MIKE KING

It’s day three and I’m running late. The directions don’t seem to match up. Ring…Ring…Ring, “Grant, where are you?” “Ahhh, Mike, I’m good. I’m where you said to meet, am I meant to be at your house?” “No, at a park, what road are you on?…OK, turn around, I know where you are I can guide you here.”

Nicely done Grant, you can’t even use a GPS. Getting things wrong put me off my guard and now I’m on the back foot but I keep telling myself it’s like any other day. I pull up and we do the formal hellos. He is quiet…quietly confident. It’s unnerving until we get to putting our bikes together and he’s forgotten his wheel skewers. He doesn’t seem bothered, “I’ll be 15 minutes”, and off he goes. “I’ve never done that before” he says when he gets back. We choose a route up the side of a hill that he rides regularly as it’s a five–minute drive from his house. I follow slowly in the heat and wish I had brought more water. His calves are massive and he still shaves his legs. As much as he claims he doesn’t ride much it isn’t showing and when he lets slip that he has the top Strava time for one of the sections I’m starting to wonder how much ‘off time’ he allows himself. The same as the past two days, I’m amazed at the riding these guys can take in their stride considering their riding careers are long over.

One of my favourite shots of Mike is from Mammoth where he has had a puncture, and in complete control, is laying the bike down speedway style in a right hand corner, because running on a rim at 50+mph doesn’t allow for much braking consistency. I wonder how much of this Mike I’m going to see today. We hit the top and have a rest. The views over San Diego are amazing…if you like smog. In the distance the tops of city towers are just pushing through the thick brown fug that hangs in the air. He has yet to break a sweat and his demeanour is still level, maybe this comes from running the US national BMX program for the past six years or maybe he is always like this. I ask about USA cycling and the BMX program. “Well, the facilities are just over there so it was great being a 15 minute drive from my house, but it had to end. They wanted certain results and those results didn’t come from London so we had a mutual parting. I’m in transition and considering my options.” I say surely the options are many for someone of his experience? “Yes”, he says, “but not all ones that I want to do”. I can’t figure him out. His responses to questions are slow and methodical. Different to the others.

We hit the downhill and ride dry, rocky and fast singletrack into the valley below. As with the others he makes his riding decisions first on foot, looking at things I haven’t even noticed. When he decides on a line he hits it first time and hits it fast with his wheels rarely breaking traction. He still looks the same on his bike, he looks fast and his riding position is pure racer. I can’t help but notice I’m timing my shutter presses with the looks on his face rather than his riding and trail position, the same looks from all those years ago. My arms are burning and so is my neck, I’ll remember sun cream next time. We ride back out of the valley and go for sushi where I quiz him about racing and life after the circus. We are asked to leave the restaurant as they want to close up for their afternoon break so Mike suggests we should go to a big water dam 10 minutes away. It’s massive, and Mike says we should walk across the top, “It will be great for a picture”. I hate heights, and so it turns out does Mike. I ask him to sit on the edge for a photo. He says no way. Instead we climb down and shoot some photos from the side. It’s better here. Then as quick as we met we say goodbye. He tells me to go to the beach to miss the rush hour, I go to the pharmacy instead to buy cream for my burning neck. I grab a coffee and sit on a sidewalk thinking the past three days have all been a bit surreal but at least I remembered my wheel skewers.

Mike: Carter, Cully, Lopes and I were top ten in BMX when we crossed over so expectations were pretty high. Then when you look back there weren’t that many riders who were naturally talented on a bike, so instantly we were winning races. There was a lot of synergy between the BMX and MTB world at the time, which made the crossover happen very fluidly. My BMX sponsor Balance put together a package that let me race both formats and built me a MTB, and on my ninth DH race I won the worlds in France and the rest is history as they say.

I’m not gonna lie. It was substantial. No one at that time or even now in BMX is making that kind of money.

At the time they were ground breaking but I would love to have the bikes we have now and go back ten years! Suspension technology has made a lot of average riders very good riders and now you have riders that are coming up having only ever raced MTB. I mean we rode motocross, BMX, all these things that allowed us to feedback to the suspension designers of the day to make it better week in and week out. We came into the sport at the right time enabling us to utilize skills that we had learned from other bike sports.