The roller coaster he’s ridden 28,000-plus times is closing. Now what?
FAYETTEVILLE — The other day, before boarding for the 28,466th time a rock star rocket of a roller coaster that has in the three years since it opened attracted worldwide acclaim for its breathtaking bends, James Fordham explained his fascination, his obsession even, with riding it over and over again.
He sat at a table in a back room just off the near-empty game room at this cheerily-named but barely-known Fun Spot America amusement park south of Atlanta and told how he had ridden that coaster, ArieForce One, as many as 146 times in a single day.
How he once amassed 1,000 rides in 11 days. How, all told, he has spent the equivalent of more than 40 full days of his life on board. How ArieForce One, which debuted in March of 2023, hits 64 mph and boasts the longest zero-gravity stall in the country. That is, how it makes riders feel weightless for a couple of seconds as the track twists and drives through a semi-loop, rendering them, for a flash, afloat.
And how Fordham rides it most days after work and often clocks 70 or so rides an evening, not to mention 130 rides a day on weekends.
But first one must realize there is, at least in part, a very good and some would say very sad reason why he has tallied so many rides. Not many people, or at least not enough in these parts, even know the coaster exists. Rarely were there crowds, throngs in line to ride it. Fordham could sometimes stay on board indefinitely.
Which is also, again in part, the story of the demise of the theme park that is ArieForce One’s home.
And, come Sunday evening, why Fun Spot America will close for good.
“If anybody is gonna cry,” Fordham said, “it’s gonna be me.”
Well, him and the man who dreamed up the coaster, John Arie Jr., who owns a pair of other Fun Spots in central Florida. Arie himself happened by while Fordham was describing his love of the coaster.
Arie recognized Fordham and said, “That guy’s a legend right there.”
Earlier, on that recent morning, Arie told a reporter the story of ArieForce One and how it was an homage to his father, John Arie Sr., who founded Fun Spot America in the 1990s.
The park where the Fayetteville Fun Spot sits first opened in 1990 as Dixieland Fun Park under different ownership. In 2017, the younger Arie bought it in hopes of turning it into a regional attraction.
After the pandemic, he built the coaster that has put the park on the map for coaster fans from far and wide. Its name, ArieForce One, is a pun on his family name and the presidential jet.
The coaster is 154 feet tall, its highest hill jutting above the treetops along Ga. 85 in Fayette County. Its track, a ribbon, a streak of red, white and blue, dwarfs an otherwise low-slung spread of go-cart tracks, ordinary carnival rides — bumper cars, carousels, a Tilt-a-Whirl — and a seemingly forgotten Old West-style strip of a facade that houses a snack bar and an arcade.
The scene is stark with its modern, manmade-steel skyscape coaster lording over otherwise nondescript suburbia. Think country airstrip with a Space Shuttle on the tarmac.
“It’s a top-10 coaster in the world,” Arie said of his creation, built by Rocky Mountain Construction, an Idaho firm revered for its thrill-making prowess. “I was just hoping it would hit in the top 50.”
The first year, it was ranked 17th on a list comprised by Amusement Today, a trade publication. Lately it has ranked in the top 10. But now it’s closing.
“Not enough attendance,” Arie said, his eyes welling at the realization that you can fashion something stunning and still not lure enough thrill seekers. “It’s horrible. It’s sad. It’s emotional.”
He described “sleepless nights and nightmares” about what to do, how not to close. “I tried to hang in there as long as I could,” Arie said.
Ordinarily, he said, a new coaster spurs a 30% increase in park attendance.
“This one,” he said, motioning to ArieForce One, “didn’t show any kind of increase. And it’s a top coaster in the world.”
He believes he promoted it enough and said he purposely built the coaster along the highway for visibility. “You can’t miss it.”
Unless, of course, you never pass this way in what is a largely suburban notch between freeways in the Camp Creek basin south of I-285.
“Maybe there wasn’t enough to complement it in the park. I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.”
So what will become of it?
“Don’t know,” was the only answer Arie could muster. He said people have been in touch, inquiring, but that no sale or relocation of the coaster is imminent.
On Wednesday morning, while Arie stood near the coaster at the park’s entrance, an enthusiast from nearby Hapeville walked up. Jonathan Foulk, 42, had ridden more than 300 coasters across the country. He was back for roughly his 30th ride on ArieForce One. Foulk thanked Arie and said he was sad to see the park close.
“I want to know where it’s going,” Foulk said of the coaster.
“I’ve been contacted by a lot of people. A lot,” Arie said.
“Well, it’s a one of a kind,” Foulk said. “You should be very proud.”
“Keep your fingers crossed,” Arie told him. “We’re gonna find a home. This thing cannot go down to the ground.”
Throughout the day, coaster lovers from across the country filed in. For a month now as word as spread about the closing, many have made pilgrimages here.
Dillon Young of Sarasota, Florida, came to take in the coaster’s famous stall, one that he said lasts long enough for him and ride mates to play quick rounds of rock-paper-scissors. He said the ride is “a blast — and that’s a bit of an understatement.”
Jessica Gardner, a social-media creator who posts for coaster enthusiasts, flew in from Southern California to, as she put it, “pay my respects.”
“All of us,” she said, “have our fingers crossed that this isn’t the end of ArieForce One.”
None of them perhaps more so than Fordham, the super rider. As he sat at a table near the snack bar not far from a shut-off golf simulator, Fordham went on describing how someone like him comes to be swept into a roller coaster’s thrall.
He was a math whiz in high school in Macon before going on to earn an engineering degree at Georgia Tech. He works as a quality-control and purchasing manager for a company in Fairburn that makes gear for utility workers. His lives about half an hour from the park.
He was once into tournament-level duplicate bridge. He is soft-spoken, lean and trim with a look that is, well, aerodynamic. His dark, close-cropped hair doesn’t look a lick out of place, even after half a dozen rides, during which he appears about as fazed as a guy on a merry-go-round. But inside he is abuzz.
“It’s therapy for me,” he said. “Everybody else is, like, rattled and I’m, like, ‘This is soothing, it’s relaxing to me.’ … Feeling the weightlessness ... I love all that. My body likes being in motion.”
The ride is not unlike sitting aboard a bullet fired through a rifle muzzle — for 45 seconds — or being flushed down a fun house drain.
Fordham’s favorite part of the ride is when the coaster forces him skyward, his body sent sailing while the coaster yanks him back, a sensation, he said, “like you’re gonna die if you’re not connected.”
Armed with season passes, he has long been a regular. He watched the coaster being built and was aboard the first public ride. He rode it 13 times the first day.
Then he began going on weekends, befriending other park frequenters. One day, someone mentioned trying to be the first person to go on 1,000 rides. Cool, Fordham said. He was in. Two months later, he was the first one to 1,000. His ride total climbed as the park, for a time, was open year-round, or at least when temperatures were enough above freezing.
Fordham has had his share of what he calls “Zen rides,” when no one else is aboard. On the park’s slower days, he could rack up rides, or “laps” as enthusiasts call them, sometimes not having to get off because there weren’t enough other riders waiting to get on.
“What I’ve done, nobody else has ever done in the world,” he said. “Nobody has gotten this many rides on a roller coaster in this short a time.”
World records in the realm of coaster rides can be nigh unverifiable and rely on a rider’s own claims. A Minnesota man has reportedly logged more than 30,000 rides on a coaster there, but he has been riding it since it opened in 2007. Fordham, who had hoped to catch him, has tallied his total in less than three and a half years. Staff and regulars at the park don’t doubt his math.
In one season alone he tallied 12,000-plus rides on ArieForce One. But he also is a such thrill-ride devotee that he has also ridden, as he tells it, 1,301 coasters in 19 countries.
When he embarked on his ride-tallying quest on ArieForce One, when he’d lie down to sleep at night he sometimes felt like he was still riding. His body has since adjusted.
“When I was first riding a lot, I would dream about it in my sleep,” Fordham said. “In my dreaming mind, I was counting laps. ‘No, I can’t count these, I’m dreaming.’”
People ask him how he keeps track of his number of rides. “In my mind,” he’ll tell them.
As for his stamina? “I don’t get food, I don’t get water, I don’t get tired,” he said. “Everybody says I’m not quite human. That’s probably true. When you’re on a mission, you do what you need to do.”
The other day, on what was for him ride no. 28,466, he looked as calm as a guy on a couch in a coffee shop. He snapped his seat belt with a deft flick and sat ramrod still, yoga-pose-like. On the first drop, his arms shot up but he did not scream. He was instead a bird in flight — one with the steel track, the breeze and the blurs of twisted gravity.
So now what?
He joked about moving to wherever ArieForce One might land, but he is sorry to see it go. He has made friends at Fun Spot. He has become a fixture, a minor celebrity even, though he shirks publicity. He is grounded enough to know that not too many people know about him — or for that matter Fun Spot — at all.
“I’m not famous,” Fordham said. “Nobody knows who I am. … I’ll find something else.”