These short vids reveal just how far riders are prepared to go to achieve the ultimate high. It’s a good idea to put down your cup of tea before watching any of these.

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1. Johannes Fischback’s OTB to end all OTBs

“I’ve been haunting a special idea for several years now: To make the world’s longest jump with a MTB, i.e. a world record! .. If I can jump 50 metres from your 85-metre ski jump, then the 140-metre ski jump has to go a lot further!”

2. Sam Reynolds and Andre Lacondeguy at Garden Route Trail Park

This is the recent Instagram that provoked this whole feature. You know how helmetcams make everything look flat and slow? Well, just how steep and fast must these bonkers jumps be in real life?

3. Dan Atherton’s quarry line at Revolution Bike Park

Apparently this is Dan Atherton’s “warm up run” (you can hear him say so in the introduction). The silent sections of airtime get longer and longer as the track increases in craziness.

4. Jason Rennie’s 134ft towed-in jump at Llandegla

We’re not so sure this is a world record anymore really. Surely some of the jumps at Red Bull Rampage are equal, if not bigger, than this these days? But kudos to motorcross rider Rennie for being a pioneer of such madness. This jump looks like it could have gone really, really wrong.

5. Dave Watson’s infamous jump over the Tour De France peloton

Okay so he didn’t land it. And it is kind of disrespectful to world’s greatest bicycle race. But this is still very evocative of a particular time in mountain biking when bravado (and arrogance) was high and riders were pushing the envelope in so many ways.

6. Vink and Fairclough on those insane dirt jumps

Arguably the first in the modern era series of jaw-dropping self-shot helmetcam runs. The speed and amplitude of these dirt jumps is just unreal. It’s Vink’s silhouette against the white sky in front of Fairclough (filming) that makes this video so great.

7. Cam Zink’s world record 100ft backflip

Normally these super-staged stunt events are a bit cringeworthy and rarely live up to over-hype. Not this time though. You might want to turn down the cheesy commentary but you won’t want to miss the speedometer display nor the sheer grace of Cam Zink’s backflip.

8. Aggy’s Reunion at Fest Series 2015

Skip past the first 20 seconds of scree-slope hooning and dive straight into arguably the best helmetcam dirt-jump trains ever shot. It’s perhaps a bit too polished, lacking the visceral rawness of Vink/Fairclough above, but for sheer skills on display this is unbeatable.

Have we missed any of your favourites? We must have missed out a couple. Let us know in the comments below.