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Road Cycling

9 Stunning Night-Time Bike Videos That Prove How Awesome Riding In The Dark Can Be

When the sun goes down...the night riders come out to play.

Screen Shot: Darklight – Sweetgrass Productions.

It’s a fierce rivalry as old as time itself; daylight vs night-time, the sun vs the moon, diurnal animals vs nocturnal animals. Just what half of the 24 hour cycle is better? The half when it’s appropriate to drill holes into the walls of your house, or the half when doing such a thing will seriously piss off your neighbours. Now, it would be easy to dismiss this debate early and say something snarky about it being a meaningless debate that doesn’t really matter.

Well, guess what? We’ve got a bucket filled with news, and it’s got your name it. This might just be the most meaningful debate you’ll read in your entire life. OK, that’s clearly a slight exaggeration. However, we do think you’ll have a lot of fun watching these videos of cyclists having fun in the dark. There’s no time for sleep…for tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we ride!

1) Wireless Programmable LED BMX

If Daft Punk ditched the robot suits and got hooked on the BMX scene, their music videos would probably look something like this. Ignore the terrible audio on it, seriously it’s terrible, and just bask in the complete and utter brilliance of BMX artist Rob Alton and wheel wizard Adam Kun lighting up a picturesque Budapest at night. Mesmerising stuff from start to finish.

2) Darklight – Sweetgrass Productions

This visually stunning and genuinely surreal viewing experiences is like something from a cheddar-induced dream. It’s MTB-filled madness at its absolute finest, and we love it more than chocolate Hobnobs (which have been proven by scientists to be the best thing in the whole of the known universe).

Darklight features professional mountain bikers Graham Agassiz, Matt Hunter, and Matty Miles on a brain-bending night-ride through a variety of beautiful moonlit landscapes in North America. If this spectacularly epic footage (above) doesn’t make you dribble on yourself, nothing will.

 3) This Is My Night: Fixed Soldiers

Fixed-gear bicycles (aka “fixies”) have been known to send people into uncontrollable rages. Swear words have been hollered, lampposts have been pushed over, and particularly furious commentators have simply combusted with anger.

If you can feel your eyelids starting to twitch right about now, and your neck vein is throbbing uncontrollably, you might want to give this fixie video a miss. If, however, you’re a more rational and chilled out kind of person we think you might really enjoy this video of Juan Guadalajara and his Fixed Soldiers hitting the streets of Barcelona after sundown.

4) Monkey Light – Space Dragons Bike Adventure

This odd little video is somewhere between an episode of The Mighty Boosh and the hip-thrusting dance movie Saturday Night Fever (1977). Warning: watching this more than once will make you feel like you’re caught in a swirling hurricane of kaleidoscopes. Trust us, we speak from experience.

In all seriousness, you might be wondering what this is all about? Well the video is in honour of the M232 Monkey Light that, according to the company’s website at least, “turns your evening bike ride into an instant party.”

The cutting edge digital light art system is capable of creating thousands of jaw-dropping patterns in your spinning bicycle wheel, and will ensure you get noticed on dark roads. Safe…and stylish. It’s the perfect combination.

5) Drag Race On The Las Vegas Strip

If you had to have a night-time bike race down any road in the world, we reckon that the Las Vegas Strip would be right up there. This POV video is a scintillating thrill-ride, compared with your normal cycling videos at least, and makes us think that the Tour De France organisers are missing a trick by not throwing in some rad casino-filled sections into the mix.

This low-fi footage has a real underground/sub-culture feel to it and shows road cycle racing in a pretty badass light. The traffic weaving sections, in particular, will have you on the edge of your seat (if you’re easily excited, and your seat is smaller than it should be).

6) Glow-In-The-Dark BMX With Matti Hemmings


This video features Matti Hemmings riding a UV painted BMX round a darkened warehouse in Hackney, and is arguably the closest the human race has ever come to replicating the poetic visuals of ballet…on a bike.

The majority of this visual bonanza takes place inside but we’re including it on our list for the following two reasons. Firstly, the start and the end of this video indicates that it was shot in the evening. And secondly, the inside of this warehouse is dark and darkness is what occurs when the earth rotates away from the sun’s glow. Don’t argue with us on this. It’s going on the list.

7) Danny MacAskill’s Solar Eclipse Ride

Danny MacAskill is the gift that keeps on giving. Whether it’s because of The Ridge, Imaginate, Drop and Roll, or something else entirely; every time the boy from Skye puts out a vid we end up having to re-paint the walls of our office because he’s gone and blown our minds all over again.

That time Danny MacAskill went riding beneath a solar eclipse was, as far as we’re concerned, the dictionary definition of “epic.” And, while riding beneath a solar eclipse is not exactly the same as riding at night we’re going to include it on our list because the thought of leaving it out on a technicality was just too upsetting for words.

8) Wordeo Warehouse Project

Warehouse. BMX. UV paint. We’ve been here before (see number 6). And while we don’t want to be accused of repeating ourselves, we think this video is far too rad not to be included on the list. Enjoy.

9) Tron-Light Bike

OK, so this bike clearly doesn’t fall into the BMX, MTB, or Road Cycling categories but we still think it’s radder than a lorry filled with radishes. Look! Just look at it. Look at how the bike looks like the Tron-bike. You remember the Tron-bike? It was in the film Tron. Remember that film?

The lights on this beast couldn’t be more outrageous if they tried and it would take someone with a heart made of stone to say they didn’t enjoy watching it drive off beneath a darkened sky. Clearly someone has put a lot of effort into this movie-inspired replica and, putting our grumpy hat up on a shelf for a minute, we think it’s worthy of a round of applause.

Watch The Indestructibles, a new TV show sponsored by G-Shock, Sundays at 5pm on Dave.

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