Aden Keefer first became aware that one of his friends was hurt when he accelerated out of a hairpin turn during a motocross race last Saturday in Mammoth Lakes, Calif.
“Aw, dammit,” Keefer recalls thinking when he roared past Aidan Zingg lying limp and motionless on the back section of the course, not far from his green Kawasaki dirt bike.
At first, Keefer assumed Zingg would walk away from the crash, that the 16-year-old rising star had simply skidded out and smacked his head. Then Keefer circled the track again and noticed that Zingg still hadn’t moved. Then he came around again and saw that emergency personnel had begun administering chest compressions.
“That’s when I was like, ‘Oh s—,’” Keefer said last Sunday during an episode of “Keefer Tested,” a motocross-themed podcast hosted by his dad.
Zingg died Saturday from injuries sustained during his crash, a tragedy that has devastated the teenager’s friends and family and shaken the tightnit motocross community. Just under a year ago, Zingg won his first-ever American Motorcyclist Association national championship in the Supermini 2 class and took second place in the Supermini 1 division. He parlayed that into an offer to ride big bikes for Kawasaki’s Team Green, a factory-supported program that has helped launch the careers of numerous professional racers.
The bewildering part of Zingg’s death is that exactly how it happened still remains unclear. Video of the incident hasn’t publicly surfaced. Eyewitness accounts are scarce — and conflicting.
TMZ and many other media outlets cited a report from dirtbikelover.com that Zingg “went down in a corner” and was “run over by multiple bikes.” A race official granted anonymity by Yahoo Sports adamantly disputed that, citing conversations with riders who were behind Zingg and the characteristics of the section of the course where he crashed.
Other riders unanimously said they didn’t see anyone strike Zingg from behind after he wrecked, the race official said. The race official also described where Zingg went down as one of the gentlest and widest parts of the Mammoth Motocross course, far from any blind turns or landing spots for jumps.
“In this section of the track, riders of this caliber are not going to hit somebody,” the race official said. “There was plenty of room for everybody to get around and not hit him. And he didn’t have any physical marks indicating that he had been struck.”
While the Mammoth Lakes Police Department is investigating Zingg’s crash and the cause of his death, Sergeant Jason Heilman declined to reveal what had been uncovered so far. Heilman told Yahoo Sports that he can’t provide “any additional information as it’s still an active investigation and we’re still trying to piece together what happened.”
Whatever the reason for Zingg’s crash, the timing is especially cruel. This was a top amateur motocross prospect on the verge of a pro career, an unusually driven 16-year-old with his whole life in front of him.
“He has the skill and the work ethic to be one of the greatest,” motocross trainer Dimitri Rolando told Yahoo Sports.
Then Rolando apologized for his use of present tense.
“Sorry, but I can’t talk about Aidan in the past yet.”
From underdog to class of the field
Born in the Southern California motocross mecca of Murrieta, roughly 80 miles east of Los Angeles’ beaches and bright lights, Aidan Zingg grew up on two wheels. His grandpa rode dirt bikes. His dad rode dirt bikes. So at age 6, Aidan followed their lead.
In one of his first Instagram posts as a 7-year-old second grader, Zingg described himself as an “aspiring professional motocross racer.” Another early post features a photo of young Zingg with a smudged nose after a day of riding in the hills behind his home with his dad Bob.
“Crashed like 37 times but had a blast!” the caption reads.
The older he got, the more Zingg’s obsession with motocross deepened. He enrolled in online classes by 2020 because public school conflicted with his training and race schedules. Bob Zingg also relocated the family to the town of Hemet, where they could afford a property large enough to build a supercross track in the yard.
While Aidan Zingg qualified for every AMA national championships since he turned 10, for years he seldom ran at the front when facing top-tier competition. There were always kids in his age group who practiced longer hours, who took sharper lines, who had more powerful, better handling bikes.
The pressure on Zingg escalated after he finished a solid but unspectacular 9th and 11th at 2023 nationals in his first year riding minis. Zingg’s family wouldn’t be able to afford travel expenses or competitive equipment once he graduated from minis to bigger bikes. Either he’d have to land an offer from a major factory-supported team or his bid to compete at the highest levels of motocross would be over.
“It starts getting expensive with big bikes,” Zingg told the Grom Squad podcast last November. “So if I didn’t have a ride pretty much this year, racing would not continue for me.”
The stress of that ticking clock and differing ideas for how to proceed caused father and son to start butting heads more often. Hoping that another perspective besides his own might help his son maximize his potential, Bob Zingg began searching for someone else to help coach and train his son.
Enter Rolando, the rare motocross athlete who found success despite not seriously pursuing the sport until he was nearly 18. Early in Rolando’s riding career, coach Yannig Kervella invited him to relocate from France, live at his house in California and train alongside some of the biggest names in the sport. By 2023, Rolando had transitioned to coaching in hopes of having the same impact on the next generation of racers that Kervella had on him.
The key to the partnership with the Zinggs, Rolando said, was that he was able to serve as a “go-between” between father and son. As Rolando described it, “The dad was part of the industry. He had a lot of knowledge. But dads coaching their own kids can be really hard. Aidan was 14 years old. He was starting to talk back. Sometimes there was a little bit of conflict.”
With Rolando’s guidance, Zingg spent more days at the track and at private training facilities preparing for his biggest races. Zingg also learned to train like a professional when he wasn’t ripping across the dirt. That meant getting more sleep, improving his diet and committing to weight training and cardio work.
While Zingg beat some of the best riders his age in Mammoth last summer, his ultimate test was the 2024 AMA nationals, annually held at Loretta Lynn’s Ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. It was there where Zingg’s aspirations of racing big bikes would blossom or fizzle, there where he had a chance to prove himself to the factory-sponsored teams.
On the first day of practice, Zingg failed to take the proper lines on the course and his lap times were way off the pace. His dad was understandably concerned, but Rolando preached patience.
“Calm down, he will follow the plan,” Rolando said. “You will see, he’s going to be good.”
Over the next few days, Zingg was better than good. He was the fastest supermini class racer on the property. He finished fifth, first and first in three races to claim second place in the 12-to-15-year-old division. Then he took first, third and first in three more races to run away with first place in the 13-to-16-year-old division.
“That class that he won, it’s the class that all the industry is looking at,” Rolando said. “It’s the next generation. Aidan didn’t really know if he was that guy. He was always the underdog. So winning that race was a huge achievement for him.”
Offers poured in from big teams last year after Zingg’s big week at AMA nationals. The family chose Kawasaki’s Team Green because they liked the terms of the contract, the quality of the bikes and the people running the operation.
On the day that his dad brought home his new green No. 39 Kawasaki 250cc dirt bike, Aidan Zingg immediately took it out to his family’s backyard supercross track for a test drive.
“I was so excited to ride big bikes,” he told the Grom Squad podcast last November. “I just threw my gear on and started riding.”
‘I’ve been crying ever since’
Less than a year after that backyard joyride, Zingg was back on that same green Kawasaki dirt bike for last Saturday’s 250cc class race in Mammoth Lakes. He was running near the front until disaster struck along the spectator-free back section of the fir and pine tree-lined course.
When a motocross rider gets knocked unconscious or sustains a broken bone, the race is often red-flagged immediately. In this case, other riders maneuvered around Zingg for 1-2 laps before the race was finally halted.
Flaggers who are responsible for putting the race under caution after a crash got to Zingg quickly, according to the race official who requested anonymity. So did ski patrollers trained to respond to medical emergencies on the mountain, the race official said. The issue, according to the race official, was that they “got caught up in helping Zingg versus calling for the red flag right away.”
“The medic guy realized he wasn’t breathing, so the first thing he did was get the helmet off and start working on him,” the race official said. “So they weren’t calling for a red flag. They were immediately trying to do everything they could to save him.”
While emergency personnel put Zingg onto a stretcher and loaded him into an ambulance, word spread about the severity of the incident. Before long, Rolando’s phone began to buzz with ominous texts and social media posts from friends at the track.
The motocross trainer reached out to someone close to Zingg and said, “Tell me it’s not true!”
A couple minutes later came the heartbreaking confirmation: Zingg was gone.
“I’ve been crying ever since,” Rolando said.
Tragedies like this happen in dirt bike racing. Danger is inherent in the sport, especially as the bikes have gotten more powerful, the jumps and obstacles have gotten bigger and riders have gotten younger and more daring. Forty-year-old men and nine-year-old girls have died as a result of motocross accidents. So have teenage phenoms and X Games daredevils.
And yet those in motocross circles say they can seldom remember a rider whose death has inspired a greater outpouring than Zingg’s. Social media tributes have poured in this week from friends and family, from top pros to total strangers.
Professional racer Garrett Marchbanks wrote about the inspiring work ethic he witnessed from Zingg when training together.
“This news quite literally brought me to my knees as my entire body just went completely numb,” Marchbanks said.
Amateur motocross prospect Vincent Wey recalled spending countless hours with Zingg as kids “playing basketball during recess, building jumps, or talking s— to each other.”
“Losing you feels like a dream we can’t wake up from,” Wey said.
Alex Zingg, Aiden’s older sister, wrote Sunday that even though it had only been a day, it felt like “a lifetime.”
“You used to joke that I was so old and that I’d die first,” Alex said. “I would always joke that you were crazy and you’d be the first. Now I’m sitting here wishing with everything that I am that you were right so I’d never have to live a day without you.”
Maybe the most meaningful tribute came from some of Zingg’s fellow 250 cc class riders in Mammoth Lakes on Saturday. Nearly half the riders who finished Saturday’s first race didn’t start the second one, including Keefer, the winner of the first race.
Keefer and Zingg first met as 10-year-olds with similar passion for motocross and grew closer even as they competed against one another. When Keefer learned that his friend had died, he and his family immediately packed up, left the Mammoth Lakes track and drove home.
“As a family, we decided, hey man, I could give two s—- about your f—— championship,” Keefer’s dad, Kris Keefer, said on his podcast. “It’s crazy to think about how important this sport is to us and then something like this happens and how it’s not important anymore.”