I’ve done descents at those speeds, but holy goodness they’re terrifying filmed from a pursuit cam.
This is a fun video. Kinda makes you just want to get on your bike a ride. Cool to see just fun riding instead of schalping berms, flips, and doing shit in farflung locations, unless you consider Manchester exotic.
HY! Also fun to see someone more my physical size in a video like that.
My new found downtown 9-5 commute has me pretty concerned with everyone elses’ bike ability
Got me thinking about maybe making some instructional videos of basic “riding how-tos”
First one will probably be shifting, some basic concepts like dumping your gears as your pull up to a stop and shifting as you accelerate. Looking for some ideas/input
To be effective these need to be simple and approachable.
Optimize for the TikTok audience and you have a winner there.
use the robot voice and jump cut no less than once every two seconds
Make sure to use the oh no oh no no no song
make one about how if you use the front brake you automatically flip over
I love that one and I love that some people manage to achieve it.
I can’t even begin to imagine what this means
Years ago when I was first getting into bikes, a new friend who serving as my guide lent me two DVDs (or maybe they were VHS tapes), and 20 years later I’ve now found them both on YouTube:
(Both uploaded by the filmmaker so presumably fine legally.)
Watching these again, I so badly want a road bike of that era - aluminum skeleton, level top tube, rim brakes, 9/10-speed Dura-Ace (though I’d go slightly anachronistic and use 11-speed SRAM). I love seeing the 23mm (or maybe 21mm?) tires with weird green stripes on them and the terrible ergo bars wrapped with Cinelli splash tape, though I’d never have any of that on a bike of mine. (I hated ergo bars even at the time.)
I’ve never been super into racing myself, but the nostalgia factor of these documentaries is really high for me. In 2004ish I was living in a small town in northern Illinois, attending grad school for a subject I didn’t really like, and had no idea what to do with myself or who I wanted to be. I knew one guy who rode bikes and there was one tiny bike shop in town, that was it. These documentaries (and the various Performance Bike, SuperGo and Nashbar [all three separate companies at the time!] catalogs my friend passed along) provided an entryway into a culture to which I had no other connection.
Kids have it so easy with YouTube these days.
The green tires are Vittoria Pave, but they only come in 24 or 28c.
There’s a good Cavendish doc on Netflix.