Robbie Knievel Obituary, Death – Robbie Knievel, 60, the second-generation daredevil who jumped the fountains of Caesars Palace and the Grand Canyon in the high-flying bootstraps of his father, Evel Knievel, has died on Friday in Reno, Nevada, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Knievel cleared the hotel fountains in Las Vegas in April 1989, twenty-two years after his father crashed horribly in a New Year’s Eve stunt at the newly opened Caesars Palace. In 1999, he and his motorcycle established a personal record of 228 feet over the Grand Canyon, but he broke his leg landing.
On closed-circuit television in 1974, his father attempted to traverse the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a rocket-propelled vehicle, but his parachute deployed prematurely, resulting in a dismal failure. In addition, on broadcast in 1998, Robbie Knievel jumped 231 feet (30 of them) of limousines, between two 13-story skyscrapers in Las Vegas in 1999, and over five military planes on the deck of the USS Intrepid in New York in 2004. He jumped hundreds of times over military vehicles, Hummers, trucks, barges, buses, and Batmobiles, as well as alongside a hotel volcano, throughout the years.
Robert Edward Knievel II was born in Butte, Montana, on May 7, 1962, to Evel and Linda, a former cheerleader. At the age of seven, he began riding motorbikes, in the age of eight, he did his first act with his father at Madison Square Garden, and at the age of twelve, he began touring with his father. To pursue his career, he dropped out of Butte’s Central Catholic High School. His final feat, dubbed “Kaptain Robbie Knievel,” took place in 2011 at a casino in Coachella, when he cleared a succession of tractor-trailers.
He also appeared on CHiPs and Hawaii Five-O, as well as the 2005 A&E reality show Knievel’s Wild Ride, and was the subject of the 2017 documentary Chasing Evel: The Robbie Knievel Story. His three daughters, as well as his brother, are among the survivors. Evel Knievel survived all of his crashes but died in November 2007 at the age of 69 from a lung disease. In films and television programs, he was played by George Hamilton and Sam Elliott.