i'm bloggin' lazy. yes, i'm posting a couple of videos today, but fear not, the blog has not jumped the snake and become just videos stolen from other websites. today's video dump is just a response to yesterday's video and not an end to writing.
after watching an Italian dude descend the Stelvio on his bike without using his hands, my brother quickly (a little too quickly, i might add) sent me the next evolutionary step in going downhill in a pointless manner:
brilliant, eh. this is obviously something i could never do and never would have even though to do, so naturally, i'll make fun of it. my main problem with the feat is bicycle choice. if you want to descend a mountain quickly, use a mountain bike and take a direct route as possible, or use a road bike and use the smoothness of roadways to hit higher top speeds. don't ride a mountain bike on the road. also, if you want to pop a wheelie, i think you technically need a front wheel. it could be argued that the front wheel fell off, necessitating a continuous wheelied descent (sounds like a swell James Bond (Roger Moore-era) movie stunt). but this guy didn't even have a fork. he's actually gone through the trouble to remove the fork, but somehow figure out a way to re-attach his stem and handlebars. actually, this is fairly remarkable, not as a bicycle stunt, but as the first time i've ever seen a freewheeled unicycle--which actually sounds cool.
but, as we've debated before, cyclists, even cool cyclists, are not cool. if we take these two Italian cyclists as a representative example of the coolest cyclists (and based on "Breaking Away", we know that the Italians are the coolest), we may give ourselves a little round of applause. that is, until we watch what the much cooler kids do. namely, skaters. skaters are probably cooler than cyclists. Tony Martin is no Tony Hawk. Kevin Bacon in "Quicksilver" was no Christian Slater in "Gleaming the Cube". two wheels are good, but perhaps four wheels are better. In fact, the guys at the Durham Skate Park are claiming that bikes are not allowed. (they also seem to make fun of "fruit boots", making in-line skates the recumbants of the skateing world.) and, yes, of course, skaters have a much cooler video of dudes going downhill.
Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.
if i can find their address, and if they're still alive, i'll mail them my lunch money.
3 comments:
Holy crap that's my old daily pre-work/school ride! It is Claremont Ave from Grizzly Peak down to Ashby in Oakland/Berkeley. That second lefthander (the one where he's got his palm on the pavement), I submit, is one of the finest lefthanders in cycling...banked like a nascar track and so incrediby fast. I used to see these guys (I think it's the same guys) shuttling laps in a crappy old Volvo 240 wagon.
Still no wrecks? I keep expecting someone to eat it in these videos of yours.
See, now you're starting to get my point about coolness. Those comments on the Durham Skate Park website sure seem testosteronic. This was my favorite:
"go skate your wally holiday flow parks with your pad nanny friends"
I have no idea what any of that means -- is pad nanny like pad thai but without the shrimp and peanuts that send little Leo to the hospital? It's got a nice 4-beat cadence to it, though, like it would make a nice chant:
"go skate your wally holiday flow parks with your pad nanny friends.
go skate your wally holiday flow parks with your pad nanny friends!
GO SKATE YOUR WALLY HOLIDAY FLOW PARKS WITH YOUR PAD NANNY FRIENDS!
<enter drums and guitars on downbeat>"
But those downhillers, now they show some redeeming qualities of uncoolness. I like their dorky insistence on telling us just how much fun they're having. Every turn they make sure to say "Woooo!" Cool kids would be much more nonchalant. In the middle, one of them out of nowhere says "Downhill skateboarding!" Yes, yes, we're aware that's what you're doing.
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