From the video he has seen, Mike Aitken can recount the crash with a certain detachment. The trick, a can can tire grab 360, should have been all but automatic after so many years as a BMX rider. Aitken estimated he'd gone off the jump 50 times already that day.

It was Sunday, Oct. 5, close to 4 p.m., at the end of a six-hour day of riding and filming outside Bethlehem, Pa. Another rider, Chase Hawk, asked if Aitken wanted to grab something to eat. One more jump, he answered, and he'd be good to go.

He was probably 30 feet in the air when he missed the grip on his handlebars before catching it at the last second. He over-rotated the 360 as a result. His weight shifted to the right side of his bike and he went down. His head slammed to the ground. He wasn't wearing a helmet.

"When I hit, it was like, 'Good night,' "said Aitken, 26, who lost consciousness immediately and had to be rushed to the hospital. "I just hit it exactly right."

Only three weeks removed from a Dew Tour victory in Salt Lake City that marked a career high point, Aitken was left fighting for his life. The Murray product, who grew to become one of the most admired riders in the world, would spend three weeks in a coma.

"Mikey's style is really fast and really big and he's not scared of anything," said Fuzzy Hall, a Kaysville pro and one of BMX's founding fathers. "You put that in the equation and that's what put him at the wrong place at the wrong time on that wreck."

The crash left Aitken with a broken jaw, sinus and orbital bones, a collapsed lung and, most significantly, a bruise the size of a thumbprint to the left frontal lobe of his brain that initially left him paralyzed on his right side and scrambled his short-term memory.

At one point, Aitken can remember sitting in a wheelchair, powerless to pull in his arms and legs after they had slid off to the side. "I was thinking to myself, I'm like, 'I guess I'm just going to have to get used to it,' "he said.

Left to rebuild his life in the months since, Aitken's comeback has been nothing short of remarkable. He will ride again, and while Aitken won't be doing so when the Tour returns to Utah this week, he will be on hand to present the winner's trophy.

"Everybody has the same opinion that he'll absolutely be at 100 percent eventually," fellow pro Josh Hult said at last month's Tour stop in Portland, Ore. "It's just a matter of taking the long road to get there."

Aitken already has proven wrong the doctors who warned his family that he'd spend life in a vegetative state even if he survived the crash. Same with the doctor who declared that Aitken was "a bit ahead of himself" with his timetable to ride again within the year.

"I just looked at him, I said, 'I'm sorry, but I think you're wrong,' and I walked out of the room," Aitken said, adding, "From the minute I woke up, I wanted to be back to where I was, because I was on such a high level before I fell."

Aitken hopes to be fully recovered in another 12 to 18 months. He still faces daily struggles, but with a year's perspective, Aitken can't help but wonder whether October's crash didn't have greater meaning.

"I don't believe that it was my path to go down, but I believe that everything happens for a reason," Aitken said. "I was meant to have that happen, and I can either make the best of it or make the worst of it and let it take me over. I'm not going to let that happen."

Everybody is given challenges to overcome, Aitken added, and the crash was his. He's determined to emerge from it a better person, spreading the message of helmet safety while someday hoping to shrug off what happened as if it were a broken arm.

Surprised at win » To say his Dew Tour victory last September surprised Aitken would be an understatement. He told his family to come for preliminaries because he didn't expect to qualify for finals. He believed he would come in last before ever coming in first.

Three years earlier, Aitken had all but given up on contests in favor of riding in videos. He'd watched dirt jumping come to be defined by frontflips, double backflips and triple tailwhips, breathtaking tricks but a departure from how he'd grown up riding.

Aitken, however, couldn't pass on the chance to ride in front of his friends and family at home. He took second in qualifying, then hit four 360 combinations as part of his winning run in front of a crowd of thousands across the street from EnergySolutions Arena.

"That whole set-up was meant to be ridden just the way he rode it," pro Corey Bohan said. "It's not always about those insane flip-trick variations or whatever. He was throwing out mad combos. He made it look good and the style counts, and he's got too much of that."

"Everyone knows why he won," pro Anthony Napolitan added. "It's because he has amazing style and he just does what he wants. He's not doing flips and tailwhips and stuff because he has so many other creative things that he can do. And that's what stands out."

"I'm sitting up on the deck with all the riders and every time he would drop in, it was all eyes on Mike," remembered Eddie Buckley, owner of the 5050 BMX shop in Layton. "Everyone wants to see what he's all about, and his style is just unmatched by anybody."

Days later, Aitken found himself still wondering whether his victory was a dream. He made plans to travel to Orlando, Fla., for the Dew Tour's season-ending stop, but first headed to Pennsylvania for what promised to be another career highlight.

He had been invited to ride in "Anthem 2," the sequel to a celebrated BMX video from the 1990s. "It was an honor to even be in it," said Aitken, who also planned to fly home a day early to surprise his wife, Trista, on their anniversary.

Instead, he ended up spending it hooked to a ventilator in the intensive care unit with her by his side.

"She's been a superstar," Aitken said. "I really don't know how to ever thank her. I don't know if it happened to her if I could have been just as strong. I don't know that I could have. All the video and stuff we have, seeing it, it's just too much."

With a little help » As a measure of Aitken's popularity in the BMX community, his family bought a map while he still was in the hospital. They used pin after pin to represent the donations that came from so many corners of the world after news of the crash.

"Every time I've been down, I just think about that and it brings me back up," Aitken said.

As Hult put it, "There's absolutely no rider in the entire world who is more copied or emulated or sought-after or looked up to than Mike." The 5050 crew even has coined a term -- "Mike Fakens" -- to describe all the imitators Aitken has spawned.

Soon after he was released from the hospital Nov. 13, Aitken met up with friends to see a movie in Sugar House. He climbed on one of their bikes, popped a wheelie off a speed bump and nearly fell, much to his wife's horror.

A few months later, Aitken went for a ride on his block. He did a 180, popped a wheelie and broke into a smile while his brother filmed it all. The 36-second clip has been viewed more than 110,000 times on YouTube since it was posted Feb. 26.

For the most part, though, progress has come slowly.

Aitken has returned to some of the trails he used to ride before the crash. He works out three times a week at the gym and gives credit to Kaysville doctor Craig Buhler for helping to reactivate the muscles that weakened on his right side.

"The toughest part, it's all in my head," Aitken said. "I feel like your body follows your mind. If I just keep my mind clear, then I'm pretty good. But if I think about it too much, that's when I start to bobble. And that's hard not to do, not to think about it."

Aitken also has had to deal with the $275,000 in medical bills he accumulated after the crash. By his count, he'd tried four times to obtain health insurance, but was denied coverage with the explanation that he traveled too much.

As fate would have it, Aitken learned two days before he left for Pennsylvania that he had a lead on coverage through his brother's Web design company. "I was so ecstatic," Aitken said. "I was telling everyone, all my friends and stuff."

He planned to follow up as soon as he returned home.

Through various fundraisers and donations, Aitken collected some $50,000 following the crash. His sponsors --- Fit Bike Co., Fox clothing, Lotek shoes and Rockstar energy drink among them -- have provided assistance.

He also received help from the Temecula, Calif.-based Athlete Recovery Fund, which covered the cost of a $25,000 air ambulance that flew Aitken back to Utah while he still was in his coma. ARF hopes someday to bring group coverage to action sports athletes.

Aitken additionally launched a clothing line, Vigilantia, borrowed from a name on his family crest, to help raise money to pay his bills. Either the hospitals will settle for what Aitken can offer as payment or he will have to declare bankruptcy.

Although he doesn't welcome having to retell the story of his crash and recovery next weekend at the Tour, Aitken does look forward to catching up with some longtime friends.

"It's good for me to see everyone again and it's good to let them know that I'm OK," Aitken said, "because a lot of people think that I'm just done riding, I can never ride again."

Indestructable » The day of the crash, Aitken can remember waking up and grabbing some coffee before riding. He can remember talking trash in the parking lot and the 20 or so people on hand to ride and film at the Posh trails.

He thinks he even landed a nac nac seat grab on the jump before the crash, though Aitken admits, "I don't know if that's me wanting to remember or me actually remembering it." He was hungry that afternoon and regrets not listening to his body better.

Keith Mulligan, the editor in chief of Ride BMX magazine, was part of that day's group and among the first people on the scene after Aitken's crash. He had seen riders knocked out before, but could tell from Aitken's breathing that something was very wrong.

He rode in the ambulance with Aitken, who wasn't waking up even though his legs and arms were moving, and said the final minutes before reaching the hospital were harrowing. "The thought came across my mind, 'Is this really going to happen?' " Mulligan said.

Aitken remembers nothing from the crash and coma. "For me, it was like waking up the next day," he said. "That's what it was like, but I woke up in Utah and the whole right side of my body didn't work."

The BMX world, meanwhile, had been shaken only two years earlier when Great Britain's Stephen Murray was paralyzed from the neck down and nearly died when he crashed while attempting a double backflip the Dew Tour's 2007 stop in Baltimore.

As saddened as he was by what happened to Murray, Aitken took some comfort in never attempting such a trick. He didn't regularly wear a helmet and never rode with pads. To his fellow riders, he might as well have been indestructible.

Hult had ridden with Aitken for weeks at a time on some trips, without once seeing him fall. The most significant injuries Aitken had suffered in his career before the crash were little more than a broken collarbone and separated shoulder.

That changed in an instant. Aitken still bears the scar on his neck from the tracheostomy he underwent as well as the scar on his abdomen through which a feeding tube was inserted.

"I think it definitely brought awareness to everyone that you can get hurt at any time,"

Mulligan said. "If Mikey can get hurt, anyone can."

Aitken has spent the past year relearning how to walk, talk and swallow. He's battled vision problems and is undergoing hyperbaric treatments to sharpen his mind, which he likens to a filing cabinet that got spilled all over the floor.

Although he didn't wear a helmet --- believing he was setting himself up to fall by doing so -- Aitken has become an advocate for them since his crash.

"If I can save one person from going through this, that's huge, because trust me, they don't want to go through it," Aitken said. "It's not as much fun as it looks."

Buckley said helmet sales have quintupled at his store since Aitken's crash, though Mulligan estimated "more people don't wear them than do" in the BMX world.

Last month, Aitken posted a six-minute video on his Web site, featuring his winning Dew Tour runs, followed by hospital footage after the crash. Among other things, Aitken is shown convulsing in bed and undergoing grueling physical therapy.

The video is entitled, "It Only Takes Once," a message Aitken seeks to deliver in interviews as well. At the same time, he's adamant that he wants neither sympathy nor admiration for what he has battled back from following the crash.

"I don't want people to feel bad for me, nothing like that," he said. "I just want people to know that this can happen if you don't wear a helmet. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it can, because I didn't think it could. It did, and this is what you can go through."

rsiler@sltrib.com