Red Bulletin UK

Bas Keep
W
hen Sebastian Keep was 11 years old,
he discovered an alien artefact near
his hometown of Hastings, East Sussex,
that would change the course of his life.
“I was riding an old-school Raleigh
Burner BMX, looking for hills to go down
as fast as I could, because that’s what we
thought BMX was about,” recalls the
38-year-old today. “Then my brother and
his friends stumbled across this thing
and rushed home to tell us about it, so
we went to check it out.”
What Keep saw blew his young mind:
“There was this metal structure like the
hull of a huge ship, tucked away in this
work yard in some country lanes. You’d
never find it, but it had been there more
than 30 years. At 11, I thought I knew
everything about the world, and yet this
thing felt like it had been kept from us.
Why didn’t we know about it? Why wasn’t
it on TV? It was like finding a UFO.”
Keep and his friends had unearthed
the Crowhurst Bowl. “This guy in the
village, Dennis, had built the ramp to
help out local kids who had nowhere to
skate,” he says. “Even without anyone
doing tricks on it, it was impressive.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a vert
ramp in the flesh, but this one was 10ft
[3m] tall. It was terrifying, vertical; you
couldn’t imagine people riding down it.”
He didn’t know it at the time, but
Sebastian ‘Bas’ Keep had begun a journey
to legendary status in BMX as one of its
greatest-ever all-round riders. But, back
in 1994, he recalls, “We didn’t even realise
people did backflips on bikes. At that age
I was bored, playing a lot of football and
annoying the trolley pushers at the local
Tesco. I needed something to dig my
teeth into. When we found the ramp, it
introduced me to something missing in
my life, and to people with a common
bond. These guys took us in and gave
encouragement, teaching us how to drop
into a ramp. The other neighbourhood
kids weren’t friendly like that.”
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