The Open Loop Double Backflip – a work in progress… 😉
When I first saw a video of and by Kirill Benderoni, the highlight trick was a flip out of a completely ghetto style open loop, something that not too many riders had done before him – as far as I know it might have even been the first one. During our Europe road trip, Kirill brought a variation of the loop to the Spanish desert – such a cool trick! Try finding a natural oververt takeoff with a somewhat compatible landing close to it. I can guarantee that it’ll be one fucked up process finding this kind of stuff…
During the infamous Rampage trip, Kirill tried to bring the open loop to the Utah desert.
Decent effort, but a lack of building time and therefore an absolutely minimal „landing“ made stomping the trick impossible. Pretty soon after that, we had the idea to go for a double flip out of the open loop. This was probably in 2015 or even earlier – let’s just say the idea seasoned pretty nicely over the last couple of years! Kirill was always a bit hesitant as he said he’d prefer to land a double flip on a straight jump first. This year he finally did it during a trip to La Poma bike park and so all the pieces were in place to bring the project to the big stage.
I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty nerve wrecking time building the setup. I had a pretty awesome location and I had a good contact to Bagjump for a rental airbag – that was pretty much all though. Since the time frame for the stunt fell directly into my busiest time of the year, I had to build the entire setup in my spare time, which meant spread over four days, both before and after my main shootings and with the help of my dad and my father-in-law (THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!). We definitely worked our asses off during those days… and yet, once Kirill showed up in Bayreuth, there was still quite a lot of work left. Somehow, we still managed to get everything done in time and Kirill could practise the trick into the airbag.
Click here for a cell phone vid!
Luckily, there were zero problems with the trick. It looked pretty much perfect from the first attempt and Kirill only needed a couple of gos until he said he was good to go to the real landing. The ‚real‘ landing turned out to be the most challenging part of the entire project, since we had exactly half a day left to build and shoot it and we had almost no material left to build the hard part of the landing – all we had were hay balls and carpets. With a giant group effort and every piece of wood in any kind of shape we could find we managed to piece together a wooden layer on top of the hay balls and rolled the carpets down to have as smooth a surface as possible. Amazingly, the landing kind of did its job, as riding down it seemed to be pretty comfortable after all! Shortly before dusk, Kirill went for the trick for the first to fourth time and crashed each time, twice with a 95% perfect landing, once with saddle contact during takeoff and once with a kind of double flair to complete wipeout. The fifth attempt went PERFECT all the way until both tires touched the landing simultaneously. Instead of riding away to glory, Kirill was somehow thrown off the bike though and knocked his head so that we had to call it off for the day. Of course this also meant that the first session for this trick was over, too, as his flight home was already on the very next day. All we could do was leave the trick unfinished for the time being, tear down the entire setup and wait for the famous next time… and we’re still waiting 😉 I will update this article as soon as we have some news, which I hope will be sooner rather than later, but we’ll see..! In the mean time, go get your hands on the current issue of FREERIDE Magazine, which ran the entire mess…project as their Hot Move article!! Really really appreciate that one and I can’t wait to send you the final, successful attempt as well!!!! …soonish 😉
