My name is Dan Heaton.
In 1995 I started riding unicycles
and began to make films highlighting the riding myself and others were doing.
Now I've decided to make a film that is a little different.
A film that tells the story of how our sport, off road unicycling, came to be.
How unicycling became something even we never imagined that would even become
"He rides unicycles... like nobody else rides unicycles"
"Believe it or not, we have found a guy who can actually unicycle
in this territory"
"A unicycling undergroud has begun to flood."
"The reaction from two-wheelers, just plain disbelief."
"One of the newest sports on the horizon."
"They've even made like a video"
"If you think a unicycle is hard to ride... I know, it was for me, imagine doing it on a mountain !"
The year is 1981.
Looking at unicycling at this time, you'd find a hobby that's (??) based on performance and skill-based activities
This is the same time period that one of these riders, John Foss,
began expanding the limits of what unicycling could become.
The sport was undergoing a revolution.
A gradual shift in the way people rode and viewed unicycles.
When I was a kid, I used to ride around dirt trails in my area.
It was a shortcut to get to school
to get to where I worked,
at one of my early jobs
and I've always liked the challenge of different types of terrain
We learned gradully over the years that other people where interested
in light riding off road.
It was just a handfull of people spread out around the world
who individually came up with the idea of taking unicycling off road.
Some of the notable riders where Roger Davis and Duncan Castling of the UK
and Thierry Bouché from France.
However, the first stand out rider was an unassuming man from a small town in Alaska.
"Seward is possibly the worst spot on the planet in which to ride a unicycle. The place is all sand and gusts and cracks, not to mention ice and snow and logs and boulders and mountains"
Those of you are here today for Raymond have the following rights:
You have the right to remain silent, the right to be represented by a lawyer...
I'm George Peck.
I'm currently 68.
My job here in Seward is to be the local magistrary.
Seward's existance really depends on fisheries.
George was known in his community as the legal authority.
However, it wasn't long before he became known around town for something completely different.
George's interest in unicycling developed after he read it was good cross-training for windsurfing.
He decided to give it a try
after his wife found a little red unicycle abandoned at the city dump.
I said I wanted a unicycle and of course there were no unicycles in Seward and she goes to the dump
where everybody brings all kind of matter, broken toys,
so this happens to be one of the items.
I gave it a try and it worked for a few days.
But it obviously had his weaknesses.
As George's skills developped, it seemed natural for him to take his new skill
into Seward's rugged environment.
It resonated with some features of my personnality
like, I like to be outdoors, I like a challenge,
and I like exercise.
And it seemed to offer all of the above.
This is Jessie Belle
who's been my constant companion in all my trail rides.
We rode every weekend and many week days
so she's probably got, I don't know, thousand of miles on her own.
Trails and river beds, mountains...
I was always alone and there was nobody else to ride with.
To unicycle is so personable, so private, so quiet.
There is no chain clatter, there is no .. nothing.
There's just you, and you really feel like you're part of the terrain.
I think a big, big benchmark for me was learning to hop.
One day I was trying to get up this hill and I just started hopping
and it was like "wow", look at all the new things this opens up!
George's new found hopping skills laid the groundwork for unicycling trials.
Performant unicycling where riders use their skills to negotiate over obstacles.
His riding culminated in a self-produced video that would introduces his riding to the unicycle community.
This is a film about rough terrain unicycling,
hello...
In 1991, I believe, he came out with his video.
And that was a major inspiration to the people who saw it
to go forward with offroad riding
He was just amazing to me.
I had been mountain biking for 15 years,
he was a guy way older than me,
going on way rougher terrain,
and on a unicycle, which just looked impossible.
so, that just immediately made me want to learn.
So let's turn now to the basics skills and equipment you will need to get started.
Protective equipment is vital to fun and injury free riding.
For big rock I use a mast pad beefed up with a kitty litter pan bottom and an other layer of foam.
When I first saw "Rough Terrain Unicycling",
I thought the guy was crazy.
These are dream slabs to work.
They are stable, rough and only moderately tilted.
"Rough Terrain Unicycling" opened up peoples' eyes to riding on something other than ash board and concrete
or in a gym or down the sidewalk.
That could mean steps, boxes, railroad tracks, rocks, curbs, tilted cements, mountains, snow and ice,
dry creek and river beds...
And the fact that he was an elderly guy vs all these young kids at the time.
It just kind of blew everybody away.
George's video had a profound impact on those who saw it
but the 50 copies he produced weren't seen by many people.
The small number of riders around the world who had taken up the sport
remained disconnected, riding alone, with no common ground to share their interest.
It wouldn't be until the mid-90's before that would began to change.
In 1994 I moved in California
and I started riding the trails there.
It just occured to me I had to share this, you know
It's time to get a bunch of people together and come out here
and say let's just do an offroad unicycle event.
And that became the 1996 California Mountain Unicycle Weekend.
On October 5, 1996, 35 unicyclists from around the country
and as far away as England, converged on Sacramento's Auburn Valley.
It was finally a chance for riders to share their skills
and passion for mountain unicycling.
For a lot of the people I think it was a chance to ride with other people.
This is something you normally do by yourself.
Suddenly you've got 60 people.
Everybody's interested in the same thing.
Everybody's got the same passion.
The California Mountain Unicycle Weekend was repeated again in 1997 and 1998.
Number one thing on a unicycle is attitude:
if you think you can't ride the hill, you won't.
I guarantee it, it's totally attitude.
In the third year of Muni Weekend, 1998,
we had a notable new guy.
This guy from Canada came in.
He was very quiet, didn't say much, didn't introduce himself.
We were all trying to ride down this really steep slippery slope
and everybody was crashing and laughing
and no one came close to riding it.
And then Kris Holm walked up and just rode it, first time!
Already I was thinking: "Dang, where does this guy practice?"
So we realized there was something special about him.
Later I learned it was the first time he had ever ridden with other unicyclists.
But he was already way ahead of us in the skill department.
He was the best offroad rider we had all seen.
A Vancouver man is the master of this little known extreme sport:
Mountain Unicycling,
Kris Holm.
I knew he was a wave of the future. He had all the skills
He was the most visible unicyclist in the world.
He just kind of flew down, you know, big steep hills.
I got into unicycling because I saw a street performer
who was playing a violin on a unicycle.
And I thought that was pretty cool because I actually play the violin
and I thought : I want to learn how to do that!
So, I asked for one for my 12th birthday.
I come from a really outdoorsy family, we do hiking and climbing, and skiing together.
With a lot of those sports, they have really one thing in common.
And that's trying to negociate over some kind of hard terrain.
So, for me the mentality of riding difficult terrain was pretty logical.
How in the world, why in the world did you start doing this?
I leave near a beach, by trails, that sort of things
and it was actually a fairly natural thing once I learned how to ride down the street
I tried to do some more difficult things and in my case that meant riding rocks and logs.
Rocks and logs!
We are at Spanish Banks, which is just in the west side of Vancouver.
On the logs and the rocks and the beach.
You know, I really love coming down here, this is my favorite spot in the world to do trials
because there is endless lines.
Every winter storms, they're different and it's just beautiful.
You know I could hang out here and read a book or ride trials.
It's just gorgeous, you've got the mountains in the background and the Vancouver skyline
and these awsome logs that wash up on the beach all year round.
One of the things that I like the most about riding is the focus
In day to day life, we're usually thinking about a million different things at once
whereas if you're riding and it's hard, you're thinking about riding
and if you're not thinking about riding, usually you're falling.
I love that focus, I love that feeling of just beeing in the moment.
And there's few activities that I've ever done where I can easily enter into that moment.
So, quickly I can jump on my unicycle, go for a ride and everything else falls away.
One of the places I do that a lot is Rap Beach
which is actually a new beach right by my house.
You get some encounters with all kinds of retro-nouveau hippies.
People have kind of build there castles in the sand for sun tanning
and you get logs arranged in configurations that you just never see in a normal beach.
Little did they know that they are building absolutely world class unicycle trials playground.
In 1997 I moved to Vancouver
and discovered the Vancouver north shore.
For me, that was a huge revelation, because all of a sudden,
a lot of the things that I found that I loved to ride on the beach like logs where now in the woods.
So it sort of combined all the cool things that I wanted to do.
Word got around that some guy was riding a unicycle on trails that were supposed to be some of the hardest trails anywhere.
Only within maybe 3 weeks after I started riding there I started to get calls from videographers.
Kris started doing mountain bike videos
and showing the sport to a much wider audience.
Kris' presence in mountain bike films brought new attention to the sport.
As a result, Kris became the first sponsored moutain unicyclist,
joining the Norco factory trials team in 1999.
It kind of exploded from there.
Pretty soon, it got to the point where I was doing a TV show or a magazine feature almost every 2 weeks.
You could see him on lots of different TV shows doing ridiculous outrageous riding on walls and cliff edges
and just places your mom would die if she saw you doing it.
There was still a total disbelief.
It was really viewed as something singular
that there was this one guy up here.
If you can't become a professionnal at this,
you can certainly join a circus!
Actually Mountain Unicycling has nothing to do with the circus.
It was so frustrating that no one knew about this sport.
It was kind of like this secret, almost, that it worked!
And there was so much skepticism
and there were so many times when people would come up to me
when I was riding up here and say "I can't believe you're doing that on one wheel"
and I really wanted to say that it's not a freaky thing.
It's really something you can do, you can really do it.
And I really wanted to change the way the world felt about our sport.
People in circuses are incredible athletes
but I like to stress that this is an adventure sport.
To Kris, that drive to combine unicycling and adventure worked remarkably well.
His riding took him to unique locations around the world,
including filming for a feature length documentary for Outside Television.
At the same time Kris was pushing the boundaries of mountain and trials unicycling,
another revolution was taking place.
Just south of Vancouver and Seattle, Washington
one rider would radically change the way unicycles were ridden and viewed.
I was alway a pretty shy, small, not very athletic kid
and unicycling became my way of expressing myself.
I was just having fun on my unicycle.
I never expected anything to come out of it.
The man is credited with starting Street Unicycle:
Dan Heaton.
I got a unicycle for Christmas in 1995.
I was interested in the challenge of it
and wanted to try to do something different.
When I first started to try to learn how to unicycle
I thought it was impossible.
It just felt totally unnatural.
I had never seen anybody unicycle before
and I didn't have anybody to help me learn.
I just kept practicing over and over and over
and eventually after 3 months, it just clicked.
I found out that there was a local unicycle club.
I got involved with them
riding with other people, learning tricks,
and doing shows and performances.
I wasn't too into the performance side of things.
So I kind of moved away from that
and started doing my own things.
Dan received one of the few copies of George Peck's video
which inspired him to take up mountain unicycling.
I found out about the California Mountain Unicycling Week-end.
I went to that event in 1997 and 1998.
I was meeting a lot of the people that were pioneering the sport,
guys like John Foss and George Peck.
I was always trying to keep up with what Kris was doing
'cause I really liked his riding.
It didn't always work out, I was having a lot of bad falls
and probably riding outside of my limits.
Ohh, you're okay?
It would be Dan's freestyle background
that allowed him to stand out from other mountain unicyclists.
In the late 90's, Dan Heaton came along
and started taking the freestyle which he learned originally
and combining that with trials.
And that became Street Unicycling.
Street Unicycling was a completely new style,
where instead of just trying to get over obstacles,
you'd try to do tricks with those obstacles.
I had seen bikes and skateboards do tricks
and I always wondered if it was possible
to do those things on unicycle.
So that really became my goal.
In the beginning, Street Unicycling was limited to what Dan could find in his own backyard
Wanting to find better obstacles, he took his unicycling to the local skatepark.
I'd walk up to the skate park
and everybody would just stop and look at me
and start laughing and making jokes.
I didn't have very many tricks that I could do
and I was really just practicing things to see if they were possible.
People really didn't understand what I was doing.
I always felt awkward being at the skatepark.
We're at Gasworks Park in Seattle.
It's my favorite place to ride, there's tons of stuff to ride on down there.
And the people here are generally a lot more into what I'm doing.
A lot more accepting of unicycling
than at places like the skatepark.
Hey he's fuckin' insane.
Yeah.
Oops, I--you want it on tape? Oh shit.
Sorry, didn't mean to do that.
Yeah we're just checking up here see if there's anything to ride.
Kid, what do you think of...
Oh yeah, yeah, jump off the edge here.
Alright dude, let's do it.
No!!! Are you really?
Are you serious?
Are you freakin' insane?
Nice! Oh no!!! Shit!!!
Kiddin' me! Oh shit!
You gotta be kidding me!
Alright check this out.
And then he's jumping off, with a high five?
Let's see if we can do that.
I got a finger tip. Lunatic! Lunatic!
Gimme some love!
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
That's totally insane!
When I was in high school, I had a friend, Adam Risner (???)
who would unicycle with me.
We were taking a video class in school
and got the idea that "Hey let's make a highlight video of unicycling".
Alan let's document some of the moves on tape.
What about a 180° clock tower elbow!
Originally it was almost kind of a joke.
Let's see a double jack hammer!
Let's go! Let's go!
We started filming ourselves just kind of doing some stupid stuff.
Dan get over here, check this out.
Oh man, that's a gash.
As we were filming, we really started to get better at riding.
Eventually, we started connecting with some of the more known riders in this sport.
Dan Heaton came down from Washington
and wanted to shoot some riding.
So we took him around to local trails and we started shooting video.
Stick it on the damn unicycle, are you ready?
I'm recording.
You got it, you got it!
Oh yes, that's so bad, man.
They started filming and then they came up here
and we continued that on the north shore
and urban Vancouver.
We really got a sense that maybe this video could be more than just a high school project.
Holly shit!
We had never made a video before
but we just filmed the progression of our riding
and filmed with some other riders and released a full length video on this sport.
This was the first kind of "modern style" unicycle video that was out there
and it got virtually all over the world.
For the first time,
unicycling wasn't just a segment in a bike video.
It had its own video.
The "Universe" video had a great premiere at Unicon X in Beijing, China.
Unicon X, the unicycling world championships, where traditional forms of unicycling take center stage.
You had an event where 800 people were getting together
and then you had this video which was totally unlike
what anybody had really seen before that.
And the premiere was unbelievable.
We were sitting in a bar in China.
And we were able to cobble together a TV and a VCR.
I think we were there with about a 100 people.
All unicyclists.
People from all over the world gathered around this one little TV set
and they were all spellbound.
I mean, I remember the reactions of people.
You know, people were like "Whoaa!!!"
The bar keeper pretty quickly realized that if he kept playing this video over and over
it was really good for his business.
So he played it, and it looped and it looped and it looped for hours and hours.
It put the sport out there, so people could see it.
It took it from there, it took it in a huge direction,
to Europe, to Asia and North America and elsewhere
where people took that home with them and started to doing it themselves.
It really opened the unicycle community's eyes to this sport.
The Universe video changed people's conception of what could be done on a unicycle
bringing a whole new generation into this sport.
However, there was still one remaining barrier that plagued all off-road unicyclists.
The quality and availability of equipment.
Currently available stock unicycles are not up to long term use in rough terrain.
These are a few of the dozens of axles I have broken from these machines.
Most of us were on normal, regular, off the shelf unicycles
or those same unicycles with a knobby tire stuck on.
And the unicycle would just break.
You would go out on a ride
and your ride would end when your equipment broke.
It didn't end when you were too tired
or when you wanted to stop riding.
And sometimes that was within 5 minutes.
Sometimes you'd get lucky and you could ride for an hour or two.
And here another broken unicycle.
Damn' it!
I had a huge shelf (???) with broken gear, in the beginning.
And it also affected what I rode.
A lot of the terrain that I rode was bumpy and technical
but it didn't involve for example big drops because I would have busted my unicycle.
We were pretty much breaking something in every ride.
If we had a group of six or eight people,
somebody would break a frame, a hub, a seat, a seat post.
The crank arms would bend, the pedals might come apart.
Broken rims, broken spokes, broken cranks, hubs...
You name it, pretty much I broke it.
And it was really really frustrating and expensive really, y'know.
I'd break it, I'd be off for three weeks.
When you were looking for strong equipment, 10 years ago,
basically unless you could make it yourself
or you knew a machinist that could make it for you
you were pretty much on your own.
I started looking around for machine shops
because that was, really what I thought could be the only solution
considering that you couldn't actually buy a mountain unicycle at the time.
These one-off were about 1000 bucks a piece
'cause you were paying a craftsman for his time
and then you break it and then you modified it
and you pay him another 4-5-600 to something else to it
and then you break it and modify it, so it added up.
It was expensive, I was paying hourly shop rate for that.
I think my first unicycle cost me close to $3000 by the time I went through prototypes and failures.
These were pretty strong, only broke a couple of these.
This is off from some kind of mountain bike setup with an elastomere in here, didn't work.
So because of all the people in the past like George Peck and Kris Holm and Dan Heaton
looking for high-end equipment,
now there's actually manufacturers making it
and it's available today.
I started selling unicycles out of the back of my hearse.
Back in around 1993.
Everything's got a little bit bigger, I had to open up a shop
and here we are, pulling down at the back of the factory.
When people come in here, they're totally blown away
because they're used to going to a bicycle store
where they have like one 20" and one 24"...
Occasionally, even maybe a tall one.
But there's nowhere you can just go and see like 80 or a 100 unicycles on display,
ready to ride.
Few years back, I thought y'know I want to customise unicycles,
make them cool.
So you can see along here, I have powder coated rims in many colours, many sizes
and I can pretty much build any unicycle however you want it.
You know that kind of personalizes unicycles.
The very key component on a unicycle today is definitely hub and cranks.
Big tires for offroad unicycling,
Super big and wide.
Alloy rims, alloy frames.
Just in general, the unicycles have come a long way.
This is my t-shirt rack here
and I have about 35 different t-shirts.
And these are all cartoon versions of actual people,
people that I thought did something really cool to promote the sport
or kind of took it to another level.
This is Mike Clarke.
This one here is Kris Holm.
And here's Dan Heaton.
And the last one I have on the rack
is Kevin McMullen.
What this does is it creates a role model for unicycling
which to me is incredible.
Like you hear about it in skateboarding and BMX
but you never really heard of it before in unicycling.
And I feel that it created kind of like, like a culture that unicyclists now can call their own.
Businesses like Bedford Unicycles and most notably online retailer unicycle.com
have helped to solve one of the sport's biggest problem.
They have created a market for offroad unicycles, driving the prices down,
while the quality of equipment was continualy improving.
With convenient access to offroad unicycles,
new riders began popping up all over the world,
continually expanding on the riding that Kris and Dan had introduced.
I wanted to go and meet these people
and film the things that they were doing.
So I started taking road trips around the country.
I wanted to see the sport unfold first hand
and I wanted to document that.
People were taking what they saw in my video
and not only learning it but they were putting their own style into it
and they were riding in their own way.
Yeah!
First fucking try!
Man I was so excited to go down to Boston and film for "Defect" with him
'cause I had seen Universe, I had seen Universe 2
and then those were the videos to be in.
If you were in one of Dan's video, people knew you right away.
They knew your name, they knew your style of riding,
and they were excited to meet you.
Being in Dan's videos really changed the way people...
well I mean when I went to a unicycle convention
all of a sudden you'd shop at that convention and everybody knew who you were.
And people wanted to talk to you, people would come up to you
and have their picture taken with you, or asking for your autograph.
It was weird.
You kind of felt like you were a celebrity in this really small community.
Once we got better at riding,
we could go to a skatepark
and when we'd walk up, people would still start kind of laughing at us
and look at us kind of weird.
You guy trying to join the circus?
But now, we were better at riding.
So we could go and just bust out one trick.
Instantly when people saw that,
their attitudes changed towards what we were doing.
They realized it was the exact same idea as what they were doing.
But it was just on unicycle.
People really started to accept it and respect it.
Dan's dedication to filming our sport has been incredible.
He barely makes any money off these videos.
And this is a guy who broke both of his feet in a unicycling accident
and was still out there filming, like, two days later.
Dan was in a wheelchair 'cause he couldn't walk with his two broken feet
and he didn't want to stop filming.
So I drove him from Michigan to Seattle
and we stopped at these places and filmed people riding.
A lot of the people that are riding now
are the same people that might have just picked up a skateboard.
And for whatever reason, they tried a unicycle instead.
My name is Xavier Collos, I'm 20 years old
and I live in Montpellier, in the south of France.
I tried bicycle before.
It's too complicated, two wheels...
There is so much stuff, I don't understand.
I like unicycles because you can do very creative stuff.
In France, you see more and more people on unicycle
and mostly on Street Unicycle.
I think Kevin McMullin is a crazy guy.
He tries some very hard tricks down a lot of stairs
and that's "Whoa".
I like this sport so much
mostly because of the feeling I get when I land a big trick.
You got it!
I've fallen a lot when I've been unicycling.
Usually it's not that bad, you can get up from it.
But sometimes, you know, the same feeling of excitement you get when you land a big trick,
it can go completely the opposite direction when you fall,
and everything can just come down.
Oh my God!
Oh man, that was the worst fall I have ever had.
I got stuck on it,
stepped off, put one foot on the rail
and had my right foot cross over and fell directly on the stairs
on my back and on my head.
I think one of the big changes in this sport has been
that now there's risk, physical risk associated with it.
That it wasn't, historically.
Here we go.
My nuts and my head...
Oh God ! Oh God !
Oh man!
Oh son of a bitch! No
Fuck man.
Shaun Johannesson has a pretty "out there" personality.
My name is Shaun Johannesson, and I'm 20 years old
from Mandan, North Dakota. Whooo
I used to watch videos of Dan Heaton and Kevin McMullin
and I always tried to push to do that type of street riding
and flow like them, like that type of style.
I was always the guy that wanted to be the person people talked about of the street unicycling.
I've got to do it again ! I've got to do it again !
This is the Mandan skatepark, it's my favorite place to ride.
It's got everything, it's got great rails, ledges,
and you don't get kicked out.
For riders like Shaun,
who have become the new stars of this sport,
opportunities become much more frequent than in the past.
They've provided a little extra motivation
to help keep riders interested and involved in unicycling.
You can get sponsored fairly easily.
You can get big sponsorship if you're good.
You can get in TV commercials where you don't have to be a performer.
There's all sorts of things now that didn't exist a few years ago.
People around here actually don't believe me when I tell 'em some of the things I've done.
I've been to California for a fashion show.
I did a commercial for an energy drink down in South America.
I've been flown to competition to Denmark and Germany,
it's been quite a great trip for me with this sport.
Ready and action!
So Stacey can you just tell me what you're doing,
up here in Seattle?
I'm up here with a crew of people and we're doing a commercial for Columbia Sportswear.
And we're focusing on you,
Dan Heaton, great unicycler.
Very good, very good.
The first time I saw, like, Mountain Unicycling, I was knocked out.
I had never seen it before, I didn't know it existed.
I rode a unicycle as a kid
and never in my wildest imagination, did I think that you guys could do what you're doing.
Can you get a little air up at the top?
Wether it's pedaling in or jump... you know, stopping.
Yeah, I can do it.
What this is again ? This is kind of a ???
I've been watching the whole damn' thing right here.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
There's some rockin' man!
Is he gonna get down this time?
Yeah.
Oh... Ouch!
Man, I'm like going:
"How's this dude doing this crap?"
It's like... Jesus!
What's really cool about what you guys are doing
is you're doing exactly on a unicycle what we did on skateboards thirty years ago.
You're inventing a sport!
When you see kids invent a sport,
it opens up everybody's mind because you're showing us all the possibilities.
Who would have ever thought?
I like unicycle because of the people that are involved in this sport,
like you meet new people and riders.
Anybody, doesn't really matter, their skills.
You get together with them and have a good time.
It seems that all you need to do is
have that one thing in common that you both ride unicycles
and it seems that you'll be good friends from the start.
I don't think I can generalize at all in terms of who unicycles
because it's everybody, it's anybody.
It doesn't seem to be related to age or where you live...
There's thousands of people all over the world,
there's kids in Australia, New Zealand, in Europe, Japan,
all over the US and Canada, that are doing this sport now.
I'd like to see it recognized as a sport more,
I'd like to see people understand unicycling better
because they've seen what we do now
and they've seen it more,
and the public perception is changing, which has taken a really long time.
We don't get that circus music so much, like we used to.
Skills are becoming so phenomenal
and equipment is so good.
I just want it to go where it can go.
It's not so much how big this sport is.
I don't think this sport is going to get that big
because it's too hard at beginning level.
I don't think we have to worry that it's going to get so mainstream that it becomes uninteresting.
But I do want to see it become something
that people do have the opportunity to get into if they choose.
And that somehow also kind of keeps a sense of where we come from.
Keeps its soul.
It's hard to imagine that they can go any bigger than they are now
with, you know, rail grinds and drops and hops
but I'm sure as time goes on, just like we couldn't believe it would be in the past,
I'm sure the future holds a lot more than unicycling.