Street unicycling
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Street unicycling is one of the latest developments in unicycling. The aim of the sport is to use natural/urban/specially made obstacles such as ledges, handrails and stairs in a given area to perform tricks that look good. The emphasis falls on technical proficiency, style and creativity. Street unicycling draws inspiration from skateboarding and bmx bike riding, with many similar tricks.
For street unicycling, most riders prefer to ride 20" trials unicycles because of their superb hopping abilities and their smooth maneuverability. However, some riders have been known to prefer using the less conventional 24" wheelsize for street riding.
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[edit] Competition Street Unicycling
Amongst some criticism regarding whether or not street unicycling as a genre was ready for its own competition, the 13th Unicycle World Championships (Jul/Aug 2006) played host to the first ever "official" Street Freestyle Competition, while the first ever street street competition was truly at the California Mountain Unicycle Weekend in 2004 (http://www.unicycling.com/muni/2004/). Xavier Collos (France) clinched the world title but unfortunately before UNICON ended broke his ankle while practicing a tre flip down a 5-set of stairs. Unicycling competitions incorporating street aspects are now more commonplace, possibly due to the influence of other extreme street sports such as skateboarding and aggressive inline.
[edit] Basic street unicycling tricks
[edit] Hop
The foundation trick of street unicycling, it is analogous to an 'ollie' on a skateboard or 'bunnyhop' on a bike. Hopping is simply jumping on a unicycle using a handle on the front of the seat to pull the unicycle up.
[edit] Hoptwists
A hop combined with a mid-air rotation. These are measured in increments of 180 degrees ranging from 180 to 540s.
[edit] Unispins
The rider jumps off the pedals or the wheel of the unicycle, spins the unicycle and then lands back either in the hop-on-wheel position or back onto the pedals. These are done in increments of 90 degrees ranging from 90 to 1080 (excluding 720-1080 on wheel, 810 off wheel, and 990 up or off). They are named by the amount of rotation. eg. 180 Unispin.
[edit] Unispin Hoptwists
These are when a rider completes a hoptwist and a unispin simultaneously.
[edit] 'Flip tricks'
A crankflip involves the rider jumping and simultaneously applying pressure to either the front or back pedal to so the wheel does a full rotation (backwards or forwards) in mid air, before landing back on the pedals.
A common variation of this trick is to make the wheel do multiple rotations (double, triple and quadruple crank flips have been done so far). Further variations involve combining unispins, hoptwists or both with a crankflip (or multiple-crankflip).
'Flip tricks' are significant to street unicycling. This is due to the fact that when riding, jumping, and taking feet off the pedals in mid air, the momentum of the wheel causes it to rotate, preventing the pedals from being 'lined up'(horizontal), making it very difficult to land. By flipping the wheel, the rider can control the amount of rotation and land with the pedals lined up correctly. Flip tricks allow for many unispin, twist, and no-footer combinations to be done with speed and distance up/down/across stairs/gaps.
[edit] Stances
- Natural: The stance in which a rider feels most comfortable jumping and tricking. The natural stance comes in two varieties: left or right foot forward. Both are self-explanatory. On average, more riders hop left foot forward.
- Fakie: While riding backwards is not called riding fakie, any trick done while riding backwards is considered to be done fakie and is described with the prefix-fakie (ie. fakie 360 unispin).
