SturgisThunderdome

You cannot tell this story without Seth Enslow. Before Raha ever lined up in the Thunderdome, Enslow was the man who made the V-Twin airborne into an event worth watching — the legend who defined V-Twin distance jumping, who turned an impossible pairing of a heavy machine and open sky into a discipline all its own. Every rider who has since throttled a V-Twin toward a takeoff ramp has done it in Enslow’s long shadow. His legacy wasn’t a footnote Raha had to acknowledge; it was the entire reason the runway existed. To chase a record like this is to chase a person, and the person Raha was chasing built the road he was riding on.

The moment itself was pure and terrible in the way the best of these things always are. The staging. The engine note climbing. The runway swallowed under the front wheel. Then the launch — and for a stretch of time that had to feel far longer than it measured, all that iron was simply airborne, a heavyweight suspended over a Sturgis crowd holding its breath. There is no half-measure in a jump like this. You either land it or you don’t. Raha landed it. Clean. Two hundred and five feet from takeoff, the longest V-Twin jump ever recorded, and — crucially — officially certified, not a claim whispered afterward but a record measured, verified, and stamped in the same night the crowd witnessed it.

None of it happened in a vacuum. The night carried the weight of its partners — Rockstar, Weedmaps, Dixon, and Scrum Junkies — the kind of backing that turns a stunt into a spectacle and a spectacle into a certified record. But the machinery of an event only sets the table. What people will remember from the 85th Sturgis Rally is a single image: a Harley-Davidson V-Twin, an engine that was never built to fly, hanging impossibly over the Thunderdome while a rider chasing a legend rewrote the number for good. Seth Enslow defined the distance. On August 2, 2025, Colby Raha extended it — 205 feet into the record books, and into Sturgis history.