We sometimes like to think that we have seen it all, only to be proved wrong time and time again.

While downhill skateboard racing has its dangers, we somehow doubt that Ryan Vitale was expecting an innocent looking deer to be one of them.

It all happened during a practice run at this past weekend’s Buffalo Bill Downhill Bloodspill race on Lookout Mountain when Vitale along with many other skateboarders, were rolling at speeds of up to 45mph (72 km/h).

One of Vitale’s fellow racers, Mike Paproski, who had mounted a GoPro 2 camera on his helmet to record the run, was coming from behind when all of a sudden, a deer crossed into the road.

Vitale is seen in the video attempting a last-second maneuver to evade the hapless deer but at these speeds and without brakes, there wasn’t much he could do and ended up crashing into the animal.

“Ryan Vitale, the guy who got hit, was done for the weekend, but it was pretty much just road rash, bumps and bruises, no broken bones,” Paproski told the Westword news site.

As for the deer, Paproski says it also made it out alive: “At the very end of the video, if you watch it to the end, you’ll see a deer crossing at the bottom. That’s the same deer! They said it was stunned a little bit and it sat there and thought about it for a second, and then it just jumped up and ran off.”

Head over the break to watch the footage from the incident for yourself.

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