Something for the weekend: Not your average cyclist
I’m not much good at extreme sports. I do extreme cooking that would make Jamie Oliver faint but I don’t think that counts.
It’s not that I’m too frightened. It’s just that other people are petrified to be around when I attempt them.
So I’ve kept it all pretty tidy since that time I wiped out 12 very genteel skiers rude enough to be crossing my path to get to the restaurant to have their lunch. It was my second day of learning on the snowy slopes of Meribel in France and perhaps I shouldn’t have tried out a red run when I didn’t really know how to snow-plough.
It ended with me having to steer myself into a tree to avoid going over a cliff. I escaped with third-degree bruising. The Genteel Skiers Party wasn’t quite as lucky. Their very French tanned-nose-in-the-air-with-not-a-hair-out-of-place vibe was horribly punctured and, after enduring some uncontained cackling from already-seated lunchers, they stared daggers at me through designer sunglasses and muttered Frenchieisms, many of which included the word “merde“.
I still can’t understand how they didn’t see the funny side of it. But then I am a South African.
So friends go to great lengths to keep me away from surfboards, skateboards, snowboards, blackboards and anything ending in board. Which is rather unfair as I often like to get my “Extreme Scrabble” game out of the cupboard.
But, hey, it doesn’t mean I can’t admire the total radness of a totally rad dude doing something totally rad in an extreme sport. This is where I introduce you, if you haven’t already been exposed to his total radness, to local lad Greg Illingworth. He rides bikes (bicycles) but not quite in the manner in which you might have seen people using them to gad about Amsterdam.
So here’s a mindblowing vid (Jedi web edit for The Riot) shot by Jimmy Reynolds, one of Umdloti’s finest creative sons, of Greg taking a leisurely Sunday cycle around a shopping mall and environs…
[pro-player width='480' height='253' type='video']http://www.vimeo.com/3968156[/pro-player]
How did that feel? Nice? Not a million miles from awesomeness overload, hey? How was that drunk woman who stumbled out of somewhere to find young Illingworth whizzing past on his way to get a book out of the local library before 5pm shutting-up time?
I liked it. I like it so much I’m going to pester Jimmy into making a lekker movie of me doing the same thing. He might want to shoot it with a mega-zoom from the top of a very tall building. That’s cool. But maybe not for any Frenchoids promenading around in search of a nice, quiet lunch.