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Practising ahead of Saturday night’s Acer Arena show in Sydney, the daredevil rider admitted he had not done his homework on the physics of the drop-in jump, which involves riding off an elevated platform and landing on a ramp.
The ramp was not positioned correctly for the stunt and he nearly missed the crucial tilted section entirely before landing heavily on a flatter part further down.
“I was like ‘this is going to hurt’," Maddison, 29, said. "I saw the end of the ramp, I could see I was going too fast so I leant right back to brace for it... I thought ‘this is going to smash me’, but I rode out of it, so I got lucky.
“It was a pretty brutal impact.” The rider was checked by a paramedic after the jump, but was cleared OK.
“It’s tough to ride off the edge and make the bike go into a front dive," he said. "You want to keep the wheels under you, and not go face-forwards, but if you land in the right spot, the best technique is to be pointing towards the ground and it’s smoother. But your gut instinct takes you off and you’re trying to lift the wheels up and that’s what I did on the first jump and it was really dangerous.
“It’s a tough jump, getting the angles right is the key and once I get them right I just need to ride off the edge really slowly...
“There (are) calculations to work this out but I haven’t been bothered to figure it out, I just kind of roll the dice and go with it. I’m just a dare devil.
“...now I sit down and think about it, it’s something I should have been doing leading into this.”
Maddison is no stranger to injury – he has broken about 30 bones, ruptured his scrotum, broken his neck and almost died from viral meningitis and encephalitis when he was young.
“I’m a product of western medicine, that’s the only reason why I’m here,” he said.
Maddison, who stunned crowds when he jumped almost 30m onto the Arc De Triomphe in Las Vegas in 2009 and then jumped off it, admitted to still getting nervous before his stunts.
“It’s what I do, I live on the edge, and it’s scary out here, it’s just what I deal with,” he said. “It is what it is, I’m just happy to step up to the plate and take it on and whatever the consequences are, I’m happy with them. “I try not to think about what could go wrong.”
Maddison’s first child Kruz was born in the US last month and he has only spent seven days with his son because of the Demons tour. Kruz has encountered some health problems, which has made the separation even more difficult to cope with.
“It’s been hard for me to stay focused and grounded,” he said. “It’s killing me.”
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