Think you need a $4500 Sony A9 and expensive trick lens to take fast action shots? The photographer that caught this moment was probably using an early 1950s rangefinder, or a press 4×5 with sport finder; try using one of those today in a similar situation and see if you can come up with anything remotely usable.
Swedish amateur motorcyclist and stuntman Roine Loeow decided to perform a trick called “the cavalier start” (where the machine “would rear like a bucking horse”) for the local crowd on a sleepy Sunday in Uppsala Sweden, when he suddenly lost the front fork and wheel of his motorcycle in the process. The caption says he came out it “miraculously uninjured” due to the fact he was wearing a high-tech knit cap helmet.
This story ran in the January 17th 1955 edition of Life Magazine, and I got it from Google books.