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Danny MacAskill, perched on high. Glasgow, Scotland, 2012.
Angus MacAskill was one of the biggest men who ever lived. Some have claimed that he was history’s largest “true giant”—a giant who was not afflicted with gigantism, exhibiting no growth abnormalities or hormonal irregularities. His body was huge but proportional. He stood seven foot nine and weighed upwards of four hundred pounds. The palms of his hands were said to have measured six inches by twelve; his shoulders stretched nearly four feet across. Herculean feats of strength were attributed to him: he hoisted a twenty-five-hundred-pound anchor to chest height and carried it the length of a wharf, he single-handedly set a schooner’s mast, he tore a fishing boat in two from stem to stern by yanking hard on a rope, he lifted a full-grown horse over a fence, he raised a 140-gallon barrel of Scotch whiskey to his lips and drank from it as from a jar.
He was born in 1825 in Berneray, Scotland. When he was six, he moved with his family to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. At age twenty-four, he joined P. T. Barnum’s circus. Giants, Barnum wrote in his autobiography, “were always literally great features in my establishment, and they oftentimes afforded me, as well as my patrons, food for much amusement as well as wonder.” Barnum paired MacAskill with one of his star attractions, the three-foot-four dwarf General Tom Thumb, in an act that consisted of sight gags. Tom Thumb would tap-dance on the palm of MacAskill’s hand or roost in his jacket pocket; sometimes the dwarf and the giant would square off in simulated fisticuffs. As a sideshow performer, MacAskill toured the United States, Europe, and beyond. He performed for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. (The queen presented him with a traditional Scottish Highland costume—Tartan kilt, tweed jacket and waistcoat, sporran pouch—tailored to his massive frame.) Eventually, MacAskill retired from show business and returned to the village of St. Anns on Cape Breton, where he ran a gristmill and, later, a dry goods store. He died in August 1863, at age thirty-eight, of brain fever. His coffin, locals said, was big enough to have served as a boat that could float three men across St. Anns Bay.
There is a replica of that coffin on display at the Giant Angus MacAskill Museum, which sits near the main commercial strip in the small village of Dunvegan on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. The exhibit holds other artifacts: a life-sized statue of MacAskill that towers above a life-sized Tom Thumb statue, one of MacAskill’s sweaters, a pair of enormous socks, an extra-long bed, and a chair modeled on one that MacAskill himself used. The chair is so large that adult museumgoers look like children when they pose for photos seated in it, their feet dangling inches above the floor.
The museum devoted to the giant is in fact quite small. It occupies a one-room thatch-roofed cottage at the bottom of a garden, outside the family home of Peter MacAskill. MacAskill, who claims Angus as an ancestor, opened the museum in 1989. The following year, MacAskill’s youngest child, four-year-old Danny, was given a bicycle as a gift. It was a black-and-white child’s Raleigh that MacAskill had found in a dumpster. The boy learned to ride in just a few days, and right away he began trying to do unusual things on the bike, barreling up and down the garden path, yanking the front wheel upward pop-a-wheelie-style, weaving and skidding, jerking the bicycle on top of, and over, rocks, chairs, and other objects. Danny was a wild kid, energetic and fearless, and from the time he’d learned to walk, his parents, realizing they had little choice, had let him crash around the front yard undeterred. He spent his days climbing trees, clambering to the roof of his parents’ car and leaping off, scaling the side of the family home. Now he wondered: What would it be like to ride a bicycle on a tree or up the wall of a building, to summit the Giant Angus MacAskill Museum on his bike and fly back to the ground below? If he could climb and jump using his two legs, why couldn’t he do it on two wheels?
By the time Danny was five years old, he was a familiar figure in Dunvegan, a little boy on a bicycle that he manipulated with startling ease, as if it was an extension of his limbs. He pedaled a mile uphill to school in the morning, and in the afternoon, he raced back with a mob of kids, all older than he, on downhill runs through the village’s bendy streets. The older boys taught him how to ride hands-free, and he made a habit of it, streaking along the roads with his arms overhead. He rode whenever possible, in fair and poor conditions, in the daylight and in the dark. Winter days on Skye are short, and the weather is raw and wet. At three-thirty or four in the afternoon, the sun would disappear into the sea of the Little Minch, off the island’s west coast, and Danny would bike for hours in the dark, on roads slick with rain.
In any case, he preferred his wheels off the ground. He learned to jump from the curb to the street and back again, and worked to increase the length of his leaps, extending the time he floated above the pavement, spokes spinning in the open air. His mental map of Dunvegan was a chart of obstacles and jumps at the level of the centimeter. He memorized which spots on which slab of curb he needed to hit at speed in order to go airborne. He biked so much that he altered the terrain, molding ridges of turf into miniature ramps he could kick off to get air.
By age eight, he was making bigger jumps, descending to the grass or gravel from walls and benches as high as four feet. He got a new bike, the BMX-style Raleigh Burner, and took on tougher challenges. He impressed his peers by landing a six-foot jump onto the concrete from the top of Dunvegan’s bottle bank, a big metal container for glass recyclables. He fell often, and his legs would wind up pretzeled around his bike frame. But he bounced up, bruised and scraped but unbroken.
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Etymologists have suggested that the name Skye comes from a Norse word meaning “isle of cloud.” An alternative name, in Gaelic—Eilean Sgiathanach—has been translated as “winged isle,” a reference, it is thought, to the shape of the island’s coastline, which “can be viewed as a mighty bird with outstretched pinions, coming in to land, or to seize upon prey.” Skye’s topography pulls your line of vision upward, into the realm of the mists, and you can imagine how it might tug a child’s thoughts toward dreams of flight, or approximations of flight on a bicycle.
The island sits just off the northwestern edge of the Scottish mainland, in North Atlantic waters warmed by the Gulf Stream. (Giant Angus MacAskill’s birthplace, the Isle of Berneray, lies twenty-five miles farther to the northwest, across the Little Minch.) Skye is the largest of the Inner Hebrides islands, and the most northerly. On winter nights, the aurora borealis can often be seen from points along the coast. Skye’s scenery is spectacular: green meadows, plunging glens, waterfalls that empty into crystalline pools, deep lochs ringed by volcanic rocks. The most famous feature of the island’s terrain is the mountain range known as the Cuillin, serrated peaks that jut into the air to stab at the clouds. They look fantastical and cinematic, the kind of mountains where you expect to find a wizard with a staff, scanning the horizon for dragons. Sure enough, many movies have been filmed on the island. A scene in the time-travel epic Highlander (1986) captures Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert crossing broadswords on the Cioch, a famous crag that cantilevers out from a cliff face above a glacier-carved dell. It may be the most dramatically situated and least exciting action sequence ever shot: the actors are visibly petrified, standing with unmoving feet and waving their weapons with comical caution, knowing that a stumble of a couple inches in the wrong direction could send them plummeting.
Skye is the setting for many legends, stories of magic and violence that speak of the island’s wild landscape and reflect a history marked by bloodshed and clan warfare. Dunvegan Castle, which looms over an inlet on Skye’s northwestern shore, holds several heirlooms of the chiefs of Clan MacLeod, including the Fairy Flag, whose mere unfurling is thought to have extinguished fires, turned battles in the favor of the MacLeods, and rid Skye of a plague that was devastating its cattle. There are various accounts of the flag’s origins. In one story, fairies bestowed the flag on an infant MacLeod chieftain; in another, it was a farewell gift given to a chieftain by his fairy lover. Less beneficent creatures are said to have inhabited Skye: “water bulls” with fiery nostrils that stampeded out of the sea to wreak havoc onshore; demon greyhounds that haunted mountain passes; a headless monster, the Coluinn gun Cheann, that stalked the island’s pathways at night and left behind mutilated corpses. Legend holds that the jagged Cuillin range was formed when a male and female giant faced off in a days-long sword fight, carving up the mountains with their errant swipes. The devil himself is supposed to have appeared one night on a ridge in the Trotternish, Skye’s northernmost peninsula.
It is not a place for fainthearted people, or for coddled children. When Danny MacAskill wasn’t riding his bike, he roamed Skye, leaving wreckage in his wake. He took his grandfather’s Second World War machete into the woods to hack at tree trunks and branches. He snuck saws into school and spent his lunch period carving up tree limbs. He liked to watch things crash and burn. He and his friends climbed up mountains and used iron bars to roll boulders off the edges of cliffs, into the sea. They gathered driftwood and lit bonfires with lawnmower petrol. Danny was asked by teachers at school what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said, “Demolition expert,” imagining a daily routine of dynamiting buildings. When they were still preteens, Danny and his friends would get hold of old cars that were set to be scrapped and go careening around meadows at high speed. The game would end when the boys sent the empty car rolling downhill to smash into the woods. The kids would scramble to the roof of a nearby house to watch flames consume the wreck.
Always, there was the compulsion to get air. On beachcombing excursions, Danny found old fishing nets that had washed up on the coast. He dragged the nets back to Dunvegan, attached them to scraps of netting from soccer goals, and rigged them up in trees, so he could swoop out of the branches, Tarzan-style. With friends, he built a treehouse in an oak that sat atop a hill behind the MacAskill home. The boys found a huge length of six-millimeter rope in someone’s father’s shed and stretched it from the treehouse to a fence more than a hundred yards away. They used it to do “flying foxes,” zip-lining to the ground from the fifty-foot-high treetop. “I had freedom, growing up in Skye,” Danny MacAskill says. “I unleashed my energy on the wilderness.”
Most of the time, he did so while hunched over handlebars. When Danny was eleven, he moved on from the Raleigh Burner to a mountain bike. He began to soak up the culture of mountain cycling, in particular the sport called mountain bike trials, in which riders compete to pedal, hop, and jump their two-wheelers over obstacles without letting their feet touch the ground. It’s a cycling sport that upends various conventions of cycling, including the appearance of the bicycles themselves. (Many trials bikes have no seat.) Danny and his friends traded magazines that documented the trials scene and watched the videos that circulated, in those days before online streaming, on VHS cassettes obtained by mail order and via samizdat networks of enthusiasts.
He was mesmerized in particular by one famous video, a 1997 film called Chainspotting, which featured several cyclists performing stunts on the streets of Sheffield, England, and in various other locations. Unlike the riding in competitive mountain bike trials—contests staged within a taped-off course, with carefully arranged obstacles and judges determining winners and losers—the “street trials” cycling showcased in Chainspotting was informal and improvisational, heeding no rules or boundaries. The riders in the video hurdled park benches, rode across water tanks, balanced their bikes on bollards and hopped from bollard to bollard, turned 360s while dropping to the ground from ten-foot walls. Street trials has roots in other so-called extreme sports—skateboarding and snowboarding and “freestyle” BMX riding—but places even greater emphasis on tricks, wit, and vision. It isn’t just a style of cycling. It’s a way of seeing: a practice that involves sizing up topography, judging distances and angles of approach and lines of attack, and generally viewing the streetscape, and the natural landscape, as a giant playground. It captivated preteen Danny MacAskill. In Chainspotting, the amateurish camerawork and blaring rock soundtrack added to the video’s allure, the sense that the cyclists were staging a guerrilla assault on social proprieties and conventional thinking—on preconceived ideas of what a street was for, what a bicycle could do, how gravity worked.
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Danny was seventeen when he left Skye. He had finished high school but had no designs on university. His career ambitions had changed. He’d abandoned his plan to work in demolition, deciding instead on a career as a bicycle mechanic. In fact, the two jobs were not unrelated. He’d always liked to tear bikes down and rebuild them from scratch.
He moved to Aviemore, a resort town in the Scottish Highlands. The town had a small but lively trials riding scene. There were lots of places to bike, and things to bike on and over: ski trails, a parking lot full of big boulders, street furniture. He stayed in Aviemore for three years, working at a bicycle shop on the main street and cycling in his off hours. By 2006, he’d ridden the town to death. He left for Edinburgh, where he moved in with a friend and found work as a mechanic at a well-known bike shop, MacDonald Cycles. MacAskill was twenty years old, his cycling skills were prodigious, and Edinburgh offered what seemed to him a dazzling plenitude of shreddable terrain.
MacAskill’s perspective on the cityscape was unique. Others in the Edinburgh trials scene gravitated to benches and bollards, the usual targets. MacAskill found his eye drawn to stiffer challenges. Rounded railings. Treacherous stair sets. He taught himself a technique called a hook, which entailed hurling his bike at a high wall and bouncing up onto the wall’s narrow lip. His regimen was murder on bicycles. He trashed his wheels and bent his forks. His body suffered, too. MacAskill broke bones and dislocated joints and tore ligaments. His wrists were in constant pain. There were a number of good trials riders in Edinburgh, but it was clear that MacAskill’s skills, and will, placed him in a different category.
In the fall of 2008, he began filming a video with a friend named Dave Sowerby, who had a decent video camera and a good eye. The idea was to compile an edit of MacAskill’s most audacious tricks. The challenge focused his mind and pushed him to try new stuff. What tricks could he pull off that hadn’t ever been conceived of, let alone attempted? Scanning the streets, he sought new places, odd spaces, ledges and protuberances and bits of the built environment that could, if you forced the issue, serve as a riding surface, or at least as a momentary resting place or springboard for one or two bicycle wheels.
Six months later, in April 2009, filming was finished. MacAskill and Sowerby uploaded a five-and-a-half-minute edit to YouTube. Without thinking too much about it, they called the video Inspired Bicycles.
The title was well chosen. The film shows MacAskill vaulting his bike from the sidewalk onto ten-foot-high walls and back down again. He hurtles fences and walls, he flies down a twenty-foot-deep pedestrian subway stairwell. He jumps from the roof of MacDonald Cycles to the roof of the copy shop next door, before dropping onto the street below. His tires appear to have superglue on them. He can stop on a dime, sticking perfect landings, on narrow targets, after absurdly long leaps. In one sequence, MacAskill bikes full tilt up an oak tree and twists into a backflip. The video’s tour de force showcases MacAskill’s vision and imagination, his recognition of cyclable terrain in implausible places: he is shown pedaling across the slender stanchions at the top of a tall wrought-iron fence.
Three days after Sowerby uploaded the video, it had racked up hundreds of thousands of views. MacAskill, who didn’t own a computer, found himself fielding dozens of media requests from around the world.
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In 1896, 113 years before Inspired Bicycles appeared online, a Kinetoscope film short, Trick Bicycle Riding, was released by the Edison Manufacturing Company, the motion picture arm of Thomas Edison’s expanding media empire. The star of the film was a man named Levant Richardson, a skillful cyclist who would go on to be a pioneering manufacturer of roller skates. There is no surviving print of Trick Bicycle Riding, but it was the first of several Edison shorts featuring acrobatic cyclists. Two of these, Trick Bicycle Riding No. 2 (1899) and The Trick Cyclist (1901), can be queued up on the internet today. The camerawork is primitive, but the stunts performed in the films—pedaling backward, 360-degree spins on the front wheel, bicycle rope jumping—are fixtures of trick riders’ repertoires to this day, and they are executed with skill.
It is noteworthy that trick cyclists were given starring roles in a handful of the earliest commercial motion pictures. The titles of some other Edison films from the period are instructive: Lasso Thrower; Trapeze Disrobing Act; Faust Family of Acrobats; Alleni’s Boxing Monkeys; O’Brien’s Trained Horses; Ching Ling Foo’s Greatest Feats; Rubes in the Theatre; Pie, Tramp, and the Bulldog. The performance of a trick bicyclist fit comfortably alongside circus acrobatics, animal acts, conjurer’s tricks, vaudeville knockabout comedy, ethnic burlesque—the raucous variety entertainment popular in the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Trick cycling was, in a word, Barnumesque. Like the giant who strode onstage with a dwarf tucked in his breast pocket, a person who executed gravity-flouting, death-defying stunts on a bicycle was a species of sideshow freak.
The emergence of trick cycling as popular entertainment appears in retrospect to have been inevitable. The bicycle is a magnet for show-offs and daredevils; cycling and showbiz were destined to meet and cross-pollinate. Karl von Drais’s first ride on his Laufmaschine was a kind of theater: a public demonstration, announced with a notice in the press. The crowd that gathered that day in Mannheim was there not just to assess the viability of an invention but to take in a spectacle, and Drais’s skill in handling his machine, his ability to stay aboard the thing as it hurtled forward, would surely have struck those viewers as something on the order of a stunt.
P. T. Barnum was among the first showmen to feature trick bicyclists. The most celebrated of these acts was the Cycling Elliotts, a troupe of English siblings, two girls and three boys, ages six to sixteen, who won fame and notoriety in Barnum’s circus in the early 1880s. The Elliotts’ show consisted of intricately choreographed bicycle “dances” and stunts, executed on custom-sized high-wheeled ordinaries and unicycle “skates.” The Elliotts would snake through obstacle courses of lighted candles. They did a cycling version of a Parisian quadrille. They formed a human pyramid atop a single bicycle. They vaulted their bikes onto a rotating table, where they executed elaborate maneuvers without colliding, five bicycles sharing a circular tabletop measuring just six feet in diameter. An admirer lavished praise on the Elliotts in a poem published in The Sporting and Theatrical Journal: “Faster and faster, like flashes of light / They ride on their wheels, then fly from our sight /…Then up on a table they all spring with ease / With bicycles the Elliotts can do what they please.”
In the spring of 1883, during a lengthy run of Barnum’s circus at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the Elliotts came to the attention of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC), which obtained a warrant against Barnum, two of his employees, and James Elliott, the Elliott paterfamilias, who managed the troupe. The four men were arrested for violation of New York State’s child-endangerment laws, and the case was argued before a three-judge panel. Prior to the hearing, the Cycling Elliotts gave a special demonstration for an audience “of about 4000 invited guests” that included the NYSPCC’s president, police officers, and a committee of “a dozen or more leading doctors.” It was undoubtedly the first stunt-riding performance that doubled as a legal proceeding. Ultimately the judges ruled in Barnum’s favor, and the Elliotts resumed their run in the circus, to wide acclaim. One of the medical experts, the physician Dr. Louis A. Sayre, testified that the regimen of a trick cyclist was “very beautiful and beneficial” to the children’s health, stating “if all children took similar exercise, it would be better than doctors or drugs.”
There were certain stunts that the Elliotts chose not to perform for the New York magistrate. One of these, “The Revolving Wheel of Fire,” featured Tom Elliott, the eldest male sibling, pedaling a bicycle on rollers inside a larger wheel, which shot gusts of flame from tiny valves ringing its exterior. The boy cyclist accomplished this feat while “at the same time spinning a plate making a wreath of fire.”
Trick cycling brought together the age-old and the newfangled, marrying the ancient art of acrobatics to the quintessentially modern one of bicycling. Trick cycling was sexy. Riders were graceful and strong, with sculpted physiques. In the pulp novel Miss Million’s Maid: A Romance of Love and Fortune (1915), a trick cyclist was cast as a sex symbol: “He was [a]…small, but beautifully built fellow, supple as a cat.”
Trick-cycling troupes were often coed, and, like their male counterparts, these “expert wheelwomen” exhibited their bodies along with their talents. The all-female ensemble Kaufmann’s Cycling Beauties appeared onstage in snugly fitted Edwardian dress—tights, shorts, tutus—that accentuated the contours of breasts and thighs and hips. The bicycle was already associated in the public imagination with sexual liberation, and the sensuality of trick cycling, the lithe movements and rippling sinews, added to the frisson. If spectators found their thoughts wandering from bicycle gymnastics to the kind performed in a boudoir, it was only natural.
Trick cycling offered another sort of titillation, showcasing seemingly superhuman skills while holding out the possibility, both frightening and tantalizing, of catastrophic human error. Trick cycling was funny: to watch a stunt rider in action was to witness a series of visual punch lines, and many riders billed themselves as “cycling comedians,” donning the costume of a clown or tramp. But at any moment, the slapstick might lurch into unintentional violence. Did spectators want the cyclist to land the jump cleanly, or did they crave the gruesome pratfall? The answer, surely, is that they wanted both, and often enough, that’s what they got.
Sensationalism—what Barnum called “humbug”—was the currency of late-Victorian popular culture. Grave danger, high stakes, the Greatest Show on Earth. The stage names and taglines of trick cyclists blared from vaudeville placards like carnival barks: w. g. hurst, the king of the wheel; st. claire sisters and o’day. ten wheels and no brakes; joe pauly, the human cat and trick cyclist; the original mcnutts, the aerial cycle wonders; prince wells, greatest living sensational cyclist. Hundreds of performers claimed to be “The World Champion Trick Cyclist” or “The World’s Trick Cycling Record Holder” or “The Holder of the United States Championship Medal.” These distinctions were cited in the press, though of course the championships, medals, and records were entirely fictional.
Which is not to suggest that trick riders were unworthy of superlatives. They would jerk a bicycle’s front wheel into the air and ride on the rear wheel, pedaling backward, then forward, then backward again, hurtling at high speed toward the precipice of the stage before stopping, at the last second, and spinning into a figure skater–style twirl. Trick riders performed stunts with swords and fired arrows at targets while pedaling hands-free. There were bicycle sharpshooters. Annie Oakley did a bicycle turn in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, blasting clay pigeons with a Winchester rifle from the seat of her bike.
Some trick cyclists specialized in contortionist tricks, squeezing through the center of the diamond-shaped frame and snaking out the other side, holding their bodies just inches above the ground the whole time as the bicycle coasted forward. There were trick-cycling musicians who balanced on two wheels while strumming banjos or scraping out violin sonatas; a child cyclist, “Hatsley the Boy Wonder,” navigated the high wire while soloing on the trombone. Trick riders rode up and down long staircases that stretched between the stage and a raised platform, or bunny-hopped up and down those stairs. The British cyclist Sid Black did a thrilling variation on this stunt, pedaling at high speed down a sixty-foot-long ladder, arranged at an angle that sent him shooting off the stage into the theater’s center aisle. Black would complete his descent by whooshing between rows of spectators to the rear of the theater and out into the lobby, trailing a gust of wind that lifted hats off heads as if in salute.
The essence of the stunt cyclist’s art was “equilibrism”: balancing one’s body on a bicycle in ways that demonstrated creative flair and disdain for the laws of physics. It was dangerous work. At a performance in Bremen, Germany, Minnie Kaufmann, one of the stars of the Kaufmann’s Cycling Beauties, attempted a “flip-flap” move—springing from handlebars to the saddle and back again, in a handstand position, on a moving bicycle. But Kaufmann faltered and went flying into the orchestra pit, taking a thirty-foot tumble that ended with a crash into a bass drum.
Trick cycling could be punishing to bicycles too, and riders modified their machines to withstand the beating. They reinforced frames and wheels, carefully calibrated the pressure levels of tires, tweaked gearing systems, and contrived a host of boutique modifications and add-ons. This custom work was generally invisible to all except their fellow stunt cyclists.
But for certain performers, the surgery was the selling point. There were comedy cyclists who specialized in the expert handling of absurdly mutated bikes. Some rode toweringly tall bicycles—the freak bikes of their day—whose saddles sat at giraffe height, fifteen feet above the ground. Riders would mount these machines by climbing ladder-like rungs built into the bike’s frame or by swinging into the saddle from a trapeze. There were bikes with square wheels, with triangular wheels, with semicircular wheels. The Villions, a family troupe prominent on English music hall stages, had a unicycle whose wheel looked like a giant egg. The comic effect was heightened by the egg-cycle’s rider: a small boy in the getup of a harlequin.
Unicycles, egg-shaped and otherwise, were favorite trick-cycling props. Performers rode them while juggling vegetables or Indian clubs or even bicycle wheels; they rode them across tightropes and up flights of stairs. A widely practiced stunt was to convert a two-wheeler into a unicycle, slowly disassembling the bicycle while riding it, until the rider was left balancing on a lone front wheel. The signature stunt of vaudevillian Joe Jackson was a variation on this gag. Jackson portrayed a tramp whose joyride on a stolen bike goes south when the machine he has stolen starts to fall apart piece by piece—bicycle horn, handlebars, pedals, rear wheel, frame, all dropping away in turn. In Jackson’s act, the suave virtuosity flaunted by trick cyclists was ingeniously flipped. It was a pantomime of incompetence: Jackson teetered and swerved wildly but stayed upright and in motion as his bicycle disintegrated beneath him.
Another source of comedy, and wonder, was the spectacle of bicycles under the control of animals, a novelty that gained popularity in the mid-1890s. There were cycling dogs and chimpanzees and bears. There were specially built tricycles piloted by lions and elephants. It is still possible to see a performance by animal cyclists, and these shows can take macabre turns. At the 2013 Wild Animal Olympics in Shanghai, an interspecies race on a circular bicycle track ended badly when one of the competitors, a monkey, swerved his bike into the path of his opponent, a bear, prompting the latter to maul the former, in full view of hundreds. A cellphone video of the incident went viral. It is posted on YouTube under the title “A Bear and a Monkey Race on Bicycles, Then Bear Eats Monkey.”
The appeal of four-legged trick cyclists may in part have been a reaction to a glut of the two-legged kind. In the 1890s, trick riding took hold as a recreational pastime. A trick-cycling how-to industry enticed novices by hyping the bodybuilding benefits. Trick cycling, it was said, afforded “exercise to every known muscle.” One lavishly illustrated instructional manual claimed (a bit disingenuously) that “graceful, daring, and altogether fascinating feats…may be accomplished by any rider possessed of an ordinary amount of nerve” and noted (less speciously) that the mastery of esoteric cycling maneuvers could have practical applications for the bike commuter: “[The trick] rider is naturally facile princeps in threading the intricacies of congested traffic in crowded thoroughfares.”
There were trick-riding academies, aimed at an upscale clientele. The chief instructor at a popular New York cycling school, an accomplished Black stunt rider named Ira Johnson, would decamp to tony Newport, Rhode Island, during the summer months to service his pupils at their seaside vacation homes. Trick cycling was also in vogue among London’s socialites. In 1897, the women’s magazine Hearth and Home took note of the trend: “Sixty years ago the belles and beaux of the fashionable assemblies qualified for Almack’s by attending dancing academies. Nowadays they spend their energies in learning the latest thing in the way of gymkhana tricks on wheels.” The teenage Prince Albert, England’s future King George VI, was reportedly permitted by his father, George V, to make incognito visits to music halls, where he studied the latest trick-riding turns. The prince would “[emulate] the performances of the professionals” during practice sessions on the grounds of Windsor Castle and Sandringham House.
But the fad for trick riding was not confined to the upper crust. In big cities, see-and-be-seen spots where bikers congregated—the Coney Island Cycle Path in New York, the grounds of the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris—served as public stages for trick cyclists. The riders attracted admiring crowds but came under attack in the cycling press for showboating, a sin of bad form that was thought to bring disrepute to bicyclists. In several American cities and towns, the police cracked down on public trick riding; some municipalities went so far as to pass laws banning the practice. Today, the Code of Ordinances for Memphis, Tennessee, includes an anachronistic prohibition against “all trick and fancy riding…in the parks and parkways” on “bicycles, tricycles…[and] velocipedes.”
As amateur stunt cycling flourished, the ranks of professionals swelled in turn, and market saturation set in. In 1905, the theatrical trade magazine Broadway Weekly complained that trick cyclists were “drugs on the market” and that “the ability to do a few saddle tricks will not pay board.” The solution, the editorial suggested, was more exciting and dangerous stunts: “to perform tricks that would stagger a horse…. If you can ride a bicycle up a wall or across the ceiling, cycle riding will be profitable.”
Increasingly, trick riders took on riskier challenges, stunts involving high speeds, steep inclines, and hazardous leaps across chasms. Often these performances found cyclists navigating custom-built structures—rococo contraptions with spirals and ramps that allowed riders to attain high velocity and reach great heights in the confined spaces of theaters and fairgrounds. There were “cycle whirls”—circular velodromes raised dozens of feet above the ground—and vertical loop-the-loops in which cyclists rode upside down. The names given to these acts underscored the peril: “The Loop of Doom,” “The Terrible Ring,” “La Cercle de la Mort.”
There were many accidents and, indeed, deaths. Bicycle wheels got stuck in the slats of aerial velodromes and cyclists were hurled into lethal falls. Riders slid off ramps and dropped out of loops. Concentration flagged, wheels wobbled, gangways collapsed. In 1907, an audience at the Belfast Hippodrome watched a teenage trick cyclist, Hildegard Morgenrott, tumble off a platform and fatally snap her neck. Another young trick rider, Charles Lefault, lost his balance while attempting a turn-of-the-century version of a street trials stunt, steering his bike atop the fortifications near the Porte d’Italie in Paris. “He fell into a dry moat,” a newspaper reported, “and was killed on the spot.”
Yet trick cycling remained popular, despite and because of the body count. In particular, stunts that turned bicycles into flying machines held fascination for both performers and audiences. There were specialists like Charles Kabrich, a self-styled “bike-chute-aeronaut,” who did a kind of airborne ballet on a two-wheeler hitched to a parachute. A trick cyclist named Salvo was a star attraction in the circus troupe of Barnum rival Adam Forepaugh. His act, “The Terrible Trip to the Moon,” was hyped with the usual grim sensationalism. (“An Awful Holding of Life as a Pawn. Reaching the Crescent or Dashing to Death.”) But Salvo’s act was dreamy and romantic, a daredevil’s pantomime of space travel by bicycle. Salvo sped his bike down a steep ramp that turned sharply upward like a ski jump, launching the cyclist toward a crescent moon that dangled from chains near the apex of the circus tent. “It is a terrible leap, such as pinches the heart,” wrote a reporter in 1906. “The pale, tensely drawn youth shoots into space like the ball from a canon, with nothing between him and dire death but the powerful energy and faith that lifts his wiry body to the reach of the swaying moon.”
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The popularity of trick cycling has wavered over the decades, but it has remained a cultural constant. Stunt riders were variety stage regulars until the mid-twentieth-century demise of vaudeville. The swing era brought dance bands mounted on bikes. Ray Sinatra—the elder second cousin of Frank—led a “cycling orchestra” whose sixteen members performed while straddling gleaming Silver King cruisers. In the mid-1930s, Sinatra and his band landed a radio show, Cycling the Kilocycles, broadcast weekly on NBC—not the ideal medium, perhaps, for a bicycle orchestra. Presumably listeners took the whole bike thing on faith.
Outside the United States, stunt cycling was recast as a gentrified entertainment, with intimations of ballet and gymnastics. In China, so-called acrobatic cycling emphasizes flashy costumes and ornate configurations of cyclists: a dozen performers balanced on a single bike, fanning out like peacock feathers. “Artistic cycling” competitions, which are popular in central and eastern Europe, feature balancing tricks and fluid gymnastics-style floor routines performed on fixed-gear bikes, with judges awarding points to singles, pairs, and four- and six-member teams.
Today, the most prominent forms of stunt riding fall under the category of sport. Since 2008, BMX racing—motocross-style competitions staged on purpose-built off-road tracks—has been a medal-awarded Olympic event. There are mountain bike and BMX competitions that highlight “extreme” acts of daring, dangerous leaps from ski jump–style ramps, hair-raising flips—all kinds of rad acrobatics. Yesteryear’s Loop of Doom and Cercle de la Mort have transmogrified into the ramps and half-pipes of the X Games. The appeal of a bicyclist zooming through the air and tempting fate is evidently perennial.
Danny MacAskill is a great athlete, but it would be wrong to characterize his performances as sport. He is an entertainer. He’s almost certainly the most famous stunt cyclist in history. Since the release of Inspired Bicycles, MacAskill has shot many more videos, with increasingly large budgets and slick production values, flaunting an ever more outrageous repertoire of skills, stunts, dangerous leaps, and journeys to improbable altitudes. These videos have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. One of the most popular is The Ridge (2014), which features MacAskill on his home turf: executing a series of tricks while cycling a vertiginous knife’s-edge trail up and down various peaks in Skye’s Cuillin range. The Ridge was filmed from multiple perspectives. There is footage shot by a crew that trekked uphill alongside MacAskill, and there are soaring bird’s-eye panoramas captured by drone camera. The hairiest images were recorded by a GoPro camera mounted on MacAskill’s helmet: dizzying verité views of the cyclist’s progress as he ascends and descends the rocky path along the ridge, a trail that provides mere inches of running room and the prospect, with a faulty move, of a plunge hundreds of feet into a crevasse.
The signature moment of The Ridge presents a heroic tableau: swathed in mountain mist, MacAskill stands with his bike atop the sheer rock face known as the Inaccessible Pinnacle, one of Skye’s iconic outcroppings. This image, which MacAskill calls “the Braveheart shot,” is both majestic and cheeky, a description that fits MacAskill’s enterprise generally. His videos emphasize feats of strength, agility, and nerve, but they toss in jokes and slapstick, loud music, and jaunty asides. In a video called Imaginate, MacAskill performs stunts on a set designed to make him look like a toy bicyclist, frolicking in a landscape of children’s playthings. He swoops up a ramp made of playing cards, hurdles a matchbox car, executes a bar-spin drop from the gun turret of a toy army tank. In Danny Daycare, he is shown barreling across fields and hills and narrow ledges while towing a little girl in a children’s trailer. (In fact, the “child” in the trailer is a doll.) Often, MacAskill’s videos include blooper reels, showing flubs and wipeouts. The aesthetic is quintessentially internet-era and millennial, but it is also a throwback to the fearless, funny stunt-cycling routines of more than a century ago. MacAskill is a digital age vaudevillian.
He spends much of the year on the road, shooting videos and scouting locations for new videos. He has filmed in the Alps and on Kilimanjaro, in Argentina and Taiwan, at the Playboy Mansion, on a barge in the Thames. He does live shows with the cycling team he founded, Drop and Roll. He has corporate sponsorships and a signature bike on the market, but he keeps a low profile, rejecting most of the offers that come his way. He fears any travel that will cut into his cycling time or compromise his credibility in the community of trials riders. He said no thanks to Ellen DeGeneres. He turned down an offer to join a South Korean circus.
MacAskill lives in Glasgow. When I visited him there, in the last weeks of a raw Scottish winter, he was living in a house with several roommates, all serious cyclists. If you catch sight of MacAskill when he’s not on a bike, he doesn’t look much like a celebrity, or a world-class athlete. He’s strong and sinewy but not an awesome physical specimen. He stands five foot nine, has close-cropped red hair and a handsome but boyish countenance. He wears jeans and hoodies and baseball caps. MacAskill has a girlfriend but admits that he spends most of his non-working time on bicycles. “I don’t really do much of anything else except ride bikes,” he said. When he’s not out on the street on his trials bike, he rides a mountain bicycle. Sometimes, he heads out on an electric motocross bike. “I like anything with handlebars,” he said.
Over the years, he has suffered injuries that have sidelined him for weeks and months. He has no illusions about the dangers of his line of work. In 2013, Martyn Ashton, a trials legend whom MacAskill hero-worshipped as a kid, fell backward off a ten-foot-high bar, landed hard, and cracked two vertebrae. The accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. Ashton has since returned to mountain biking, using customized bikes. In 2015, he appeared alongside MacAskill and two other riders in Back on Track, a video filmed on the Antur Stiniog, a mountain biking trail in North Wales. For MacAskill, overcoming fear is crucial. “Your brain has to do the work. Your body may be telling you not to do something. Your brain has to calm your body and give it a push. You have to make your mind very quiet.”
MacAskill himself is quiet. On a bicycle, he appears emphatic and flamboyant, oozing confidence and style. But on those occasions when he’s not riding, he is reserved, watchful, laconic. Trials riding—street trials especially—is a cerebral pursuit. It’s a form of psychogeography, of cataloging the tiny details of the streetscape. It involves seeking and speculating, measuring and calculating. When MacAskill scans the landscape, he sees broken bits of pavement to use as bumps and kicks. He searches for links between obstacles: a railing that leads to a postbox from which you can ricochet to a bench. He sizes up distances and gaps between targets. Trials riding emphasizes stillness. Though the most eye-popping moments of MacAskill’s performances involve bursts of speed, flashes of movement, flights to great heights, the heart of his art is equipoise: finding ways to balance on a bike when the bike is located in a treacherous position and is moving very slowly, or not moving at all.
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I wanted to see MacAskill in action on his trials bike. I imagined myself following him around Glasgow, sitting on park benches while he catapulted over fences, rode up walls, and generally sliced and diced the landscape. MacAskill had other ideas. He suggested that we go for a ride together, on mountain bikes, in a place called Cathkin Braes, a hilly area southeast of Glasgow’s city center with several acres of cycling trails that snake through the woods. I had mentioned to MacAskill that I, too, was a cyclist and that I rode every day, and he had inferred from the breezy way I imparted this information that I had the basic aptitude required for a mountain bike outing. So early one weekday we drove up to Cathkin Braes in MacAskill’s van, unloaded a pair of mountain bikes in a parking lot, and began riding. I followed MacAskill through a fine morning drizzle into the woods. It took me less than a minute to discover that my particular set of cycling skills did not extend to pedaling a two-wheeler on a beginner’s level mountain bike trail.
Bike riding itself is a stunt. Bicycles are unstable: they want to fall down. An unmoving bike will tip over if it’s not propped against a wall or supported by a kickstand, and if you set a riderless bike in motion, the unmanned handlebars will eventually turn around the steering axis and the bike will topple. In essence, cycling is a nonstop exercise in crash prevention, an unending series of compensations and corrections to keep the thing upright and rolling forward. All cyclists master the basic tricks, movements so subtle and intuitive that many of us fail to recognize that we are making them at all. You steer in the direction your bike is tipping to prevent a spill; to initiate a turn, you briefly torque the front wheel in the opposite direction. The feats of Danny MacAskill and other stunt cyclists are beyond the powers of most riders, but they merely underline and exaggerate the fundamental cycling trick, the balancing act we all perform when we ride a bike.
History’s most consequential lesson in bicycle balance came from Wilbur and Orville Wright, who, like MacAskill, began their careers as cycle repairmen. The Wright brothers realized that the same principles that governed cycling could be applied to aviation: that a plane, like a bicycle, could be an inherently unstable mechanism. “The management of our aeroplane, like that of the bicycle, is based upon the sense of the equilibrium of the operator,” the Wrights told a journalist in 1908. Controlling the aircraft, the Wrights said, “very soon becomes automatic with the aviator, as does the balancing of a bicycle-rider.” A 1911 treatise on aeronautics, The New Art of Flying, compared plane pilots to trick cyclists: “The aviator of the present day is somewhat in the position of the bicycle-rider on a slack wire, armed with a parasol.” You could say that Danny MacAskill is teaching the same lessons about balance and bicycles and aeronautics as the Wright brothers—only in reverse. In the right hands, with the right pilot, a bicycle can take flight.
Of course, in the wrong hands, an airborne bicycle is a menace, to its rider among others. The trail MacAskill and I were riding wended farther into the woods, and the cycling became more challenging, with steeper drops and sharper turns. Suddenly I was a trick cyclist, and a very bad one, too—clinging frantically to the handlebars while working the brakes like a maniac, as the bike wheels lifted off the ground and the frame slid out from beneath me in various directions. It was dangerous, and scary, but to a neutral observer it would have had a comic aspect, like a slapstick routine. As the downward dips of the trail grew more precipitous, I had the impression that my body was being thrashed around—flapping like a suit of clothes on a drying line as a nor’easter howls through town. MacAskill tried to help, advising me to ballast the bike by shifting my weight backward and hanging my butt over the rear of the saddle. This worked for a while, but I was terrified, and the tension that had seized my body and brain made a crash inevitable. After zigzagging along a relatively flat run of trail, we arrived at a deep drop and I panicked, squeezing the front brake hard. The rear wheel lurched up, and off I went, hurtling over the handlebars—up, up, and away.
I landed hard on my rear end. To be precise: I landed on my coccyx. The injury was less severe than what I could have suffered, but it was insulting, a blow to my dignity as well as my backside. As I staggered back to the bike, MacAskill, a polite person not prone to overstatement, voiced concern. “I’m a wee bit worried,” he said, “that you’re going to kill yourself.”
I said that it might be good if I took a break for a while, and although MacAskill didn’t say so out loud, he seemed to agree. We emerged from the wooded trail onto an area of well-landscaped dirt paths, with steep-sided berms and sections that sloped upward like cresting waves. I pulled my bike to the side and watched as MacAskill rode back and forth, whizzing uphill and banking sharply into the berms, making turns that left his body and his bicycle nearly horizontal to the ground.
The mountain bike he was riding was a pretty heavy machine, less conducive to the slickest moves and jumps than a trials bike. Still, watching MacAskill command a bicycle, any bicycle, can bug you out. I knew that the spectacle was the result of expert technique—minute shifts of weight and applications of force, tiny adjustments and improvisations and flickers of intuition that kept the bike cleaved to MacAskill’s body and subject to his fancies. But I was unable to discern the technical particulars: to my untrained eye, his cycling presented itself as pure violent beauty, a blur of speed and power and flow.
He rode a fair distance down the trail, turned, and started back again, pedaling smooth and fast. It was clear that if he took the ramped section of the path at sufficient pace, he would get air. And that’s what he did. He hit the launch, kicking out the rear wheel and twisting the handlebars in a whip maneuver as the bike shot skyward. The bicycle rose and rose; when I was certain it had reached its highest point, it kept heading up. The trajectory was so preposterous, the flight so prolonged, that for a moment I reached for my cellphone to snap a photo. But I thought better of it: in theory, the law of gravity was still in effect. Before too long, surely, the bicycle would return to Earth.