‘If you live in the West, you have to be tough.’”

The expression “Be Tough” was even inscribed on the license plates of the family Suburban, and when Bergoust fell in love with aerials, it was made clear to him that if he was going to play, he should play to win.

By the time he was 18, he was sleeping in a field in Calgary to ensure a spot in the crowd when aerials debuted as an Olympic demonstration sport in 1988, and just a few months later, he was subsisting on powdered milk and peanut butter after driving cross-country in an attempt to make the U.S. team. He quickly impressed coaches with his combination of daring and attention to detail, and while he wasn’t in the running for a medal at the 1994 Olympics, it was already clear he was going to be a force in the sport.

Even injury has not slowed him. His two Olympic jumps in 1998 were taken within hours of a frightening practice crash that left him with severely bruised ribs, yet Bergoust still managed to grab the gold medal with the highest aerials score ever recorded.

And while he has since beat that number twice, he still is coming into this Olympics convinced he can do better.

“The Olympics is the biggest event of my life, easily, not just the biggest sporting event, the biggest event--it’s all I’ve thought about for the last two years,” he says. “I just want to go in there and keep improving, and I know if I do that, the winning will come.”

This is the secret, of course, even behind the crazy stuff that have earned him the reputation as Weird Eric. The jumping off the chimney onto mattresses, for example, started with a jump off the porch onto a mattress.

The jumping off a bridge--”well, there isn’t actually much that can go wrong with jumping off a 60-foot bridge,” he insists. “You just take a step and then fall 60 feet into the water.”

For years, Bergoust has been dreaming up the impossible, then breaking down every detail of the road he’ll need to take to get there.

“Eric just believes he can do these amazing things and then figures out ways to do it,”Christensen says. “And, man, they are amazing things.”