Martyn Ashton rides again

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Sometimes little things stop us from riding bikes. Things like being too busy, or having too much work on. Martyn Ashton, a professional trials rider who broke his back in an accident three years ago hasn’t let it slow him down. He’s done hand-cycling on the track and even ridden a motorcycle with outriggers.

Legends!
Preparing to tackle the descent!

This, however, is his most impressive ride yet. With the help of a few world-famous trials riding friends, Martyn was strapped to a downhill bike and let loose on some of Antur Stiniog’s downhill trails.

This is four minutes of video you need to see for yourself:

Brrraaaappp!!

As Martyn said to video house, GCN, who filmed the adventure:

“Of course I have questioned if I’ll walk again, and I don’t know if I will or not. But with riding a mountain bike, for whatever reason, it was always ‘how are we going to do it’. Never riding a bike again? Well, that never came up,” says Ashton.

“I’ve been riding bikes for so long that I think it defines my life. Riding is such a natural thing to me – it’s who I am. I’m not willing to let go of it despite the situation. All of us who ride bikes – whatever level it is – has the same feeling when they start riding: the exhilaration of riding. The freedom. For some of us that sticks and never goes away. And for me, it’s like that.

“Being able to mountain bike again feels like I’ve got something back that a higher power took away. I feel like I’ve cheated the game and that feels… triumphant.

“As soon as they’ve pushed me off at the top of the summit, I was no longer the guy in a wheelchair: we were four mountain bikers riding together and we were having so much fun; I was having the best time I’ve ever had on a bike. Genuinely.”

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Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

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