By Mitch Stacy
Evel Knievel, the red-white-and-blue-spangled motorcycle daredevil whose jumps over crazy obstacles including Greyhound buses, live sharks and Idaho’s Snake River Canyon made him an international icon in the 1970s, died Friday. He was 69.
Knievel’s death was confirmed by his granddaughter, Krysten Knievel. He had been in failing health for years, suffering from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable condition that scarred his lungs.
Knievel had undergone a liver transplant in 1999 after nearly dying of hepatitis C, likely contracted through a blood transfusion after one of his bone-shattering spills.
Longtime friend and promoter Billy Rundel said Knievel had trouble breathing at his Clearwater condominium and died before an ambulance could get him to a hospital.
“It’s been coming for years, but you just don’t expect it. Superman just doesn’t die, right?” Rundel said.
Immortalized in the Washington’s Smithsonian Institution as “America’s Legendary Daredevil,” Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980.
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THE DUMONT SMITH STORY
By Rick Anges
“Money has ruined racing, Richard Childress is a cousin of mine”, said Dumont Smith, the 1967 winner of Governors Cup when asked recently about the cost of racing, “It costs him more to win a championship then he makes in NASCAR.”
Dumont Smith is a quiet man with along history of racing in Florida. From New Smyrna to Miami he competed with the best of the best. Dumont is credited with building some of the first houses in his still hometown of Satellite Beach. He has a problem with his voice these days because of owning his own construction business and having inhaled the mold left in house he repaired from the storms in south Florida. But he still has plenty to say.
He ran the circuit most of the year but it was the end of the year championship races at each track he made sure to be at. “Those were the ones that paid the most money”, he said. The building contractor from Satellite Beach Fl. always looked at it as a hobby not a living although at times he sometimes wished he had.
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And even though it was a hobby he still took it quite serious, out there to win each time he rolled out onto whichever speedway he had picked that night. When asked why he thought he would win the 67 race he said, “I’m out there to win, I’m hungrier than them.” And you could tell he meant every word.
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