He’s almost 40 and rides a kid’s bike
At fifteen, when I starting riding bikes seriously, learning tricks and enjoying those times with my friends, we’d watch a lot of bike videos together before and after we’d go riding. On a typical bright Saturday morning after a sleepover, we’d wake up and have some cereal. We’d go to the sofa and shove a VHS tape into the player. Some of the pro riders on the videos would eventually become heroes for me.
Someone performs a stunt on camera, the video is edited into a montage with music. You sit and stare at this imagery and it gives you satisfaction, often making you want to perform the trick yourself.
A bike trick is a very interesting human construct. Let me try to convey this as best I can, and maybe you have your own interpretation as to why it has evolved this way. You take the normal state of riding a bike. But then you alter it. You create a position or maneuver in which you are doing something unique with the bike. For example, you stand on the front peg with one foot and twirl the back end of the bike around. Now you are still in the same position behind the handlebars, but the rest of the bike is in front of you. You coast behind the bike and use your free foot to assist with balance on this one wheel. From this position, you either continue with another transitional stunt, or do the reverse and bring the bike back to a normal state. You “pull” the trick when you know that you have performed the maneuver and returned to normal riding without touching on the ground.
To simplify it into steps:
1. Riding normally (relaxed state)
2. Create difficult situation for yourself where you are likely to fall down.
3. Return to normal riding without breaking your balance
I’d say there are two reasons why we call a bike stunt a ‘trick’. One is again how unique it looks to the viewer. The more strange the position, or the more perceived complexity, the more magical it is. This includes aerial stunts. When someone flies twelve feet over spinning the handlebars in mid-air, people describe a sense of awe. They imagine what it would be like to fly that high and maybe the adrenaline rush and risk of landing safely The second reason we say they are tricks is more with sensations the rider experiences.? There are many sensations during a trick ranging from fear and urgency to relaxation and there is a process where you learn to fit yourself in that perfect position where minimal force is required to maintain balance. ? Maybe it’s the sensation of a perfect spinning motion where your mind and body are so dialed into the move that your focus turns inward. Over the course of learning the maneuver people have described creating a muscle memory, where performing it becomes easier and consistency can be achieved and easily returned to even between long periods without practice.
When you walk around the block, you don’t think to yourself that it is an amazing act of balance and performance of the nervous system. But there was a time when you were learning to walk that you might have had to cross a distance of five or ten feet to reach your mothers arms as you were encouraged by her to go a little bit further. ? The excitement has faded with walking for most people just as the trickiness of a bike stunt wears off once it can be achieved too easily. To the rider it ceases to be a trick although a new viewer might be impressed by it.
This raises several questions with me. What force would encourage a person to perform a non standard riding maneuver just to see if they could pull out of it successfully?? Why would we create a self-induced difficulty through non-standard use of a bicycle? We almost take this for granted, but it’s actually quite strange. Try to pretend being an alien observing this type of behavior in humans. Can you come up with a theory??? I draw from Joseph Campbell’s writing on cross cultural heroes in mythology and try to imagine how this behavior might be part of us innately.
Tonight I was reading an interview with one of my heroes from the bike videos I watched over and over. Hero might be the wrong word, as I don’t really want to be like him in any way, but there are certain aspects of his riding that I would like to experience for myself.? Wait though. Maybe he truly is a hero then. If I would like to experience some of the things he’s done, if he’s become part of my memory, if he is a subject of the stories I tell, then doesn’t that make him a hero?
Chase Gouin is his name. Read what Chase Gouin says about flatland freestyle that goes a little deeper than you might expect from a 35 year old who rides a kids bike.
About why I got into bikes and stayed with it for so long? Camradarie is one thing. But I enjoy riding alone too. My reasons have changed over time too. There has always been the narcissism that goes with completing a stunt successfully. But now I think of the enormous range of emotion and tactile experience in biking. I suppose I could describe it, but if you’ve skied down a mountain or swam in a lake, then you can fill that in yourself.
July 22, 2007 at 4:37 am | bikes, freestyle, philosophy | No comment
images from the past
When I was a junior back in Missouri State University, I spent a lot of time in the basketball courts between classes. On warm days you’d find me out there a couple times of week on my bike riding flatland. It was a great surface to ride on. A couple tricks I have only landed once in my life and that was the place it happened. One day in early spring, a photographer was there shooting around the area. He happened to come by my favorite spot while I was riding flatland and snapped a few pics from afar. I remember the nice photographer waving to me.
The next morning I woke up to find a surprising email. A fraternity brother sent out a group email congratulating me for getting my picture in the Springfield News-Leader. It was a pretty cool shot. I didn’t want to buy a paper, but I was able to grab some tossed copies in the lobby of the dorm. Pretty nice shot I thought.
Tonight I was googling my name. I always like to see what pops up. Crazy I know, but I don’t feel guilty about it or anything, it’s just curiosity. The News-Leader used the old photo again for a story just a few days ago. I’m glad I found stumbled across it. I’ll see if I can actualy get a print this time. Flatland freestyle frozen in time.
May 28, 2006 at 4:01 am | bikes, freestyle, nostalgia, photography | No comment
extreme sportscasting
I don’t know how stuff like this slips by me. It was on ESPN and some other news. A skateboarder named Danny Way made a jump over the Great Wall of China on July 9. After searching for a minute, the video of the event was easy to find. Danny’s website shows all five jumps, and fortunately each one of them is from a slightly different camera angle so you get enough to really see the sheer mass of this ramp.
I know this event was covered by ESPN but I wonder if it was shown live. I’m thinking probably not because, well frankly it’s not in America and it’s not football or sports talk, so it probably didn’t even make it on the 4am segment. This leads me to what I hate about American TV and sports in general (major commercial sports). All the cool stuff is ignored and replaced by uselessness banter. You get ten seconds of the actual play and then 15 minutes of people’s bullshit about it. They talk about it beforehand, then they don’t shut up during the event. Then afterwards all of the people wearing ties with their shirtsleeves rolled up want to talk to each other some more about it. In the million of interviews I’ve seen with athletes after a game for “press conferences” I have never seen anything valuable said. Things like “We had a goal and we worked hard out there.” Wow, that’s realistic. Why not show me the coach busting somebody’s balls in the locker room for totally blowing that play.
Dear ESPN (CC all local news channels), I’m really tired of two things. 1. You are not the goddamn radio. You are TV. How dumb must your viewers be to you that you must talk us through everything. If I took my wife and a friend to a game and the entire time my friend sat there and talked in my ear, telling me what I was seeing, guess who is losing a testicle that day? Answer me this question ESPN. If you go out and buy a DVD and put it in your player to watch a movie, is the commentary on or off by default? And why is that do you think?
2. The only thing worse than men sportscasting is women. In fact, the more knowledgeable the women is at her banter the more stupid she sounds. Because no matter what degree she has, no matter how clear, cute or funny her voice is, she has absolutely no relation to the five black guys on the court. To talk about their feelings, their political moves within the organization, their strategy, wouldn’t it help if this 5’2″ woman was actually one of them?
And before you start getting pissed off, this is not about rights, equality or anything that degrades another person. This is about the consistency of a moment. Sports is a moment in time for people. People in this country schedule their lives around it. People beat their kids for it. People alter their brain chemistry and damage their livers for it. I’d say that’s an important moment for people. The moment requires preparation. You must set up the environment, get appropriate supplies. In fact, to enjoy these moment, billions are spent each year. Stadiums, AM radios, flags, TVs, jerseys, the money is sucked away.
So when you have a moment like this, it’s like you are at a movie theater. The environment darkens around you the screen lights up, you are pulled into this world. You are part of the moment of the event. Then what happens? A baby starts crying, burning popcorn sets off the smoke alarm, telemarketers ring your phone, anything that can take you out of the moment will occur.
This is what a women sportscaster does, she takes you out of the moment. Most television sports are mens sports. Disagree? Football, baseball, soccer, hockey, Nascar, golf. Should I go on? One fine day somebody put a women in the box with the microphone thinking she’d do a fine job talking, narrating, giving her opinion, bantering. I don’t care that she played in college. I don’t care if she has some cute story about going to games with her dad.
The need for a commentator to help us watch the action is difficult to swallow anyway, but I’ll forgive this because frankly TV is a small viewing medium for the expanse of a sporting event. I’ll forgive the man who must tell me about the necessary details of this game. But I want this man to sound like the game, to seamlessly fit in the moment. He should be a former player, a coach, former coach, players father. Someone who has something to do with it. Basically it shouldn’t be this guy.
Just like I wouldn’t expect to turn on NASCAR and expect the commentator to be black. (unfortunately, but true) I also wouldn’t expect him to speak with a Russian, British or German accent either. They aren’t part of the sport, nor of the moment. I don’t watch a training video and expect a five year old to describe the process of lithographic printing to me. It doesn’t fit the character. My expectations require certain things to maintain the moment, so why are ESPN and other broadcasters inserting things that break the moment? I don’t even love sports like other people but I think this is still just plain stupid.
Now on the other hand, if I’m watching Women’s sports. Swimming, diving, basketball or anything else, the broadcaster better be a woman. If not, they are breaking the fourth wall. It’s 2:40, time for bed.
