Someone just backflipped a cargo bike and blew my mind
Cargo bikes are – and I say this with love – not known as spritely creations. Box-trikes and box-bikes, longtails and bakfiets – they’re all life-changing freedom machines, but they’re built for loads and lovers, not loops.
Sure, every so often someone does something a bit crazy on a cargo bike, like that bloke popping a wheelie in a Danny MacAskill video. But that has just been thoroughly trumped by some wholesome maniacs in Estonia, one of whom has just done a full backflip. And landed it. And didn’t snap his neck.
Our protagonists are as follows:
- Kaspar Peek: the founder of Hagen Bikes. Hagen is named after Copenhagen, the cargo bike capital of the world. Peek is Estonian but lived in Denmark for a stint, where he started numerous entrepreneurial ventures including building a bicycle sidecar, a bicycle display rack constructed of handlebars, and now his Estonian-made, steel cargo bike company. [I first became aware of this brand at the 2022 Tour de France, where someone rode the entire route on a polka-dot road cargo bike and finished in Paris on the same day as the peloton, which is also amazing but less acrobatic than flipping one.]
- William Kass: a “vegan delivery man” who’s excellent on a BMX, who did the actual stunt – despite having retired from the sport due to a knee surgery and multiple plasma injections in the last year.
There’s a long and short cut of the video – one on social media with just the flip, one on Youtube with all the lead-up to it. The short one, embedded above, gives you what you want. The long one, embedded below, gives you what you didn’t know you needed. If you don’t speak Estonian – and I suspect you don’t – it’s a linguistically … challenging watch, just a lot of melodic burbling interspersed with the occasional “no focken way!” and “welcome to Jackass!” thrown in. But it gives you a greater appreciation for the feat, seeing Peek and Kass puzzle out the logistics and angles of getting an enormous pink cargo bike to backflip.
Without causing lasting physical harm, preferably.
At a Tallinn indoor sports centre, the duo progress from jumps into a foam pit, to steeper ramps, to enormous bruises on the inside of the thigh, to triumph.
Usually with videos like this, you watch them with a quiet sense of awe – but at the core of it lies an understanding that this is within the theoretical realm of possibility for a bicycle to do, at least if piloted by someone much braver with world-leading mastery of their craft.
But backflipping a cargo bike? I didn’t know that was possible. I didn’t know it could do that. I didn’t think anyone would dare. And now I want a pink Hagen cargo bike.
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