The world of extreme pogo is an eye-popping blend of artistry, courage and 'mystical zest'

Audio By Carbonatix

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The greatest day of Michael Mena's life as a professional athlete ended with a pair of world championships that the 33-year-old had spent the better part of two decades chasing.

Asked how becoming the best in his chosen sport — for a day anyway — was going to go over back at the office, the Florida native who currently works as an automated software tester in Canada just laughed.

“They think it's cool,” Mena said. “But they don't get the full depth of how it all works.”

Hard to blame them. Because how do you explain ... this?

Mena is a pogoer. Check that. He's a “professional pogo sticker."

Yes, really.

And yes, Mena and the rest of the tight-knit group that gathers every year in the parking lot of a converted school in Wilkinsburg, a neighborhood a few miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, attempting to one-up each other during the annual “Pogopalooza," understand what they do is a little out there, even for an action sport.

They also don't care. You can have your thing. This is theirs.

“I feel like it’s similar to a fraternity,” said Dalton Smith, considered one of the greatest of all time. “But if like all the frat guys were half jocks, half artists, with a little sprinkle of mystical zest on the whole thing.”

That mystical zest comes during those precious fractions of a second when you’re 10 feet in the air with a piece of steel between your legs, trying to balance the yin and yang between gravity and imagination.

They do this for glory, not for money. The total amount of cash won across three days at Pogopalooza 2026? Zero dollars and zero cents.

Mena and everyone else made peace with the business side of all this long ago.

“The dream used to be: we’re going to be the next skateboarding,” he said.

The reality is that what would be required for pogoing to carve out a more lucrative slice of whatever might be available in the extreme sports space could cost what drew them to it in the first place.

“If we got a bunch of money, it would be cool, but it’s not the goal anymore,” he said. "We’re not like, ‘How can we make more money?’ It’s like, ’How can we make it more exciting? How can we push the sport further and get more people into it?' That’s what it’s all about.”

It's that common vision that draws Mena and Smith and a dozen or so of their friends together every year to hang out and compete in things like Big Air — think, pogoing around a skate park, with handmade, graffiti-painted elements to leap off of — and Best Trick, which is basically taking turns during a 30-minute jam session trying to pull off the sickest stunts imaginable.

Front flips. Back flips. Letting it go, doing a full twist, then snatching it back and setting your feet on it just before you land. The list of possibilities is endless, and that's kind of the point.

“We're equal parts naive and brave,” said the 29-year-old Smith, whose flowing black hair, moustache and soulful approach to his life's work give the “Man With Pogo” a zen-like vibe. “It's not even naive. You just want something so bad. You see it in your head, this trick that you're chasing. Once you get into the flow of trying it, you're not thinking about fear. Your body's just pushing, pushing, pushing until you get it, so you kind of get over the fear hump and then whatever happens, happens.”

That covers a broad spectrum. Much of it painful. In your mind's eye, you land the trick. In reality, you don't. Many, many, many times.

The Big Air and Best Trick trophies that Mena won on a cloudy June afternoon — "perfect pogo weather," as the emcee put it to a crowd of a few hundred curious people on a small set of bleachers in the corner of the Community Forge parking lot — were the result of hundreds of moments of failure.

The first time Mena tried a backflip, he was 13. He inflated an air mattress for safety. It hardly mattered. He didn't know how to flip off two feet, let alone a hollow air-pressurized tube.

“It went really bad,” he said. “I landed on my head or whatever.”

All of their origin stories are like this.

Smith remembers pulling all the cushions off the couches of his childhood home in Franklin, Tennessee, while his parents were at work and using them as crash pads, then putting them back when he was done, hoping his folks wouldn't notice. Henry Cabelus' dad put carpet on top of plywood so his son could practice in the backyard instead of the street, where Cabelus' mother feared he'd get hit by a car.

Not that it made much difference. At 26, Cabelus has arthritis in his right knee and his left foot. A couple of years ago, one bad landing ended with both feet broken. There was the time he had to spend a night in the ICU because air was leaking into his cranium due to a fractured orbital bone and doctors feared he might have a stroke.

Yet there is no other way Cabelus, who lives in the extreme sports enclave of Long Beach, California, wants to make a living, for now anyway. Most of the athletes at Pogopalooza are part of the “Xpogo” team that performs at everything from NBA halftime shows to state fairs and cruises.

What began as a childhood fixation for all has become a livelihood for most, run by a Carnegie Mellon graduate who left a job as an internal consultant for IBM to run a business that has morphed into a passion project.

By Will Weiner's own admission, the corporate gig the 34-year-old once had was “1000% more lucrative" than his current job. Yet it doesn't allow him to wear orange pants with a blazer while trying to organize a show led by performers who often find themselves on “pogo time” (translation: urgency and punctuality are optional) as he did during “Pogopalooza.”

Weiner described the event as more of a family reunion than an actual competition. And while Xpogo is technically a for-profit business, after making a push to try and broaden Pogopalooza — including making an appearance as part of ESPN's “The Ocho” programming at one point — the event has settled firmly into “if you know, you know” territory.

“We might not have 20,000 people here, but we can give you authentic, and we can give you cool and we can give you content,” Weiner said.

The proof was everywhere during Pogopalooza, where 39-year-old Nick McClintock, one of the godfathers of extreme pogoing, filmed the athletes while following them around on a skateboard, searching for the best way to convey the sport's mix of danger and artistry.

On the eve of the event, Cabelus debuted a three-minute video that served as a mash-up of some of the most difficult tricks he's ever completed. Duncan Murray crisscrosses the country in a white hatchback, “The Duncan Pogo show” emblazoned on the side.

They all want pogoing to grow, but only in a way that feels organic. And in some ways, it is. Cabelus couldn't help but laugh when telling the story of how he was getting coffee a few blocks away recently when he spotted a kid wearing a “Pogopalooza” T-shirt.

The kid turned around and asked Cabelus if he was, well, Henry Cabelus.

“I've never had someone calling me my full government name on the street,” Cabelus said.

Soon enough, Cabelus was doling out tips and the kid was promising to stop by Pogopalooza, which ends every year with a “jump off” for spectators 15-and-under in an effort to provide the spark that turned into a full-fledged obsession for Mena and others long ago.

Going from bouncing a few inches off the ground on a spring-loaded stick like the ones you used to find in gym classes to pumping an air-pressured stick that can run around $500 and make each trick the equivalent of leaping off the second story of a building takes more than imagination. It takes guts.

Connor Poe, all of 19 and considered one of pogoing's bright young stars, stood atop the Big Air course during the finals and said to no one in particular, “I'm going to ... hurt myself,” before dropping in.

He was right. Ten seconds into his run, the stick gave way. Poe's face hit the pavement.

No matter. That didn't stop him from attempting it twice more. Poe's third run was a clean and creative 60-second journey from one element to the next, earning the former high school football player third place behind Mena.

An hour later, Mena captured first in Best Trick after flipping his stick underneath him, then grabbing it before sticking his feet back on, and bouncing the three times required to demonstrate control.

Mena, dubbed “every pogoer's favorite pogoer" by Cabelus, was immediately mobbed. When the competition was finally over, McClintock approached him with video of the trick. Mena leaned in and put his hands on his head as he rewatched a moment that was countless falls in the making.

“I tried that trick hundreds and hundreds of times and I was just scared to put my feet on,” he said. “Then, once you’re in it and all the adrenaline’s going and everyone is screaming, then you just kind of don’t care about getting hurt so much. It’s like, ’I’m going to do this, and if I have to be bedridden for the next month, then whatever.' I know I went for it as hard as I could, you know?"

There are times when Mena and Smith — who is writing a book entitled “Of the Dreams, in the Streets” about the quest for “oneness with concrete” — and all the rest wonder how long they might keep doing this, even as a side hustle.

Funny how those questions become so much background noise when they're soaring, the world literally at their feet.

For a time during the pandemic, Smith says, he struggled to separate himself as a person from himself as a performer. As much as he's tried to look elsewhere, he keeps being drawn back to the sport that made the world open up and make sense.

“I've stopped fighting it and just come back to see it for the beauty it was," he said. "Travel. Friends. Movement. All the good aspects ... I've just accepted that I'm one with this thing."

___

AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports