Idle Speculation: How Big is Dan Atherton’s New Hardline Valley Gap?

Red Bull Hardline Wales kicks off next Saturday, June 1. This week athletes will start to arrive at the venue, walk the track, and start checking off features. But for now, before the flood of vlogs and Insta clips and photo recaps starts, we’ve just got a few details, rife for some idle speculation.

Event organizer Gee Atherton has always had a penchant for scale. The man knows how to go big. The crash that put him out of Rampage last year happened on an absurdly large drop, and his Hardline events have always had some improbable looking jumps. But generally those features have ended up working reasonably well in practice. From the outside it feels like the Athertons set a high bar at their Hardline events, but usually, racers step up, and meet it with aplomb.

So when Gee posted this Insta carousel of the latest gap he’s put together for Hardline, it wasn’t so much surprising as it was impressive. After all, Gee has been proposing moves, gaps, lines, and features that put a pit in the stomach of most riders for over two decades.

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Update: Bernard Kerr and Matt Jones have cleared the gap!

While I was building this article, Bernard Kerr posted this clip of his first hit on the valley gap. No word on size yet, but it looks smooth!

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Matt Jones also posted this video of his first hit on the gap:

According to Matt, the gap measures around 70 feet, invalidating all my questionable photoshop math below.

Questionable Photoshopping

This new canyon gap is obviously massive. But how big is it? I’m sure we’ll see plenty of clips involving real, scientific tools, like tape measures, in a few days, but for now, I woke up on a rainy Sunday and decided to cobble together a poor-man’s measuring tape with Photoshop.

When displayed side by side, like in the original image carousel, the gap looks absolutely enormous.

But, closer examination reveals that there’s a fair bit of overlap between the two shots. I chose these two trees as my shared reference point.

With those two trees aligned, it becomes clear that the two photos were probably taken from slightly different angles, and the gap, while still huge, looks a little less unreasonable.

Then, (because it was a rainy Sunday morning and pseudo-science is entertaining) I grabbed a gentleman off of the landing deck, and cloned him across the gap. Ignoring the fact that the photo is taken at an angle, it takes six repetitions of this person’s body height to span the gap. According to Google, the average height of a man in the UK is 5’10” or 177.8 cm. Multiply that by six and you get 420 inches (nice) or 35 feet (10.7 meters). That’s still large, but much more reasonable.

Now, of course, that’s a totally made-up number, I’m sure the gap is larger than that, because the photos were taken at an angle to it. I don’t quite have the computer wizardry to calculate the lens distortion and the approximate angle of that gap, but just for fun, I employed the same technique to measure the width of the gap in the original, non-overlapping photos. There it takes ten body lengths to span the gap, for a total of 58.33 feet, or 17.78 m. Again, that’s huge, but nothing out of the ordinary for Hardline.

What does it all mean?

What does all of this tell us? Nothing really. My methods of measurement are questionable, thus the “idle” in the title. But there are a few things we know for sure:

• Red Bull Hardline continues to push the envelope for mountain bike competition.

• Gee Atherton is an excellent rider, with an excellent taste for dramatic features

• If you clear a gap, it doesn’t matter how deep it is - it could be lined with poison stakes, or over flowing lava, or a shark pit, but as long as you clear it, none of that matters.

• If you don’t clear a gap, it really matters how deep it is, and this one is deep.

• TEAM ROBOT continues to provide some great entertainment with this petition.

I’m sure we’ll get plenty of videos documenting the actual size of this monster, complete with (hopefully successful) breathless first hits. For now, Hardline weekend is coming, and we wish all the competitors the best. The sun is coming out, it’s time to shut down Photoshop and go ride!