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COAST RIDER DESENT ANGLE FREE

But with this sudden acclaim came criticism, too.īefore Brian became a filmmaker, he became a bike racer.

COAST RIDER DESENT ANGLE FREE

Video views racked up, comments poured in, fans gushed, and his audience-stuck indoors due to COVID and perhaps looking for the type of enrapturing content that could free them from their domestic confines-swelled. Though he had no formal experience as a filmmaker, his work immediately struck a chord. Brian shot the first installment of Descent Disciples two years ago, and when the pandemic hit he decided to venture further into the unknown by ditching his messenger job to pursue filmmaking full-time. The guy rips down a road the way Alex Honnold free-climbs up a mountain: quickly, obsessively, death-defyingly, and, above all, mesmerizingly. Descriptors abound anytime Brian straddles a bike. In conversation, Brian exudes an intelligence that borders on the philosophical, and he seems to employ this same deep-thinking mentality when riding. Especially journalists writing about those sports deemed, for lack of a better word, “extreme.” In such cases, we can default to facile summations, ones that praise daredevilism over skill, as if, in Brian’s case, the only prerequisite to descend at such dizzying speeds is a lack of brain cells. Journalists, we both agree, can sometimes be misleading.

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This tension charges each clip with an immediacy not otherwise found in a sport whose romance has long been defined by the slow-burn sufferfests spent riding up mountains, not down them. In many of Brian’s videos, a soul-restoring sense of beauty mingles with the specter of serious injury or, in the most white-knuckle of them, maybe even death. You see it in the soft light, the sound, the vibe, the flow, all of it belonging to a vision that feels as dialed as the dude’s descending. There’s an artistry on display beyond the skill required to ride at such high speed. This might be the video’s defining feature, but it is not the sole appeal. The stakes are high, the threat of a crash sometimes looming only a tire’s length or two to one side of the road. canyons go, it isn’t one of the most technical, and yet the way Safa Brian rides it leaves little room for error. → Sign up for Bicycling All Access and get more great reads like this one.įor the uninitiated, Deer Creek is a two-mile twist of California road that veins the hills north of Malibu, dropping riders down an 11 percent pitch that, like most of the canyon roads out there, T-bones into the one-lane traffic along the northbound side of the Pacific Coast Highway. Only a caption that might as well be a mic drop: “Deer Creek in under 3 minutes. “No, no, no,” she says, hand darting to mouth, eyes squished shut so as not to witness the crash she’s sure will come.

My wife shares a similar response, turning away within seconds of my leaning across the couch to show her the clip. “Jesus Christ, that’s maniac shit,” writes the first friend I DM the video to, a downhill mountain biker who never gushes over anything remotely related to road cycling. The blue blur of the ocean that blends into the horizon in the hazy summer light the early morning sun, already white and washed out as it rises from behind the Santa Monica mountains the sepia-toned scrub grass speeding by on either side of the fish-eye frame, allowing the viewer to burrow deeper and deeper into the singular world of the rider known as Safa Brian to his more than 200,000 followers across Instagram and YouTube. The cicada zing of the rider’s freewheel. The wind whirring past the cameraman’s mic. There are other features that compel me to watch the 25-second Instagram clip over and over again as I sit safely on my couch-some sensual, most visceral. No sooner has he navigated these two turns and he’s melting into a super tuck, all his movements-his entire being-blessed with a preternatural grace, even at 56 miles an hour with the western fringe of the Continental 48 plunging hundreds of feet to the Pacific far below. Now the rider drifts from the white line along the right side of the road to the double yellow and then back again as he skims another corner. The rider flings his machine into a corner, his body pitched unnaturally to one side, as if the rules of physics are merely things to be fucked with, and that fear-even the faintest traces of it-is somewhere behind him, far up the canyon he’s currently barreling down, dropped and left gasping for air in the gutter. It’s the flagrant angle of the bike that catches me off guard.