Martyn Ashton is a highly-decorated British mountain biking legend. The world champion has been riding professionally since 1993 but an accident at a bike trials demo in 2013 left him with a broken back, paralyzed from the waist down. This accident ended his professional biking career, but it didn’t diminish his will to ride. The Global Mountain Bike Network just released the 2nd installment of Ashton’s come-back downhill rides. He uses a modified Canyon Sender mountain bike to complete a downhill course, motivated by a crowd of what has to be a few of his close mates. The bike was fixed with a chair, allowing him to sit in it, along with an electric motor to build up speed while coming out of turns. The vid plays off his viral trials biking videos, the first of which, Road Bike Party, came out in 2012 and has been viewed some 12 million times displaying Ashton’s incredible athleticism on the ground, and in the air, on a bike us normal humans simply use to ride on the streets.
Dude is straight-up hungry. And the passion burns as hot as ever. Martyn Ashton’s story reminds any of us whining about our own small problems, stuck in our own worlds, to simply #stfu and go after what we love. Because in spite of his injury, Ashton hasn’t stopped pushing the boundaries of his sport.
