On August 2, 2025, Colby Raha pointed a Harley-Davidson V-Twin — a machine bred for asphalt, not air — down a runway inside the Thunderdome and threw it 205 feet into the South Dakota night. The crowd at the 85th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally watched the longest V-Twin jump ever recorded land clean and get certified on the spot. This is how a heavyweight learned to fly.
There are machines built to fly, and then there is the Harley-Davidson V-Twin. It is iron and torque and low-end thunder, a motorcycle engineered to chew up open highway and rumble through main streets — a heavyweight in every sense. Nobody drew it up to leave the ground. That is precisely why, on the night of August 2, 2025, the number that hung in the Sturgis air felt less like a statistic and more like a dare answered: 205 feet. The longest V-Twin jump ever recorded. Certified. Live. In front of the whole rally.
The setting was the Thunderdome, dropped into the heart of the 85th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally — the largest gathering of two wheels and loud pipes on the planet. Sturgis doesn’t do polite applause. It does dust and leather and a low collective roar, tens of thousands of riders who have seen everything and are hard to impress. That was the jury Colby Raha rode out to meet. And Raha is not a man who flinches at a hard room: twelve X Games medals, seven of them gold, a résumé that says he has already proven whatever there is to prove. He came to Sturgis to prove something else entirely — that a bike that was never meant to fly could be made to soar farther than anyone had dared send one.
A machine that was never meant to fly, sent farther than anyone had dared send one — 205 feet, certified, in front of the whole rally.
The Weight of a Legend
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.
That is the quiet brutality of what a V-Twin asks of a jumper. A purpose-built motocross bike wants to leave the earth; it is light, nimble, forgiving in the air. A V-Twin fights you the whole way — heavier, more stubborn, less willing, every pound of it arguing against the physics of flight. Distance on a machine like that is not a matter of nerve alone. It is a negotiation between a rider and an engine that would rather stay planted, settled in stages by riders like Enslow who kept pushing the number out foot by hard-won foot. Raha showed up to move it again.
The Athletes
Colby Raha
A 12-time X Games medalist with 7 golds, Raha threw a Harley-Davidson V-Twin 205 feet inside the Thunderdome to set the longest certified V-Twin jump ever recorded. He rode chasing the legacy of the man who defined the discipline.
Seth Enslow
The rider who defined V-Twin distance jumping and turned a heavyweight machine into a flying spectacle. His record and legacy were the standard Raha chased into the Sturgis night.
To chase a record like this is to chase a person, and the person Raha was chasing built the road he was riding on.
Two Hundred and Five Feet
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.
That certification matters more than it might sound. Big air breeds big talk, and the graveyard of extreme sports is full of numbers nobody could ever confirm. Record Breakers Co. builds its events on the opposite principle: the moment is real, the measurement is real, and the history is written the instant it happens. Every event goes down in history — but only because every event is held to the standard of actually being true. Raha’s 205 wasn’t a legend in the making that would grow with each retelling. It was a fact, locked, the second his wheels touched down.
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.
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