#BikeLife: The Revolution That’s Taking Back the Streets
I heard the wheelies before I saw them.
The metallic clackity-purr of coasting hubs announced the mass of riders cruising up the street, fanning out curb to curb.
The first rider passed me wearing a red T-shirt, gold baseball cap, and beaming grin. He punched two quick pedal strokes and popped his front wheel into the air. It looked effortless. He leaned back, body hanging below the front hub. Others wheelied one-handed, some wheelied with knees or feet on the saddle. Another dipped back precariously far and dragged his fingertips on the ground.
Cars slowed. Heads turned. One rider blasted reggaeton from a speaker strapped to his frame. Over the looping bass thumps, more riders laughed and chatted as casually as if they were riding a couch. Nobody was in a hurry.
Forget all our arguing over how to take back the streets from cars. These kids just do it. Their wheelies-all wheelies-command authority. Their wheelies halt traffic and stop pedestrians. Their wheelies celebrate their place in the city, proclaiming that they own the pavement they’re rolling down. Cars deal with it.
I watched in awe. I wanted to be out there. I wanted to have that much fun, to command streets.
As they reached an intersection, more riders poured in from either side until nearly 60 filled the road, one with his foot in a walking cast. The kids hollered on down the street, away from me. The booming soundtrack of my night gone as quickly as it had appeared. But they stayed with me. I had to wheelie.
I thought of my former life as a zipped-up road racer (high socks, crisp tan lines, Strava, Strava, Strava). I believed I was the coolest cat on the street because I was fast and very serious. But from the sidewalk, I realized fast has hardly anything to do with anything. These kids had everything I wanted from cycling: Not a contract or designer bike, but friends, unregulated fun, and a small, perfect slice of freedom.
In an uphill alley, I finally pulled hard enough and leaned back far enough that I held my front wheel off the ground for four pedal strokes. I shrieked and whooped and bounced on my pedals in excited, stupid hops. After six more sprint-coast-push-yanks I did it again, savoring all three seconds of one-wheeled wonder. In that dicey and totally adrenalizing moment, I understood the magnetism of the wheelie.
The movement is purely authentic, not something you can buy or borrow. You earn every pop, and in the gamble with gravity is the joy that mesmerized me that night. But I also realized the most primal truth of the wheelie, the bedrock tenet from which it draws its power.
Wheelies are just fucking fun.
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