Most people would be lying if they were to say that they didn’t want to go viral on the internet in one way or another. The problem is that not everybody is lucky enough to capture something on camera that hundreds of thousands of people want to take time out of their day to watch. However, CHS freshman Joshua Garcia is one of the special few. He was lucky enough, or unlucky enough depending on how you think about it, to have a clip of him skateboarding rack up nearly six hundred thousand views on the Thrasher Hall of Meat Instagram page.

Garcia had been skating for a year and a half before the video, which was taken by a friend at a skating summer camp. His love for skating was strong and remains, even after the events shown in the viral video.

“It’s really fun, it’s really satisfying to learn new tricks. It’s just fun to me.” Garcia said.
In the video, Garcia attempts to perform a trick known as a boardslide along a rail running parallel to six stairs. The video then shows him jumping up onto the rail with his board, only for it to slip out from under him. Garcia had done successful board slides plenty of times before, but none quite as long as this one. He explained what exactly went wrong.

“I kind of got scared because I had never hit a rail that big before, so I kind of just didn’t commit to it,” Garcia said.

The video then shows him slamming down, crotch first, onto the rail, and proceeding to flip over it. Despite how intensely painful the accident looks, Garcia insisted in the comments on the post that it did in fact not hurt and went on to later defend this.

“It never hurt. It didn’t hurt at all,” Garcia said.

The comments on the Instagram post from other users tended to disagree, with many of them remarking upon how lucky Garcia was to have been wearing a helmet and how incredibly painful the video looked.

“Circumcision,” timothylee1 said.

“Lucky he young. Any older the gulag would be calling,” said fuego_c63.

Garcia vehemently disagreed with these evaluations of what went down at the skating camp that day.

“No. It hit the inside of my legs.” Garcia said.

He has yet to have attempted the same trick on a rail of the same length, although he remained optimistic for the future.

He hopes to be able to successfully perform a boardslide on the same rail next summer.

Despite how lucky Garcia was in being able to avoid serious injury, the video stills call into question whether or not the brief stint of internet fame was worth the proximity to a serious injury. It’s probably for the better that most people’s dreams of internet fame are left unfulfilled.