Within the sweltering warmth of downtown Pittsburgh, on the final Friday of June 2022, a 25-year-old from Tennessee named Dalton Smith stood in the course of a throng of about 100 individuals in Market Sq., clicked the strap of his helmet into place, and climbed atop his pogo stick. He tightly gripped two handlebars, his sneakers resting on two pegs affixed to the underside of the aluminum cylinder. Then he began bouncing. He took a number of small hops, then one huge leap, and his physique was airborne. It was at this second that Smith took his sneakers off the pegs and spun the stick clockwise in entrance of his face like an airplane propeller, whereas clearing a horizontal bar positioned 12 toes within the air.
When Smith landed efficiently on the opposite aspect, he had set the Guinness World Document for highest-ever soar on a pogo stick. And he did it on the Vurtego, maybe the best pogo stick the world has ever seen. “It’s the wand that makes the magic doable,” Smith, now 26, advised me this summer season.
The spring-loaded contraption that many people are aware of was launched in America shortly after World Conflict I. For nearly 100 years, that straightforward pogo stick didn’t change a lot. However when two high-school buddies who grew up on browsing, skateboarding, and snowboarding noticed a good friend messing together with his previous pogo stick at a celebration, they received to pondering: Is there any solution to reimagine a childhood toy for the extreme-sports world? That’s how Vurtego pogo sticks, named after the Mission Viejo, California, firm that has produced them since 2005, have been born.
Not like spring-loaded sticks, Vurtego’s gadgets are powered by air, with shafts that pump out and in of hole metallic tubes. The air strain inside a Vurtego stick is definitely double the PSI of a typical automobile tire—which implies a single bounce can launch a rider greater than eight toes into the air. This innovation gave rise to trick pogo, a distinct segment excessive sport centered on an annual competitors known as Pogopalooza. However it has additionally put Vurtego in a difficult place: It has to promote the factor to individuals who don’t wish to whip round at neck-breaking altitudes.
As a enterprise crucial, it’s a conundrum Vurtego has to resolve, and one it’ll strive doing when it begins promoting the Slingshot in September. The Slingshot is a shorter, lighter, easier-to-control pogo, but it surely’s nonetheless powered by air. If the Vurtego is a sports activities automobile, then the Slingshot is the sedan anybody can drive. Vurtego says the objective is to draw a wider viewers: the youngsters who need extra of a thrill than a spring-loaded stick can present, but in addition anybody prepared to strive one thing new. But the enterprise motive belies a extra elementary query: Why soar on a pogo stick in any respect?
For Smith, a pogo stick evokes a childhood innocence, a time when the one factor you needed to fear about was how excessive you would soar (and learn how to successfully bail out if the stick began going sideways). “Whenever you soar on a pogo stick, there’s simply no solution to not really feel like a child,” he advised me. “I really feel simply alive and younger and joyful. It will get your entire physique labored up into bodily pleasure.”
Outdated-school spring-loaded sticks normally bounce only a few toes into the air. The primary spring-loaded stick that the Vurtego co-founder Ian Britt was concerned in making despatched a rider as excessive as 5 toes. The inelegant design—two previous automobile shocks that he and a buddy welded collectively and caught inside a metallic tube—yielded a clunky, 60-pound contraption, but it surely nonetheless enabled a better bounce. Mutual associates related Britt with Vurtego’s different co-founder, Brian Spencer, whose uncle, a former aerospace engineer, made the important thing contribution: air as an alternative of springs. To make a spring stick attain world-record heights, you want metallic with a thicker gauge, which weighs it down. Compressed air is lighter and may be adjusted on the fly with a motorbike pump. That’s what permits for insane top: Extra air strain equals extra altitude.
The Vurtego stick utilized by a lot of the athletes at Pogopalooza is the V4, the most recent within the firm’s line of trick-pogo tools. Although the stunts guys like Smith bust out are breathtaking to behold—have you ever ever seen somebody do three backflips on a pogo stick?—the V4 itself is inaccessible to the plenty. The cylinder is aluminum, the shaft is heavy chrome steel, the pogo is greater than 4 toes tall from shaft to handlebars, and the value is $499.
By comparability, the Slingshot is $149 or $159, relying on the mannequin measurement: extra-small or small. Supplies that Vurtego was in a position to entry solely prior to now a number of years enabled the design. The cylinder on this stick consists of six layers of pressure-rolled aluminum. The shaft is aluminum. The pegs are a particular mix of thermoplastic and nylon, with glass-filled fibers inserted for extra energy. The pogo itself is shorter. And in contrast to the V4, which Smith describes as “tremendous punchy and poppy,” the bounce of the Slingshot, based on those that have tried it, is sluggish and cushioned.
“It’s so much much less intimidating to start out with one thing just like the Slingshot, the place it doesn’t appear like you’re routinely going to interrupt a bone,” says Will Weiner, the CEO and co-founder of Xpogo, the Pittsburgh-based governing physique of trick pogo that hosts the annual high-flying contest. “I actually suppose it’s sort of the lacking hyperlink we’ve been on the lookout for.”
Getting somebody to embrace pogo as a leisure exercise looks as if a protracted shot. If something, the Slingshot seems extra suited to the trick-stick wannabes, the youthful technology that isn’t prepared for the jolt of a bigger pogo stick.
And that is sensible. Why give a 10-year-old a pogo stick that’s one errant bounce from sending them face-first into pavement? Britt advised me that the Slingshot is simply the primary of two new pogo sticks that Vurtego plans to roll out. Subsequent spring, the corporate will launch the V5, its latest stick for the Pogopalooza set, which can incorporate the softer, trampolinelike bounce of the Slingshot. The truth is, an early take a look at mannequin of the V5 is what Smith used to hit his high-jump mark a 12 months in the past.
However what makes the Slingshot a presumably simpler pogo stick is similar factor that makes it greater than only a set of vertical coaching wheels for an aspiring back-flipper: Anybody can soar on it. That makes it a gateway into unstructured, nostalgic enjoyable, free from the contemplative pressures that crush a lot of each day life.
“Should you go snowboarding, most individuals are on the bunny slopes. There’s not many individuals which might be flying within the terrain park,” Britt mentioned. “Most individuals simply wish to go as much as the mountain, have a pair beers, and chill and have enjoyable. That is our model of that.”
The explanation a brand new pogo stick would possibly matter is due to how little it issues total: a bit buoyancy in a heavy world. Not lengthy earlier than I noticed the scene in Pittsburgh, I’d discovered I’ve a specific kind of muscular dystrophy, a degenerative illness that causes my physique to progressively break down. I’ll by no means bounce on a Vurtego or a Slingshot or any of the others, however I can admire what they symbolize. Witnessing pogo stunts in particular person gave me a newfound appreciation for frivolity.
Smith sees his time on a pogo stick as a bridge into the creativeness. He remembers when he first began watching YouTube movies of others doing tips on pogo sticks, after which attempting to emulate what he noticed. The act, he says, was like enjoying a personality. “It’s so absurd in a means, but it surely’s so playful,” he mentioned. “That’s on the root of nostalgia, and feeling younger and naive.”
This summer season, he spent a few months at Legoland in Florida performing in a scripted sports activities present. He was there together with his Vurtego, bouncing on stage as “Mike,” a jackhammer operator. The pogo stick, after all, was the jackhammer.
