“The city is my ramp”

“My office has no walls. It’s somewhere between a handrail in Warsaw, a staircase in Lagos and a wall in Barcelona. For 25 years I’ve been riding BMX Street – the discipline in which the city itself becomes the ramp. I read cities the way other people read newspapers or books, on every continent in the world. I peer into backyards, pull myself up onto walls and explore underground car parks. As soon as I’ve found a spot, I get started right away. In my head I calculate the speed, take-off, landing, run-out. Are there cars coming? Are there people coming? In front of me there are 20 steps and a narrow steel handrail. I take off, feel the metal beneath me, slide down and jump.

It all started on a gravel mound beside our house in Siegen, where I grew up. As children, we would build ramps and race down the small slope on rattly bikes. I got my first BMX when I was eight. On the last day of the holidays, I crashed and lost seven milk teeth. For months afterwards, I wouldn’t go near my BMX.

Today, my BMX takes me around the world. Azerbaijan, Belfast, Glasgow, Kyiv, Moscow, Tokyo: I’ve been to countless places. Once I travelled with professional riders from the United States, Argentina, Greece and Spain to Lagos in Nigeria. A young scene of 15 to 20 talented riders was waiting for us there, the youngest of them still teenagers. They were familiar with our clips from the internet; now we could go riding together in the skatepark. One evening, the park was lit by floodlights while breakdancers and rappers performed. I hadn’t experienced so much joy and energy in one place for a very long time. These moments live on because I film them. The videos make my sport visible, and that’s why my sponsors send me around the world. In this way, I can capture a trick that would otherwise be over in six seconds.

There are some cities I go back to again and again. Barcelona is one of them: smooth stone, clean edges, staircases and squares that seem made for us, plus soft light late into the evening. In Rome, I prefer exploring the city on foot. As beautiful as the historical centre is, its walls and staircases are too old and too rough for BMX riding. What keeps me going more than any architecture is the people. Whenever I arrive somewhere in the world, I post a brief message on social media to say I’m there. The rest happens by itself: someone picks me up and shows me the best spots. In our scene, nobody asks first about money or careers – they ask about the next handrail. That’s what carries me forward: a few thousand people scattered around the world who see the same thing I do: cities that become a ramp anew, every single day.”