The Red Bulletin June 2019
MTB street 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 Simon Brettle – known to his fellow riders as ‘Kettle’ – unloads his bikes from his van at an estate at the top of a hill in Brighton 58 THE RED BULLETIN
“Some of the ramps feel literally like getting sent to the moon” XX EDITOR ILLUSTRATOR Reynolds sends it to the sky mid-whip with the help of a mobile ramp, the MTB Hopper
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“Some of the<br />
ramps feel literally<br />
like getting sent<br />
to the moon”<br />
XX EDITOR ILLUSTRATOR<br />
Reynolds sends it to<br />
the sky mid-whip with<br />
the help of a mobile<br />
ramp, the MTB Hopper
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