Good afternoon, here are some sweet unicycle tricks

You can keep your Tony Hawks, your Mat Hoffmans, and your Shaun Whites. We’re more interested in true extreme sports athletes—ones who see possibilities beyond skateboards and snowboards, BMX bikes, and sweet rollerblades. The boundary-breakers who look at convention and thumb their noses at it, knowing that carnival vehicles are for more than just fun and games.

We are, in short, into extreme unicycling now.

Matt Taylor, the best of the extreme unicycling vanguard, has been showing just what he can do with only a single wheel, a bike seat, and some pedals. A compilation clip of his top tricks shows Taylor bumping fists with a pal after balancing on a railing, doing big, absurd jumps that use his vehicle like it’s a ride-on springboard. He traverses all sorts of environments in the most successful effort to make unicycles look cool that the world’s ever seen.

Last week, Taylor managed to pull off one of his best stunts yet. In the video below, which is a real masterwork of unicycle athleticism, we see him wordlessly surveying a big stack of wood pallets in a backyard before backing up, priming himself with a few hops on his ‘cycle, then launching up to the top of the obstacle. He yells “yeah!” in a faintly terrifying victory cry, clenches a fist and shouts, “yes, c’mon!” then hops back down. The stack of pallets is 155 centimeters high, which translates to 1.55 meter or just over five feet tall. The video, replayed immediately in slow motion, is even more impressive when you know this (and the nightmarish “yessss” is even more hilarious dropped a few octaves.)

Hopefully, before long, cool teens across the globe will see what Taylor’s doing and, inspired to follow in his single-tread path, spark a full-on unicycle revival. We’ll take that over other circus-based phenomena—looking at you, extreme clowns—any day of the week.

[via Boing Boing]

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