For the many of us who ride and talk about bikes, it’s almost always about getting from A to B, and often as fast and as efficiently possible. But can there be another way? Touring the world, a group of some of the world’s most skilled and physically strong riders dedicate their lives to doing exactly the opposite.
Their aim is to go nowhere on a bike but round in inventive, breathtaking circles. And they do so with such flair, entertainment and extreme daring, that, as a road cyclist never interested when young in smaller bikes or skateboards, their performance has managed to re-orientate how I think about riding a bike. Commuting, touring, riding a sportive or occasional race, I’ve always thought about riding two wheels as akin to running. But this is like dancing.
The World Series of Fise 2016 (Festival International des Sports Extrêmes) began in May this year in Montpellier, before going Croatia, the US, then Canada this weekend, before concluding in China in October. Now in its 20th year, Fise has become immensely popular, watched by crowds as big and animated as any grand road tour. The Montpellier leg alone attracted half a million spectators.
Alongside other extreme events on skateboards and rollerblades, BMX and mountain bike riders perform on a variety of courses, slopes and surfaces made of wood, earth and metal. En route, instead of battling the clock, they compete against each other like spinning-top gladiators, twisting, and somersaulting with death-defying manoeuvres. They are gymnasts whose bodies merge with their bikes, like a new iteration of characters from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.
Each performance is a competition for prize money, not to mention a chance to show off, but as much as that they also seems to express sheer, undiluted joy on a bike. When the BMX flat stage final had to be cancelled in Montpellier due to unexpected rain, several competitors decided to stick around until the showers stopped and just entertain the crowd with their skills.
Current overall leader of this discipline, France’s Matthias Dandois, is a household name in his own country, and regularly appears on primetime TV, but how many people in Britain have heard of the equally skilled Lee Musselwhite from Torquay? Or BMX spine event superstar Mark Webb from Portsmouth, far better known abroad? Or indeed that three out of the current top 10 BMX riders in the World Series are British?
Culturally of course this is a very different scene to the serious, though no less friendly culture of road cycling, where conversations are often about Strava, group riding and cassette size, rather than trick manoeuvres by dudes with baseball caps and knee-pads inside black jeans listening to hip hop.
Even though top Fise professionals continue well into their 30s, the two worlds generally don’t meet, but the closest thing to this seen in road cycling is the charismatic Slovakian sprinter Peter Sagan, who began his early career riding mountain bikes, and is still frequently seen doing a wheelie in the middle or at the end of a road race, and displays what Fise riders are all about – panache.
So why are bike gymnastic events less of a big deal in the UK? Is it because we don’t have the weather for it? Are they seen as more of a teenage fringe event that’s more about skateboard fashion than serious sport? The UK has a reasonably large number of urban skateboard parks and mountain bike courses, halfpipes and exhibition events, and this is certainly a sport that comes up from the streets, but even as the UK continues to blossom into a golden age of cycling, Team GB scooping Olympic and Paralympic medals, with British riders regularly dominating the Tour De France, other biking events get little coverage.
Even as a race event, mountain biking is largely ignored in the media, despite British success. Rachel Atherton and Danny Hart were recently crowned downhill world champions at the UCI Downhill Mountain Bike World Championships in Val di Sole, with Atherton gaining four gold medals this year.
What is it like to compete in such events? “It’s very tough,” says Musselwhite, who tells me over dinner how thousands of hours of practice can do terrible things to your joints. I saw Webb reveal how his knee joints move in an unnaturally loose way from multiple crashes in the BMX park, where broken bones are a common occurrence.
Competing for prizes can also be unpredictable, just as much as performing in any talent competition. Are the judges’ decisions ever controversial? “All the time,” he nods. And weather can also be a huge unknown. In the BMX flat event, Musselwhite was keeping back his best moves for the final, that was cancelled due to rain, so his interim standing of fourth had to count at the end.
The MTB slopestyle is a jaw-dropping event where mountain bikers set off down an extreme drop to loop, pose and shape over man-made hills. One slight moment of mistiming and painful accidents are inevitable. Watching a tryout event for amateurs (these are plentiful at Fise) you could see how difficult this really is. Sudden gusts of wind, including Montpellier also became a hazard, leading to multiple crashes. Are all the moves planned or are they ever improvised? British rider Daryl Brown told me, “Yes you plan it all in advance, but if you suddenly find your landing is not right, you just have to think fast and keep going.”
Watching it is one thing, and doing it another, but I get back on my bike on the road, I’m left with the feeling that with all its excitement, unpredictability, bravery and skill, dancing on a bike is certainly going places.
• The latest round of the Fise World Series took place last weekend in Edmonton, Canada. The final round is in Chengdu, China on 28-30 October
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