DON'T LOOK DOWN

It's one thing to dream about riding a bike in the sky. It's quite another to pull it off. Enter Kriss Kyle, a Scottish BMX pro whose imagination is as wild as his skills in the saddle.

- JESSICA HOLLAND

Kriss Kyle's hands have been sweating all morning despite the December chill, and he's hardly slept. The 30-year-old BMXer is checking over his bike in a small aircraft hangar on a country estate in Wiltshire in South West England, trying to keep warm and stay calm. It's frosty enough outside that the grass crunches underfoot, but as the sun rises, it burns off the mist and fills the field with golden light. Today is the day Kyle has been waiting for.

Eleven months of waiting, to be precise, for the right weather to attempt his most extreme stunt yet. All told, it's been almost three years since a lockdown pedal through the hills near his home in Scotland inspired the unlikely idea of a BMX ramp suspended in the air. The pro rider has worked on some outlandish projects in his time, but this was next-level even for him. When Red Bull asked if he was serious about turning this daydream into a reality, Kyle's answer was instant. "I was like, fucking 100 percent," he says. "I said I would do it in a heartbeat."

In reality it took a lot longer than that. What followed was a Herculean effort full of setbacks and grit as a team was assembled to problem-solve their way to making airborne BMX riding a reality. By that cold December morning in 2022, a carbon-fiber skate bowl-like those you find in skateparks, roughly the size and shape of a small, empty swimming poolhad been constructed, which could then be attached to the U.K.'s biggest hot-air balloon and flown almost 2,100 feet above the ground. It was the product of a collaboration between engineers at Red Bull Advanced Technology, who usually work on F1 racing cars; U.K.-based company Cameron Balloons; and a group of Kyle's old BMX friends from Scotland and the north of England, who had been building ramps together since they were kids and now do so professionally.