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news
Destin Sandler battles with the reverse-steering bikeVideo: As easy as riding a bike — with reversed steering?
It's as easy as riding a bike, right? And riding is something you never forget how to do once you've learned? Well, maybe not. Learn to ride a bike steers the wrong way and you may forget how to ride a normal bike.
Science video-blogger Destin Sandlin spent eight months learning to a ride a bike with backwards steering. No, not a bike that goes backwards, but one where turning the handlebars left makes the wheel turn right, thanks to a pair of cogs between stem and steerer tube.
Such bikes are fiendishly hard to ride, especially if you already know how to ride a bike. As you lean a regular bike, you slightly turn the handlebar and front wheel. But with the handlebar geared to turn the wheel the wrong way it all goes pear-shaped.
After much perseverance Sandlin managed to learn to ride the bike. After a lot less perseverance, his three-year-old son learned to ride one too, which shows that a) it's much easier for kids to learn new skills and b) a trip to Australia is a great incentive.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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The small frame, the aggressive posture, lots of standover height.
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You're defending bombing hospitals and refugee camps and starving children.
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11 comments
If you cross your arms, putting your right hand on the left grip, and your left hand on the right grip, you can ride these just fine.. Won many £20 notes as a kid doing this at church fêtes..
Did you watch the video?
I wonder if it wheelie the same way
I sometimes get a similar thing when I switch from my about-town fixie to my proper road bike or vise-versa. Trying to free-wheel on the fixie can result in a rather nasty 'kick' that causes the bike the lurch. But it doesn't happen often, and after I'm properly aware of which bike I'm riding, the mental switch is pretty much taken care of.
It's a very interesting project, although I'm not sure how much I want to read into the 'plasticity' argument from this one study, as I believe that that whole 'adults are about as flexible as a brick' thing has come under scrutiny in recent years.
I think I tried one of these bikes at a festivally thing. The person in charge had mastered it and made a big deal of riding it with ease. I think it was a 'pay £1, ride 10m and win £10' affair. Needless to say, everyone failed, and I expect the organisers made a tidy sum, but the experience was certainly worth the entry fee. I'd like to own one and see how long it took to get a get a handle on it...
Also, are road.cc combing the Singletrack forums for stories these days?
This video is six days old, but I mention it on a Singletrack thread and it appears on road.cc within an hour.
That was cool. Now all we need to do is mass produce the bikes and plant them at bike theft hotspots and sit back and watch the fun unfold.
The guy is a natural; very entertaining.
Hehe, a school friend's dad built one of these about 25 years ago, and used it as a fund raiser at school fetes - people would pay a pound to have a try with a promise of £100 if they could ride it a certain distance. Don't think he ever had to pay out!
Really interesting video!
Be interesting to see if it is harder to learn than a 'normal' cycle for someone who can't cycle?
Well one of the things he shows in that this young son picks it up in the space of a couple of weeks, whereas it takes him months of practise.
I suspect that someone who had *never* ridden a bike, and so never laid down those neural pathways, would find learning to ride a reversed bike comparable to learning to ride a normal bike.