How does he do that?

From leaping off rooftops and rock crops to riding down a 1,000-meter waterfall, extreme mountain biker Hans (No Way) Rey performs stunts that others haven't even dreamed of

"Riding is almost like meditation," says Rey.  Peter Read Miller

Every once in a while, extreme mountain biker Hans Rey likes to go up on the roof of his pretty little hillside house in Laguna Beach, Calif., and take in the view over the wide blue Pacific. He'll go down into his garage and from the 12 bikes there choose maybe the gray GT Ruckus with the full suspension, take it into his backyard, climb on, then bunny-hop it up 16 stairs to a deck. From there he'll jump it onto a chaise, then onto the deck railing, then onto the roof, where he'll do a front wheel stand on the downslope, turn, ride up to the chimney, jump three feet up and perch on the chimney top looking very much like some kind of bicycle-factory weather vane. He'll finish with a chimney wheelie that he maintains as he jumps back onto the downslope, then converts into a front wheel stand before he shoots off the gutter and 10 feet into the backyard pool, where he bobs up smiling as if to say, "Bet you haven't seen that before."

In fact, Rey can do so many things on a bike that you haven't even imagined, much less seen, that people have been trying for years to come up with a handle that does justice to the range of his two-wheel talents. He calls himself No Way Rey because, he says, each time his friends in Laguna would dare him to try a seemingly impossible jump, climb, downhill or rock-hop jig, they would say, "No way you can do that, dude." Then he would go ahead and do it. The media has called him the Wayne Gretzky of mountain biking, the David Copperfield of mountain biking and, because of how hard he works his shows, the James Brown of mountain biking. All the sobriquets fit, but even together they don't catch what this 36-year-old German-born Swiss can do on an aluminum frame and two fat tires.

"When I do this, it's almost like a meditation," he said in August in a Laguna beachside park as he sprang five feet onto a wall, put his front wheel on a railing, then leaped six feet to a picnic table. "You have to shut out everything around you and visualize where you're going to go next. And you have to know what could happen if you miss -- where you could put your feet to save yourself." He's a thin six feet, with receding brown hair, and speaks with a soft German accent. "I'm not out to kill myself," he said, doing a 180 on his way to a table on a lower level. "In fact, I've had very few injuries."

There was, of course, the downhill race on Hunter Mountain, in Hunter, N.Y., in 1992, during which he crashed at 45 mph into a water barrel, breaking three ribs and puncturing a lung. And then there was a much earlier injury that may have set him on his career course. When he was four, at the family's home in the Black Forest, his two older sisters put him on a tricycle and pushed him down a flight of stairs. The ensuing wipeout left him with a gashed head, but he found the ride a thrill. He started on bikes at eight years old and at 12 began imitating motorcycle trials riders on his BMX.

Trials riding, which is not nearly as well known in the U.S. as it is in Europe, involves taking a motorcycle or a modified BMX bike over a course of obstacles, which can include teeter-totters, rocks, old cars or high thin edges of walls and pipes. Falling or putting a foot down draws a deduction, adding penalty seconds to the rider's time. At 16 Rey won the German trials championship, the first of four in a row. He also took three Swiss titles and in 1986 finished second in the world championships and decided to retire. But in 1987 he moved to the U.S. and, what the heck, as long as he was here, went ahead and won the American trials title. He then won the worlds in '89.

"When I got to this country, mountain biking was starting to take off, so I decided to use mountain bikes to do the trials stunts, which up to then had been done only on smaller bikes," he says. "Then I started making videos so I could show people what we did, and they were a hit."

A couple with a young boy stopped on their way through the Laguna park to watch as Rey flew the bike back to the wall, landed it on the rear wheel and held it there like the Lone Ranger on a rearing Silver.

"Wow," said the boy.

"Get down off the wall," said a cop walking by with his partner. "You can't do that here -- liability issues."

"Nice trick, though," said the partner.

The police here know Rey -- he appeared as himself in several episodes of the bike-cop television show Pacific Blue in the late 1990s -- as do millions of people around the world because of his other great talent: marketing himself.

"What most outdoor athletes don't understand," Rey says, "is that it's a business. They don't understand that if a company gives you money, it wants something back. I spend way more time marketing and managing myself than I do on a bike. I'm promoting myself 340 days a year."

Mountain biking icon Gary Fisher, a former rider who now designs bikes, says that Rey "was the first to take the notion of doing impossible stunts and marketing them. He was a forerunner in the move away from motor-driven to human-driven X Games kind of sports."

Among Rey's p.r. efforts is a slick book he puts together every year for his dozen sponsors -- among them Adidas, Swatch and bicycle-maker GT -- that catalogs his many shows and clinics, his TV appearances, as well as the magazine articles and ads featuring him. He also maintains a website that provides lessons, video, a biography and reports on the Hans Rey Adventure Team.

The Adventure Team's seven TV documentaries have followed Hans, and other bike athletes he has invited along, to Borneo to look for headhunters, to Egypt to trace the wanderings of Moses, to Peru to explore the Inca trail, to Jamaica to ride down a 1,000-meter waterfall, to Hawaii, to New Zealand, to South Africa, to Cuba.

"They used to take mule and horseback to get to these exotic locations," Rey says. "I wanted to do it on a mountain bike. I've always had a big interest in archaeology and history and mystery. In China we went looking for a tribe of totally miniature people who, legend says, crashed in an alien spaceship 2,000 years ago. The Chinese secret service wouldn't let us go where we wanted, so we didn't see the miniature people, but the Chinese admitted the tribe exists."

Rey's interest in the extraterrestrial dates to a UFO sighting he says he and his mother shared in the late 1980s while on the deck of their house in Switzerland. "If she hadn't seen it too, I wouldn't believe it," he says of the sudden twilight appearance of two saucers across a mountain valley. He is a member of the Archaeology, Astronautics and SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] Research Association and believes that conventional archaeological theories don't tell the whole story of the Earth's past. "It's not that I was going to solve the pyramid mystery," Rey says of his 2001 ride across the Sinai to the Red Sea, "but I'm still hoping I'll have the big find.... I'm sort of the Indiana Jones of mountain biking."

On the last Wednesday in August, Rey and 32 other members of the Laguna Rads, a hard-core mountain bike group, met in Laguna Canyon for their 19th annual Challenge Race. It's a mile-and-a-half run up to the canyon ridge then a treacherous descent through oak and chaparral to the finish. The overall race and the downhill portion were to be timed separately, and Rey chose to use different bikes for each half: a light one for the uphill and a heavier, full-suspension model for the downhill. A half-dozen competitors somersaulted off their machines on the descent, and several of them got up bloody. Rey came in sixth overall, thanks to a daring pass on a sweeping turn just short of the finish. He won the downhill.

"I'm really not so much into competition anymore," he said as the ragtag group had beer and burgers near the bottom of the run at sunset, "but this is a rare old-time mountain bike gathering. It's very hard to get into the Rads. It takes years, and one negative vote among the 60 members keeps you out. They made me a member my first year."

The next afternoon in his living room, with its groaning trophy shelves, he told a story that seemed to suggest the only handle that describes him adequately.

"I was in Chicago a few years ago doing a clinic for a group of bike cops when these two bike messengers pulled up to watch. In the middle of whatever I was doing, I heard one of them say, 'Who does this guy think he is, Hans Rey?'"

Exactly: the Hans Rey of mountain biking.

Issue date: October 14, 2002

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