KRISS KYLE
Red Bull athlete Kriss Kyle’s daydream of riding his BMX in the clouds turned into an epic odyssey of carbon-fibre engineering, unique fitness conditioning and a touch of trepidation
Iwas so scared that the whole thing would tip over and we’d all die.”
By rights, it should never have flown. The mini-BMX bowl suspended below one of the biggest balloons ever built in the UK weighed two tonnes, and swung around so violently when hung from a crane that rider Kriss Kyle doubted it would ever get off the ground. If it did, he feared the consequences.
Kyle’s whimsical, lockdown-inspired vision of riding his bike through fluffy clouds quickly turned into a gut-churning fever dream. Riding the bowl on the ground merely sowed the seeds of doubt in his own abilities, as he battled to even breathe under the pressure of the bowl’s leg-shreddingly tight quarters and the weight of an 8kg parachute.
An interminable wait for a weather window gave these doubts time to slowly curdle his nerves. No one had ever done this before – but there was a reason for that. This is the story of what committing 100% actually means when you dream big enough to break things…
When a dream collides with reality
Kriss Kyle is known for both freestyle BMX and mountain biking, and his previous stunts include dropping out of a helicopter onto a heli-pad in Dubai. He’s on a mission to bring BMX to a wider audience… but it’s not just for clicks.
“I’m just quite a creative person,” he says. “I’m always thinking outside the box, and instead of doing a normal riding video, I want to take it to the next level and beyond, and do something completely opposite each time.”
This drive led him to daydream about riding a BMX bowl in the sky.
“But you need to be careful what you say at Red Bull!” he adds.
Before Kyle knew it, the engineers crafting Red Bull’s F1 success had been drafted in to build the world’s only carbon-fibre BMX bowl, and a UK company had been commissioned to hand-stitch a hot air balloon gargantuan enough to be able to lift the 2.5-tonne rig.
MF was there to witness Kyle riding the bowl for the first time, on the ground in a Red Bull racing hanger. It was much smaller than the usual BMX bowl, and the sound of his wheels on the carbon was unexpectedly violent as he fired his bike off the ramps to execute tricks high above the bowl. It was a baptism of burning legs.
“The bowl itself is so tight,” says Kyle. “It’s just like, ‘Pump, pump, pump’ and you never get a second in there to breathe. It’s so hard on your legs, because you go straight into the next transitions and into the next trick.”
A humbling realisation
It’s fair to say that Kriss Kyle pushes the boundaries of what’s possible on tw
