This Guy Cheats Death Every Time He Rides—and He Wants You to Watch

It’s the flagrant angle of the bike that catches me off guard. The rider flings his machine into a corner, his body pitched unnaturally to one side, as if the rules of physics are merely things to be fucked with, and that fear—even the faintest traces of it—is somewhere behind him, far up the canyon he’s currently barreling down, dropped and left gasping for air in the gutter. Now the rider drifts from the white line along the right side of the road to the double yellow and then back again as he skims another corner. No sooner has he navigated these two turns and he’s melting into a super tuck, all his movements—his entire being—blessed with a preternatural grace, even at 56 miles an hour with the western fringe of the Continental 48 plunging hundreds of feet to the Pacific far below. There are other features that compel me to watch the 25-second Instagram clip over and over again as I sit safely on my couch—some sensual, most visceral. The wind whirring past the cameraman’s mic. The cicada zing of the rider’s freewheel. The blue blur of the ocean that blends into the horizon in the hazy summer light; the early morning sun, already white and washed out as it rises from behind the Santa Monica mountains; the sepia-toned scrub grass speeding by on either side of the fish-eye frame, allowing the viewer to burrow deeper and deeper into the singular world of the rider known as Safa Brian to his more than 200,000 followers across Instagram and YouTube. “Jesus Christ, that’s maniac shit,” writes the first friend I DM the video to, a downhill mountain biker who never gushes over anything remotely related to road cycling. My wife shares a similar response, turning away within seconds of my leaning across the couch to show her the clip. “No, no, no,” she says, hand darting to mouth, eyes squished shut so as not to witness the crash she’s sure will come. There is no crash. Only a caption that might as well be a mic drop: “Deer Creek in under 3 minutes. It’s a thing…now.” [View in Browser]( [Bicycling]( [SHOP]( [EXCLUSIVE]( [SUBSCRIBE]( [This Guy Cheats Death Every Time He Rides—and He Wants You to Watch]( [This Guy Cheats Death Every Time He Rides—and He Wants You to Watch]( It’s the flagrant angle of the bike that catches me off guard. The rider flings his machine into a corner, his body pitched unnaturally to one side, as if the rules of physics are merely things to be fucked with, and that fear—even the faintest traces of it—is somewhere behind him, far up the canyon he’s currently barreling down, dropped and left gasping for air in the gutter. Now the rider drifts from the white line along the right side of the road to the double yellow and then back again as he skims another corner. No sooner has he navigated these two turns and he’s melting into a super tuck, all his movements—his entire being—blessed with a preternatural grace, even at 56 miles an hour with the western fringe of the Continental 48 plunging hundreds of feet to the Pacific far below. There are other features that compel me to watch the 25-second Instagram clip over and over again as I sit safely on my couch—some sensual, most visceral. The wind whirring past the cameraman’s mic. The cicada zing of the rider’s freewheel. The blue blur of the ocean that blends into the horizon in the hazy summer light; the early morning sun, already white and washed out as it rises from behind the Santa Monica mountains; the sepia-toned scrub grass speeding by on either side of the fish-eye frame, allowing the viewer to burrow deeper and deeper into the singular world of the rider known as Safa Brian to his more than 200,000 followers across Instagram and YouTube. “Jesus Christ, that’s maniac shit,” writes the first friend I DM the video to, a downhill mountain biker who never gushes over anything remotely related to road cycling. My wife shares a similar response, turning away within seconds of my leaning across the couch to show her the clip. “No, no, no,” she says, hand darting to mouth, eyes squished shut so as not to witness the crash she’s sure will come. There is no crash. Only a caption that might as well be a mic drop: “Deer Creek in under 3 minutes. 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