Norse power!
By TMX Archives on 9th Feb 04
AILO MIKKELSEN Gaup is just like you and me - a bike nut who likes to have fun and chill out with his mates - but with just one small difference. AILO MIKKELSEN Gaup is just like you and me - a bike nut who likes to have fun and chill out with his mates - but with just one small difference. The 24-year-old Norwegian is the only European freestyle Pro who's consistently done the back-flip in public!The boy from Alta in the far north of Norway (though he now lives in the Oslo suburb of Kongsberg) has been booked to cap off the evening's entertainment on each of the three nights at the German SX finale in Dortmund."I'm feeling pretty rough, I think I'm coming down with the flu," admits Ailo as we try to find something to drink in the Westfalenhalle. "And I haven't actually done a flip for three weeks because it's minus 15 back home so I hope I feel up to it tonight."Ailo's dog-rough by the time the evening's show starts but he does flip once for the crowd. But the Germans cock-up big time by deciding to 'surprise' the crowd and half of them miss it. "We did ask him if he could possibly do another one," admits the ADAC's Ute Kockelke sheepishly the next morning, "but he's a pretty shrewd businessman. It says once in his contract and that was how many he was going to do."The Germans make sure everyone's watching for the Saturday evening flip and just to show he's not mean, a somewhat more clear-headed Ailo flips twice in a minute for the Sunday crowd."Anything up to 10,000 Euros (that's about six grand Sterling)," is the astonishingly open answer I get when I ask what sort of fee Ailo could demand from promoters. Quite a tidy little wedge - but Ailo is taking a bigger risk than the promoter as he performs the most dangerous trick in freestyle."It is really scary, especially in the beginning and it's still scary today," Ailo admits. "I can imagine that you can learn it really quickly if you're lucky but I didn't want to rely on luck so I practised a lot. It can be extremely dangerous if you don't have a clue what you're doing."First I practised a lot of gymnastics, just to get used to going backwards. You don't get dizzy but you get disorientated. In the beginning you're so focused and scared that you can't even see where you are. It's just like when you are jumping on a trampoline, it's difficult to see where you are in the room and how far you have rotated."It's actually more natural to go backwards on a motorcycle but it's difficult to turn your head into it. Once I felt comfortable with that, I started jumping with a BMX bike from a two metre ramp into water. I spent several weeks at it and did it hundreds of times. In the beginning I just let go of the bike and landed on my back all the time and sometimes the bike would hit me."I had a friend with me who does freestyle skiing and rotation tricks are common in that and snowboarding. He learnt it on a BMX much faster than me. When I saw he could do it I decided it was just a mental thing and finally I psyched myself up to do it, gradually started rotating more and more."But there's a lot of technique involved when you go onto bigger bikes. The only person I had seen try to do it live was Mike Metzger and he crashed and got knocked out. I worked my way up through 50s, jumping into wood chips, then onto 80s and 125s. The key is to have the balance between the gas and your body positioning into the lip of the ramp. After that you've got to rotate it correctly according to the landing."I use the throttle to speed up the rotation and the brakes to slow it down if I need to but the most critical point is the take-off. If you don't get that right, then you can forget it - you don't want to get halfway round and find out it's going wrong. After that you have to spot the landing as soon as possible and figure out if you have to slow down or speed up the rotation."I've done around 400 on 125s and 250s with a lot of different take-offs on jacked-up normal ramps and kicker ramps and I can feel it right away now as soon as I leave the lip. But every ramp is different. The most difficult was a ramp in Spain with three pieces, each with a change of angle at the join."Also, the ceiling and the lights make things different. If the roof is brown like the dirt it can be a little confusing because sometimes all you see are the colours and it is important to find the landing as soon as possible."I've heard that a British guy has done some and a friend of mine in Sweden called Frederik Johansson did a couple before the winter set in. Other than that, I heard a French rider has also done some at home but I didn't hear of anybody else in Europe doing them regularly at different places. I think the Canadian Benoit Milot landed a few at home and he felt confident enough to do it at a show but it's not as straightforward as that!"I don't think so many people have tried to flip because it's dangerous and some people are scared. And there are some people who simply don't have the ability to do the backward gyration even if they are good riders. Most of the riders are fit enough but they just don't have the head for it. You don't have to be strong to do it, you have to have the technique."Those readers who've been privileged enough to witness a back-flip live - I've seen Ailo land four, Kenny Bartram half-a-dozen and seen Milot and another loony French-Canadian both get planted in the ground - will have noticed that they prepare by simply jumping the abyss several times."For sure it builds a feeling of suspense for the crowd but that's not the reason for it. You just need to prepare yourself, to see if you are getting enough height and also to judge the length. Because afterwards, when you are going backwards, you don't see where you are going. It's something you have to feel."As with so many freestylers, Ailo's background is in motocross. "I started when I was nine and then moved to Oslo in 1996 to go to the national grammar school for athletes - motocrossers, alpine skiers, Nordic skiers. I tried some European championship races and I raced snowmobiles too."I still race nearly every week for fun but in 2000 I got a mononucleosis virus and was sick for a year. After that I quit racing seriously. I'd only played around at freestyle until then, just the basic tricks like Supermans and heel-clickers. The IFMXF had been running events for three years before I got into it. They'd shown some of their events on Eurosport, so I knew what was expected and the first time I went and I finished third. Since then I've been at every round for the last two years."I've been all over Europe - the whole of Scandinavia, England, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Spain and I rode the Global X Games in Texas for Europe together with Sebastian Wolter. That was really cool - they had seven jumps in the arena which is a lot more than we are used to in the tight arenas here in Europe."I've also done some supercrosses like here but it's quite difficult to ride because the area is so tight and they have to build the SX track, then try to squeeze the freestyle in somewhere."The landing here is a little scary. There's not much of a run-off and when we got here yesterday the landing was lower than the take-off which means you are coming down a lot harder. So they put extra earth on top last night but that's not ideal either because if you come up short you're going to case it. But I think mixing freestyle and supercross is good for the crowd."You can make a good living if you are good enough. At first it was just fun, earning money and spending it on toys. A lot of times I'd spent the money before I got home even but now I'm investing in an apartment from what I earn."Particularly since he won the World Cup by integrating two flips into his programme, Ailo has achieved some degree of prominence in his homeland - although more in alternative publications than the mainstream Norwegian media whose appetite for biking is as outstanding as in the UK rags!"Kenneth Gundersen was in the papers a lot when he was riding 125 and winning but the media don't understand anything about motocross and they think he is doing really ***t now."But freestyle is quite popular in Norway and you can get it on interactive TV - you can send an SMS and you get the clip you want to watch. Honda Norway have actually stopped sponsoring road racing but they help me a lot which must say something."There's a common fallacy that freestylers don't train physically but Ailo doesn't fit the mould. "I guess it's because I used to race and just never got out of the habit. I train a lot, general fitness and muscle training - in competitions you can get really tired, particularly in the head. It's like GP racers doing timed practice over one lap, flat-out. When you do a two-minute competition it's just the same."With 'Busty' Wolter and Gary Taylor both working themselves up towards adding the back-flip to their repertoire this year, Ailo knows that he needs to continue to progress if he's to stay ahead. "I want to try the 360. First I'm going to get the feeling for it on a smaller bike just like I did with the back-flip but I don't know if I can do the 360 on a 250."Travis Pastrana and Brian Deegan - the two people who are doing them - have been practising into foam pits. I've seen some video clips of them and Mike Jones and they can land upside down in the pits."A couple of years ago the Europeans were ages behind the Americans but not anymore. Even X Games medallists are coming over to Europe all the time and the Europeans have started beating them on a regular basis. The biggest advantage they have now is that they have foam pits so they can try new tricks like the 360."By Alex Hodgkinson