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Backflip Over 72ft Canyon

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One backflip over a 72-foot canyon turned a mountain biker into an internet legend before most people even knew his name.

At the 2013 Red Bull Rampage finals near Virgin, Utah, New Zealand freerider Kelly McGarry dropped into a steep, exposed sandstone ridgeline, picked his way through a series of sharp cliff drops, and launched upside down over a canyon gap measured at 72 feet. He landed clean. The entire run was filmed from a helmet-mounted GoPro HD HERO3+, and the point-of-view footage of that single backflip would go on to rack up tens of millions of views worldwide.

• McGarry’s backflip cleared a 72-foot canyon gap during the Red Bull Rampage finals in October 2013 near Virgin, Utah, filmed entirely on a helmet-mounted GoPro HD HERO3+.
• The run earned him second place at Rampage, plus the event’s Best Trick and People’s Choice awards.
• The GoPro POV clip became one of the most-watched action sports videos ever posted online, cementing McGarry’s reputation as a freeride mountain biking legend before his death from cardiac arrest while riding in Queenstown, New Zealand, on February 1, 2016.

The Line Nobody Else Was Riding

Rampage courses aren’t built, they’re negotiated with the mountain — riders and diggers carve lines into natural desert terrain rather than manufactured dirt jumps. McGarry’s line took him across exposed ridge sections with sheer drops on either side before feeding into the canyon gap itself, a void wide enough that a mistimed takeoff meant no second chance. Backflipping a bike over flat ground is one thing; backflipping it over a 72-foot hole in the earth, blind to the landing until you’re already upside down, is the kind of move that separates a Rampage highlight reel from every other freeride video on the internet.

The stunt sits in the same lineage of extreme-sport disasters-avoided that fans still trade clips of — the kind of near-miss athleticism covered in pieces like CLIMBING GONE WRONG fails, where the margin between a legendary clip and a catastrophic one comes down to a single fraction of a second.

Second Place, Two Trophies

McGarry didn’t win Rampage 2013 outright — he finished second — but the canyon backflip was decisive enough on its own to sweep both the Best Trick award and the People’s Choice award, the fan-voted prize that measures which run actually stopped people in their tracks. Judges score Rampage runs on line choice, style, and amplitude across the whole descent, but a move like this one tends to overshadow everything else that happened that day regardless of where it lands on the final scorecard.

72 feet of canyon, one backflip, and a landing stuck clean — the kind of trick that wins the crowd even when it doesn’t win the event.

The GoPro Footage That Redefined Viral

What turned this into a global phenomenon wasn’t just the trick — it was the camera. Shot entirely in first-person from McGarry’s helmet-mounted GoPro HD HERO3+, the footage put viewers directly in his position at the exact moment he went upside down over open air, with nothing but sandstone and empty space below the frame. That raw, unedited POV angle is a big part of why the clip spread the way it did, the same reason helmet-cam footage from action sports keeps dominating shares and views the way similar first-person stunts do in clips like Laird Hamilton’s Revolutionary Pool Workout.

A Legend Cemented

The backflip made McGarry a household name in freeride circles well beyond New Zealand, and the GoPro clip kept circulating for years after the 2013 event, introducing new audiences to Rampage long after that particular course had been dismantled. McGarry died of cardiac arrest while mountain biking in Queenstown on February 1, 2016, and the canyon backflip remains the single piece of footage most people associate with his name.