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Multiple Views Add Perspective To Colten Moore's Extreme Crash At X Games

The cable news networks have been replaying a pretty spectacular crash from Thursday's snowmobile freestyle event at the X Games in Aspen, Colo.

Coming so soon after the death of freestyle skier Sarah Burke following a training accident, 22-year-old snowmobile freestyler Colten Moore's crash may make you shudder for a moment.

But rest assured, he wasn't seriously injured and he went on to win the event.

And, thanks to the multiple camera angles in this video from ESPN, you can see that while Moore did take a hard fall and was going pretty fast when he hit the snow, several factors contributed to his walking away:

-- He's obviously an excellent athlete. How many of us could have controlled our bodies the way he did to land on our backs?

-- The downward slope of the ramp and his forward motion meant he slid rather than splatted (a crude word, but one that strikes us as appropriate).

-- The height of the ramp also helped because he didn't fall nearly as far as he would have if he'd been over flat ground.

Still, we do not recommend you try this at home.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.