A British BMX rider has spoken of finishing a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” after he carried out methods on a floating skatepark greater than 2,000 ft (610 metres) above the bottom.
Kriss Kyle finished the world-first stunt, known as Don’t Look Down, on 6 February when he rode round a customized bowl suspended by means of a sizzling air balloon. The balloon prompt from Charlton Park Estate in Wiltshire and flew about 30 miles over the Cotswolds ahead of touching down.
Kyle achieved a number of extremely technical BMX methods and completed the feat whilst dressed in a parachute and contending with a repeatedly swinging bowl. The 31-year-old Scot, from Stranraer, Dumfries and Galloway, has competed in skilled BMX occasions since 2008 and is an athlete for Red Bull.
“I went straight to the edge, looked over and thought: ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,’ he said. “All through riding that little bike, I was like: ‘This is the one that I’ll be taking to the grave.’ [It was] a surreal experience and [I’m] just super fortunate for it, and I can’t believe I’ve done it.”
Kyle said the idea of a floating skatepark came to him when out mountain biking with his dogs in lockdown, before he pitched the idea to his manager at Red Bull. “This was pretty much the same as I go into every project – if you want it bad enough, just keep visualizing it and sure enough you can turn that into a reality. No one’s ever really done anything like this, and it’s a big bit of kit. It’s registered as an aircraft, which is insane.”
Very specific climatic conditions, including wind speeds of less than three miles an hour, were required to make the flight possible. Kyle said: “I had a year of stand-by waiting for this weather window to come around, so every night I was visualizing what it would be like.”
Engineers at Red Bull Racing needed to manufacture the bowl with less conventional materials in order to make it lighter and buoyant enough to float at 1.6 tonnes. Rob Gray, technical director of Red Bull Advanced Technologies, said: “The original wooden bowl was a sort of prototype – they built that bowl to check Kriss could ride it and to define the shape that they wanted.
“The whole focus for us was really on getting the weight down. To do that we used carbon fibre, which is the same material we make the Formula One cars out of.”