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would look impressive and persuade people to take him more seriously.

      The president was named as H. Carl Forbes, the vice president was Mike Rosenstein and the secretary and treasurer listed as Carl Goldberg. Knievel himself did a very fine, if stereotyped, Jewish/ American accent and claimed he often called people up, on his own behalf, in this accent pretending to be any one of the three fictitious businessmen. With Sarno at least now aware of who Evel Knievel was, it was time for the killer punch and this time Knievel called impersonating Rosenstein:

      Knievel: Hello, this is Rosenstein.

      Sarno: Who?

      Knievel: Rosenstein.

      Sarno: Who the hell do you represent?

      Knievel: Evel Knievel. He’s going to be in your office this afternoon about two o’clock to see you about this big jump. He’s gonna make you famous. Nobody ever heard of this Caesar’s Palace.

      With the meeting set up, Knievel finished the story. ‘So I go to this Sarno, knock on his door, the secretary lets me into these big executive offices; she ran to the back [office] door and says, “It’s him, it’s him.” He comes running out of his office and says, “Kid, where you been? I been looking all over for you!”’

      It’s an unlikely scenario and would depend on an extremely switched-on businessman like Sarno being fooled no less than four times, but it is indicative of the way Knievel worked, which was very much along the same lines as ex-carnival huckster Colonel Tom Parker who became a multi-millionaire representing Elvis Presley by promoting him in a similarly unorthodox but effective fashion. Knievel never took the obvious approach when it came to promoting himself, and in an era before PR executives and massive marketing agencies became all too commonplace his imagination and flair for self-promotion served him well.

      However, Knievel actually gained permission to jump the fountains at Caesar’s, and he bartered a deal with Sarno which would see him performing three leaps there: on New Year’s Eve 1967 and on 3 and 6 January 1968. Promotional posters were placed all over Las Vegas inviting the public to see Knievel, who was already billing himself as ‘The King of Stuntmen’. By leaping over what the promotional posters billed as the ‘highest fountains in the world’, Knievel was claiming a world-record attempt and the posters even boasted that ‘a two-hundred-yard elevated takeoff runway ramp’ was ‘now under construction’.

      The pre-jump publicity campaign was enough to rouse interest among Vegas regulars who would never dream of showing up at a small-time county fair, and crowd estimates on the evening of 31 December reached 25,000 – a figure which would later prompt Evel to boast that ‘Frank Sinatra couldn’t draw that crowd if he jumped naked off the hotel roof.’

      With the ramp in place, the rear suspension on his Triumph Bonneville stiffened and special cams, pistons and valve springs fitted to give faster acceleration and a higher top speed, Knievel readied himself for his 2 p.m. matinée performance with what had, by now, become his standard preparatory routine: a few shots of Wild Turkey bourbon and a quick prayer. He was confident to the point that even a bad omen en route to his waiting motorcycle didn’t dampen his spirits. ‘The one thing I remember was coming downstairs [from his hotel room] for the jump. I’d had my good-luck shot of Wild Turkey, like always, and was walking past the tables and stopped at the roulette and bet $100 on red. It was black. I thought nothing of it, just put my helmet under my arm and kept walking.’

      As he appeared outside the entrance to the hotel to the cheers of the crowd, Knievel waved and soaked up the applause before donning his helmet and mounting his motorcycle. Under normal circumstances, Evel would perform a few practice runs by heading straight for the take-off ramp before veering off left or right at the last second. At Caesar’s, however, there simply wasn’t the space to allow for such a luxury and Knievel would effectively be flying blind. All he could do was dump the clutch on the Triumph, hope his rear wheel would hook up and grip the wooden runway, then kick his way up through the gears to gain whatever speed he felt he needed. If he dropped the clutch too harshly when setting off his back wheel could easily lose traction and spin up, and if he fluffed just one gear change he could easily fail to gain the required momentum. There could be no stopping at speed halfway up a ramp to have another run. Apart from possible rider error, there was also the danger of component failure – and that risk was much more pronounced in Knievel’s era than it is now. British bikes in particular, like Knievel’s Triumph, were renowned for spouting oil leaks back in the 1960s, and that was only one potentially lethal hazard. Another very real danger was the possibility of a chain snapping under the strain of the launch, leaving Evel with no drive and the threat of the chain becoming entangled in his rear wheel, which would almost inevitably cause a crash. Or the engine could develop a misfire for any number of reasons, again leaving Knievel down on power and unable to clear the distance. His throttle could stick open as he sped down the runway, meaning he would be travelling way too fast and would overshoot his landing ramp, again putting him in great personal danger. And those were just the problems he faced on the take-off. Other problems, like a rear wheel collapsing on landing (which would actually happen during a 1970 jump in Seattle), or the rear suspension bottoming out and spitting him off (which happened many times), or even brake failure, were all to be considered. Motorcycle jumping, especially in Knievel’s pioneering days, was extremely dangerous.

      But it was danger which had drawn 25,000 people out onto the streets of Las Vegas and Knievel wasn’t about to have any second thoughts and disappoint the biggest audience he had ever attracted. It was make-or-break time and Evel knew it. His reputation and career would stand or fall on this one jump alone. There could be no backing out, even if his nerves were screaming, his palms sweating and his heart racing.

      With Knievel and his mechanics satisfied that the bike was set up as well as it could be and sounding as it should as he revved it in neutral, Knievel finally decided the crowd had waited long enough and kicked the Triumph into gear. He gunned the bike down the runway, revving it out to maximum revs in each gear until he reached 90mph. It was the highest speed he could achieve in the distance he had to work with but he still had no more idea than anyone watching if it would be enough to carry him to safety. Still, Evel’s run was looking good. He seemed to have the speed and his launch looked perfect; he even had the measure of the bike in mid-air, purposefully dropping its tail in search of a smooth rear-wheel landing. He sailed through the spray of the ornate fountains, travelling what seemed an impossible distance for anything without wings, and the Las Vegas revellers gawped in disbelief at what they were seeing. He had done it. This crazy kid had actually gone through with what he’d promised, and hell, did it look impressive. As man and machine descended back down towards the landing ramp things still looked good; it still looked like Knievel was going to pull off the apparently impossible. Then his worst nightmare happened.

      Just one foot further and Evel may well have got away with it. He’d travelled a distance of 141 feet – way further than he’d ever managed before – but he landed just inches short and his rear wheel smashed into the safety deck which guarded the lethal edge of his landing ramp to prevent him from being decapitated in the event of him falling short.

      The term ‘rag doll’ is over-used when describing a rider being thrown from a motorcycle either in racing or stunt riding, but there is no other way to describe how Knievel’s body was slammed and battered down the Tarmac when the impact of the landing threw him off the bike, tearing its handlebars from his grasp. He was thrown over the front of the motorcycle and landed first on his back before tumbling at great speed end over end, limbs flailing helplessly as his head took an equally brutal battering from the Las Vegas asphalt. The crowd, who split seconds earlier were expecting victory, looked on in horror.

      Some reports said that Evel actually slid further than he had jumped, and the only thing which eventually stopped him from tumbling even further was a decorative brick wall which he slammed into while still carrying speed. What happened next was nothing short of chaos. The crowd went hysterical, screaming and wailing, convinced they had just witnessed a man killing himself right in front of their eyes. Smoke poured from the twisted metal of the once-immaculate Triumph as medical crews, hangers-on and rubberneckers surged round Knievel’s battered and apparently lifeless body. General panic reigned

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