What does the Vatican want with Michael Phelps when this Brazilian chick Maya is flirting with death and mastering the circadian rhythms of the universe and emerging from all of it looking like Gisele and sounding like someone whose sole life achievement was finding a steady Oxycontin hookup? Seriously, I don't know if "extreme sports" are any more popular in the ratings than they were when last I checked; they seem a little too individualistic for the present zeitgeist but that means nothing, the real truth is that no one watches them on TV because they make kids want to kill themselves trying stupid stunts and old folks want to kill themselves for wasting their lives, the end.

*Ha ha, "like Jason" is what I thought while writing that. I figure I should probably make any sports reference I can actually think of even if it is embarrassingly a seven-year-old Nelly song.

"I thought he was dead," recalled Pierre-Luc Gagnon, a competitor and Brown's close friend. "At first I thought he was going to have compound fractures of both legs. I thought he was going to be paralyzed.

"Then I rolled up to him and he wasn't breathing. He was completely out and I didn't know if he was still alive."

The Royal We's dumbfounded reaction to it last year was especially priceless: "We mean ... his shoes popped off. That happens during car wrecks."

Barring a similar incident during these X Games, this will probably be the last it's talked about on Deadspin, unfortunately.

Tonight: Find your own personal John Daly and revel in the Thirsty Thursday goodness.

Tomorrow:we'll wrap up this Manny trade lunacy, run ESPN's "official" statement about the Erin Andrews story, and speak to the author of that piece Mike Nadel.

Thanks, as always, for your continued support of Deadspin.

Jake Brown's 4 1/2 Story Fall Lives On In X Games Lore [LA Times]