Riding a bike down a steep hill is hard enough.
Doing it backwards, balanced on nothing but the front wheel, down the landing ramp of an Olympic ski jump?
That sounds like a good way to end up in the hospital. Japan’s Tomomi Nishikubo did it anyway, and he has two new Guinness World Records to show for it.
What happened
On May 27, 2026, Nishikubo, one of the best trials riders on the planet, dropped into the landing hill of a ski jump in Hakuba, Japan, on gradients reaching 37.5 degrees.
The catch: he rode the whole thing in a fakie nose manual. In plain terms, “fakie” means riding backwards, and a “nose manual” means balancing on the front wheel with the back wheel in the air. So he came down the mountain facing uphill, on one wheel, in reverse.
He covered 136.6 meters (448 feet), topped 60 km/h, and held that front-wheel balance for a full 35 seconds. Any one of those numbers would be impressive on its own. Stacked together, they’re hard to believe.
The details
The run set two records at once: the steepest bicycle fakie nose manual, at 37.5 degrees, and the longest distance travelled by fakie nose manual on a ski jump hill, at 136.6 meters.
It did not come easy. The project took two years of planning and roughly 50 full course attempts, 35 in 2025 and another 15 in 2026, before he finally landed it clean.
Along the way he burned through a stack of brake rotors and, judging by the footage, walked away from more than a few nasty crashes. The whole idea started when he watched Japanese ski jumper Ryōyū Kobayashi set a 291-meter world record, which got him thinking about a ski jump of his own.
See it for yourself
Numbers only tell you so much. This is one of those feats you really have to watch to believe, so hit play, and try not to wince on his behalf.
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