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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the wheelie. Done properly, it is the ultimate act of motorcycle bravura, gravity defied, front wheel pawing the air, levitating on the balance point of unholy disaster, a supreme display of machine control—if you will, a work of art.
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| No-hander wheelies wow the crowd. Pfeiffer’s BMW F800 is specially modified for stuntwork. Photo by Lukas Nazdraczew |
But, dear friends, I am also here to tell you that lately the wheelie has been compromised, cheapened even, by the actions of hordes of ham-fisted amateur-hour practitioners, hacks one and all, united only by their lack of skill and too-easy access to a video camera. YouTube is lousy with the shaky, handheld evidence of their ineptitude, usually resulting in a shower of sparks, a mushroom cloud of plastic shards and bike/man-shaped holes in the roadside shrubbery.
Thank God, then, for Christian Pfeiffer.
The man is maestro of the monowheel, lord of the loft. His signature move is the tight, fast circle-wheelie, the bike cranked over so improbably far that he can reach out and slap the ground with his palm. He then climbs all over the bike—seat, gas tank, front fender, both footpegs—while it continues to corkscrew. His record for revolutions is 15 in 30 seconds.
Such showmanship has been rewarded. Pfeiffer was named Stunt Riding World Champion in 2003, won the European Stunt Riding Championship ’04 and ’06, and was top dog at Stunt Wars 2006, the U.S.’s premier extreme street riding competition. Things went all skew-whiff, though, when the 37-year-old German came back to Florida to defend that title this past January. A bad case of bronchitis had him off his game, and balled-up bits of rubber left over from by a drift-car exhibition wreaked havoc with his routine, causing a crash as his rear wheel slid out mid-wheelie. Same thing happened next run on his backup bike.
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| Dude! Pfeiffer on his Gas Gas trials bike going invert at a skatepark. Photo by Bernhard Spottel |
Any chance of redemption in the team competition was chucked down the road when he and Brazilian stunt legend A.C. Farias initiated synchronized side-by-side stoppies in front of the packed grandstands. Pfeiffer’s machine, traveling at 50 mph, its back wheel 3 feet off the ground, went into a scary speed wobble—he’d removed the steering damper for previous tricks—tossing its rider over the handlebars. While Pfeiffer tumbled to the right, his fallen machine veered left, wedging itself under Farias’ Kawasaki, still in its stoppie. A.C. didn’t miss a beat, somehow remaining upright and rodeo-riding the tangled heap to a stop (see the video at www.chrispfeiffer.com), followed by a twisting dismount and bow to the crowd before he ran to check on his friend. Pfeiffer, temporarily seeing double, escaped with minor scratches and a painfully bruised ribcage.
“In combination with all the coughing from my bronchitis, this is a combo from hell, believe me,” he said, trying hard not to laugh. Pfeiffer bounced back quickly, winning the inaugural Indoor Streetbike Freestyle World Championship the next month in Zurich, Switzerland.
As extreme street riding tries to shed its outlaw back-alley image, it’s professionals like Pfeiffer who will lead the revolution. A rider since age 4, he was Junior German Trials Champion at 15 and still uses trials bikes in his show routine and as a training tool. Big-name sponsors are attracted by Pfeiffer’s approach. BMW provides a butched-up version of its new F800S inline-Twin—a rarity in stunting, where most bikes are four-cylinder 1000s—and Red Bull, Alpinestars and Metzeler are on board. Art on one wheel is definitely paying off for Mr. Pfeiffer.
Sound Off! Stupid Bike Tricks, we’ve all done ’em, usually with unhappy endings. Fess up, it’s good for the soul.
| This story was excerpted from CW’s SportBike 2007 annual, on newsstands ’til August 1, or order direct from shop.cycleworld.com. |
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