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Skateboarder Jake Brown fell 40 feet during this summer's X Games. He suffered a bruised liver, fractured wrist and broken vertebra.

And people couldn't get enough of his crash. Within three days, it had played 3.2 million times on YouTube.com.

The video's allure? Violence, danger, peril. The tension between risk and reward attracts fans to many sports. Six of the eight hottest sports, according to a fan survey by ESPN Sports Poll, are those with a greater risk of injury.

NASCAR is tied for third in that poll. But these days, the series seems to be as safe as it's ever been. And while NASCAR touts its improved safety record, might some adrenaline-seeking fans lose interest because its sense of danger is waning?

"I do think that danger and the chance you get injured is an important part of the appeal of motor sports," said Orin Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke who specializes in sports and culture. "It's really kind of a voyeurism."

Ricky Rudd is a recent reminder of racing's danger. His left shoulder was separated in a crash at California Speedway, and he missed Saturday night's race at Richmond. He is the first full-time Nextel Cup driver to be sidelined by a crash since Jerry Nadeau's career-ending head injury at Richmond in May 2003.

For a sport that mourned four driver fatalities from May 2000 to February 2001 -- including the death of one of its all-time greats, Dale Earnhardt -- the recent safety record is remarkable. Yet it also can lead some to view driver peril as relatively minimal.

"I think it's more dangerous for the pit crew people than it is for the drivers," said 41-year-old fan Russell Phelps of Litchfield, Ky.

Cars roll and smack walls, ram into each other and shed pieces as they fly into the air. Then drivers climb from their cars and wave to the crowd like a stunt driver who had just finished a movie scene.

Energy-absorbing barriers, head-and-neck safety devices and the Car of Tomorrow are helping more drivers survive more accidents with little more than aches and pains.

So is Ernest Hemingway's contention that auto racing was among the only real sports, along with bull fighting and mountain climbing, no longer valid?

A Thirst For Violence

Not so fast, said Nextel Cup driver Jeff Burton.

"This is a dangerous sport," he said. "Any time you strap yourself into something that's propelling you down a straightaway at 200 miles an hour you have the potential to get hurt. That's part of our sport, and I do believe that we've all become a little immune to it."

Drivers downplay their wrecks. That makes it easy for many people to view the hardest hits with little concern. Consider what has happened this season:

l Clint Bowyer slid upside down across the finish line of the Daytona 500 as flames spilled from the engine. Afterward, he called his wild ride "fairly uneventful."

l Jimmie Johnson blew a tire at close to 200 mph, slammed the wall at Indianapolis last month and said: "It felt soft from my perspective."

l Jeff Gordon's head-on crash into the wall during the Coca-Cola 600 in Concord elicited a worried tone from commentator Darrell Waltrip. Yet Gordon walked away and declared "it wasn't that hard" of a hit that lifted his car's rear four feet off the ground.

Those incidents show that the safety devices mandated by NASCAR since Earnhardt's death in 2001 are working. As a sport's level of danger decreases -- or the perception that danger decreases -- it can send some people looking toward other sports for higher levels of excitement. Without an element of danger, racing is just cars going in circles to some people.

"Americans do have a thirst to see violence on TV," said Starn, the Duke professor.

Robert Rinehart, an associate professor in the sport management program at Washington State University, questions such a thirst by fans.

"I'm not entirely sure that I believe that there is a hard-wired component to people's lust for thrill sports," Rinehart wrote in an e-mail. "I think we have been encouraged to think that, that media have created needs for these types of sports.

"We think that people have to have the drama of possible injury or death."

Boredom At Bristol

Fans howled last month after watching the Bristol night race. Some called the race boring. Others lamented the lack of the usual beating and banging. Most seemed dissatisfied, although a new track surface created two- and three-wide racing there for the first time in more than two decades.

"I want it all, crashes, cautions, racing," one person wrote on a NASCAR.com message board after the race.

Conflict and crashing are what make Bristol one of the sport's most popular races. It's the track where Terry Labonte and Dale Earnhardt ended two night races with crashes. It's also where Rusty Wallace briefly stopped breathing after a crash in 1988. It's the same for Daytona and Talladega, tracks that often draw some of the sport's highest TV ratings.

Humpy Wheeler, president of Lowe's Motor Speedway, said the element of danger in racing "is part of the lore ... definitely part of the drama of this whole thing. If you took it completely out, yes, you would lose something, but at the same time, you don't want it."

Few people want a driver or an athlete to get hurt, but, Rinehart said, "there is a fascination with others' pain. It is a mixed fascination: abhorrence coupled with interest."

And so another person views Brown's skateboard disaster on the Internet. And others will wait till Sunday for another race -- and more crashes.

Contact Dustin Long at 373-7062 or dlong @news-record.com