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Bas Keep Anatomy of the wall ride “There’s a moment after you jump when you suddenly stop. It’s like being on a rollercoaster – that feeling in your stomach before it drops.” To see Bas Keep perform his signature realityfolding jump-to-vert, it seems almost effortless. But like all magic tricks, the complexity of what’s being performed is hidden from the audience by the magician himself. Here, Keep breaks down what’s going on inside his head during each stage of this jump… 1. The launch “This is the moment where the hard part is done – the decision to let go of the fear. You can’t see underneath the level – it’s completely blind, so you look at the wall ahead and trust. It’s a massive mind game.” 2. The air “In this moment you’ll know instantly whether it’s going to be a few glorious milliseconds of flight, or to prepare for a crash landing.” 3. The vert “Once the flight has reached its apex, you start to plan for the landing by looking through the bike frame to line it up with the wall. You don’t want to be too close to the wall, but you really don’t want to miss it completely and land hard on the flat ground.” 4. Exit! “A bittersweet moment of relief and disappointment – the job is done.” Keep and his friends began spending every spare moment at the bowl, and each evening Dennis would drive them home. “We’d all be hungry – we didn’t have any money to buy food,” says Keep. “But he helped us out. He helped us fix the ramp and our bikes. He was a great guy.” Within a year, Keep could pull off a backflip. “That was unheard of in the scene back then – a young kid doing a mature trick like that. I gained instant notoriety. Then, in the early 2000s, BMX blew up.” It’s 8am on a chilly September morning in 2019. Standing astride his BMX on the second floor of Selfridges car park in Birmingham, Bas Keep is staring at a short ramp leading off the edge of the storey. Beyond it is a gap barely wider than the take-off, then a concrete pillar rising from the level below. He’s in a trance, gazing into a moment where the cars are halted, chatter dies down, and the only movement comes from the flutter of the white-and-red barrier tape strung between traffic cones. Then his tyres attack the tarmac. He powers forward, committed. “I want to put my wheels places where no one has ever been” The ramp sends Keep across the gap. His bike seems to fold space as he spins through 360°, simultaneously inverting to face the floor. Both tyres hit the pillar with a clap, rubber compressing into the concrete as he hangs there for a heartbeat before plummeting down the vert. At the bottom of the pillar is another ramp meant to launch Keep back out in the opposite direction. But something has gone wrong. Suddenly, Keep is not riding at all; he’s a passenger. His bike piledrives him into the lower level like a sack of wet cement. From Mach 3 to standstill in an instant. As Keep lies crumpled on his side, the crew rush in, anxiety growing with every second he remains motionless. “Fuck, I didn’t see that coming,” he says, pulling himself to his feet with more alacrity than expected. At first he looks dazed, but quickly his expression sharpens back into focus. A quick roll of the shoulders and a few strides around the car park and you’d never believe Keep was hugging the asphalt seconds earlier. Soon he’s chatting with his crew in subdued tones. He already knows what went wrong. “Not getting the setup close enough,” Keep explains. “It was 3ft higher than we thought, and it spat me out. I was too tense, and there was too much vert. That’s a lethal combo.” If Keep’s assessment seems matter-offact, well, he’s been here before. In 2017, he dropped a guerrilla-style video, Walls, on an unsuspecting public. It documented THE RED BULLETIN 35
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