8 minute read
Free Radicals
he British city street is under pressure. It’s trapped in a slow-grind crisis where stress is rife and anxiety is the new normal. But within its concrete canyons, beasts are stirring – and it’s not the rats. Sitting astride burly, overbuilt mountain bikes are a row of riders in full-face helmets and a patchwork uniform of gloves, skinny jeans, unbuttoned shirts and freeride jerseys.
They stare down from a 6m-high asphalt overpass, gazes locked onto a double set of red-brick stairs bordered by concrete slopes, studded with rocks, and scattered with the usual urban debris: broken glass, cigarette ends… Breaking their focus, the riders split, peeling off back up the road and out of sight.
Stop and stare in a city and eventually the street will notice you. Here in Portsmouth, pedestrians have begun to crowd along the top of the overpass, looking down at the stairs and the small portable ramp that has been set up at the top. The rising whoosh of fat rubber tyres accelerated by pedal power reaches their ears as a rider rounds the corner, launches off the ramp and hurtles down the stairs, whipping his back wheel in the air. But he doesn’t quite clear the platform between the flights of stairs, clipping his back wheel and, with a tortured crunch, smacking the underside of his bike’s frame into the edge of a step. Only strength and experience prevent him from being catapulted face-first into the pavement.
The rider swears into the city air. “That ramp really launches you,” reports Simon Brettle, the 31-yearold carpenter and mountain biker. “My landing zone is exactly the same size as my bike – there is literally no room for error.”
The street is built from intersecting concrete blades. There are harsh, unyielding angles everywhere you look. It’s a far cry from the rounded, flowing lines and loose dirt of an off-road mountain-bike trail. “I find that terrifying, to be honest,” says another of the riders, Josh Reynolds, who is sponsored by Sick Bikes and works as a fitness equipment engineer. “Stair sets and bricks are a lot harsher. When you start pushing it, everything becomes more highconsequence.” Consequences leave scars, and Reynolds’ injuries from both MTB and BMX include a dented skull, blown ankles, a shattered collarbone and smashed back teeth. He’s 24 years old.
“If you’re riding off-road, you’ll have a nice big jump with a long landing to hit, which will slope off into the flat,” he continues. “It’s not angular; it doesn’t go from 45° to flat within an inch.” Street geometry and the arithmetic of impact is violent and uncompromising, but Reynolds isn’t complaining. The riders all wear adversity like a badge of honour – it shows they belong. At one point, Brettle and local rider Ben Matthews compete to gross us out by flexing their injured wrist joints – bones clunk and push against the skin, unanchored by any ligaments that may have survived previous crashes.
The bravado isn’t just a front, and you don’t ride a mountain bike in the street to be subtle; it’s a statement of intent. Reynolds grew up riding a BMX, but ‘mountain-bike street’ has remoulded him – he doesn’t even think in the same way. “BMXs are brakeless, small wheels, no suspension, so you can look at something small on the street, like a ledge, and think, ‘I can grind that, I can 360° hop off that,’” he says. “But when you’ve got a big bike, you’d walk straight past it – you’re looking for things only the craziest person would ever dream of doing on a BMX.”
The thing about street furniture is that it’s literally set in stone. Jumping a long double – or triple – stair set will write your name into legend. Once, on London’s Pall Mall, with an audience of 50 riders, Brettle landed an almost 7m drop off a high, rounded wall to the bottom steps of a triple set. “That was the biggest drop I’ve ever done,” he reveals. “I got a ticket for that one.”
Each of these guys says the same thing: riding the street fundamentally changes how you see it for ever. “Other people go down a road and all they see is the road and a pavement,” says Reynolds. “I’ll go down the same street and be looking at that bank and that stair set and that drop. You can never switch it off.”
Ben Matthews races enduro events, but takes a different approach to mountain-bike street. “It’s about being able to take the hard hits, but also knowing how to look at a wall or a bank and think, ‘Oh, I can jump up onto that and 180° off,’” says the 29-year-old, who works in carbon-fibre engineering. “You need to be able to have great imagination. It’s not like trail-riding, where you’re just following the path in front of you.”
The street has always been there, and mountain bikes aren’t news, so why is the underground bubbling again now? Why do we have outriders on our thoroughfares? For these guys, there’s a practical reason: new tech has been developed. Portable ‘pack-a-ramps’ such as those made by MTB Hopper can be carried from spot to spot as backpacks. These flatpack ramps take minutes to set up and act as a force multiplier for potential tricks and jumps, easing take-off angles between floors and banks (which rob you of speed) and allowing for launches over obstacles. “Some of the ramps feel literally like getting sent to the moon,” says Matthews.
One ramp has been used to turn a grassy bank into the landing zone for a high-speed big-air jump on Portsmouth seafront. Spotters are deployed to watch out for pedestrians, then the riders, unsure if they are going to be moved on, throw themselves into jumping it. “You’ve got to be quick,” says Matthews. “Get in there, set it up, go. It’s all or nothing, basically. You try and get as much out of it as you can, and as soon as you see security coming you just grab your bags and run. I’ve never been arrested, but it has been very close – you try not to be an idiot and actually respect the area, and you avoid doing any damage.”
Matthews races up to the ramp. It strains to absorb his charge, emitting a disconcerting ker-klunk, then he’s in the air, soaring against the sky as it sits grey and heavy above the waves. He’s reaching for a mid-air trick when it all goes wrong. The riders’ landings all sound violent, but this is like scrap metal crashing down a mineshaft. They rush to his aid, but he’s OK – kind of. “He slipped a foot and broke his saddle with his balls,” says Brettle, incredulously. It’s no joke – the saddle’s metal rails are both neatly sheared in half. It’s suddenly obvious why the riders favour a distinctly old-school set-up of overbuilt aluminium frames, 26in (66cm) wheels and downhill tyres, running at 40psi, rather than trail pressures of 25psi, with extra spacers in their suspension. “The bikes take a beating,” says Matthews. “You need something that’s super-burly to take the impacts, because it isn’t like riding dirt – you’re landing on solid concrete.”
Brettle is getting a new frame custom-built for his style – by Frome-based bespoke bike-makers BTR Fabrications – because the modern trend for low, slack and long wheelbase bikes is unsuited to the short, brutal landings of the street. “I ride an aluminium bike, 26in wheels, old-school – just has to be hardcore.” Even within the world of mountain biking, these guys are iconoclasts. As it turns out, they all have very practical day jobs, from carpenter to carbon-fibre engineer, so they’re familiar with breaking points. They know what it is to push metal, bone, carbon fibre and sinew to the limit – and past it.
“That’s the end of my day,” grimaces Matthews, who walks like John Wayne for the next few hours. If they’re shaken by his crash, the other riders don’t show it. They’re focused on the finale: another ramp jump, this time off a 3m wall, over a pavement and onto a banking in the car park below. The run-up is along tarmac to a gravel path and then grass. The ramp makes it possible, but the run-in is “sub-optimal enough” for Henry Durman to have a high-speed wash-out on the lumpy grass, just before the ramp. Picking himself up, the 23-year-old marine engineer and rigger shouts down from the top of the wall, “Aah! I’m shaking like a sick dog!”
It’s another high-consequence jump with a tiny landing zone. Get it wrong and you could land flat on unyielding tarmac and detonate your knees, or go nose in and be ejected straight off the bike into something pitilessly solid. You can’t see the landing from the top, so the riders are having to line themselves up by looking at a distant lamppost as they jump.
As Reynolds launches off the ramp, he doesn’t seem phased – he whips his hands off the bar to throw his arms behind him and land a ‘suicide nohander’. The landing is the hardest of the day: every millimetre of his downhill bike’s 180mm suspension is called upon as his arms and legs fight to absorb the rest of the impact. After a flurry of fist bumps, he dismounts and demonstrates his commitment by taking off his shoe to adjust the brace he’s wearing, following recent surgery on both ankles.
Despite his scare, Durman sends the next jump, landing with a whoop. He also races downhill, but for him the buzz you get from a street jump can’t be beaten off-road. “With street, you’ve only got one chance to get it right, which is so exhilarating. There’s so much adrenalin coursing through your system, you’re up there just shaking, waiting to drop in.”
What makes MTB street so liberating for these riders is the very fact that it hasn’t been built for them.
Downhill and enduro tracks have big jumps, but they are designed to be predictable and safe. “The distance between where you take off and land is a nice smooth arc,” says Reynolds. “But with street, if you’re jumping off a wall, you go up but there’s still 10-15ft [3-5m] to drop – the arc is lopsided.” The consequences of getting it wrong are greater, but so too are the rewards.
It’s this process of overcoming obstacles from dramatic new angles that seems to define how MTB street riders interact with their environment. Urban worlds can seem compressed, buckling under external strains and internal angst. Normally, in a world under siege from itself, options narrow, possibilities are blocked, and self-expression is stifled. For minds under pressure, streets are recast as prisons. But for the street rider, stairs become launch pads, walls become roads, and obstacles become old friends. Perhaps being able to see your street from a radically new perspective does a hard reset on your relationship to it. Who knows, it could even set you free.
Words MATT RAY
Photography DAVID GOLDMAN
