Gold medal trick cyclist Dawid Godziek is no stranger to flying to twisty, hold-your-breath heights on his bike. But his latest ride, carried out atop a moving train, might be his most impressive accomplishment yet. And you can watch.
Twenty-nine year-old Godziek is a Polish bike-riding superstar who began trying tricks out in his backyard when he was 12 years old. Now, he is one of the most successful mountain bike (MTB) and bicycle motocross (BMX) freestyle riders in the world. In fact, he is currently the only person in the world who's won gold medals in both MBX Dirt and Freestyle MTB competitions in a single season.
He's well known for soaring into the air on BMX courses, executing flips, spins and other gravity-defying maneuvers, many of which he's invented. Not being content with doing all of that on terra firma though, Godziek decided to up the difficulty factor by doing his thing atop a moving train.
Working with his brother Szymon, he built a MTB course atop a series of 10 train cars. He also decided that the course would include a never-tried trick: a flat-drop backflip landed at the base of a series of stairs.
"When I saw the train in person, I noticed the stairs were higher than I thought," Godziek said in an interview with sponsor, Red Bull. "Of course, I knew the dimensions beforehand, but you know how it is when you see the obstacles live. The punch on landing on the flat was so strong that all my joints were getting hit hard. But I wanted to do a trick that no one had landed before to add more flavor to the project."
After a year of testing out the course then designing and building the track atop the train cars, Godziek set the locomotive in motion and dialed in the train's speed and the adjustments he needed to execute his tricks on a moving course. The train's movement not only required Godziek to adjust his speed and style, but the change in the headwind he was used to also came into play.
'My head didn't quite grasp it'
"It was quite a crazy experience, the opposite of what I usually do; it was me 'hanging in place' and the route going underneath me," he says. "We observed something interesting – the lack of air resistance. In theory, this could have made it easier, but the opposite was true. The air resistance creates a tunnel that somehow keeps me in a straight line and doesn't allow me to shift right or left."
While Godziek makes it all look pretty smooth in the following video, he does say the ride posed a few unexpected challenges.
"It was quite a peculiar feeling because, in fact, everything around me was standing still," he says. "The only thing that was moving was the track, which was just passing underneath me. My head didn't quite grasp it. I had to get used to it because it's completely unnatural and takes you by surprise a lot. For the first couple of rides, I felt slight turbulence in my head - it was something unreal. In addition, the train itself, traveling on tracks that were not perfectly level, was moving a bit.
"All these little elements made the final feeling of riding on such a set difficult to describe. I think at the beginning I was experiencing something like a combination of sea sickness, air sickness and altitude sickness."
Source: Red Bull
