Balance and control seem to be the tricks of the trade for a champion motorcycle stunt rider, finds THEO PANAYIDES, meeting a man who has been around bikes all his life
What does Aras Gibieza think about climate change? Is he a dog person or a cat person? What goes through his mind when he’s gazing at a beautiful sunset? I don’t know the answers to these questions, nor am I even convinced that the answers would be very exciting. What’s exciting is watching Aras (short for Arunas) wheel around, doing perilous stunts, on his customised Kawasaki Ninja 636 motorcycle – which is mostly what we talk about as we sit in the lobby of the Navarria Hotel in Limassol, just a few hours before he’s due to give a show at the 2nd Limassol Motor Show & Motion.
“My sport is called motorcycle stunt riding,” he explains in smooth but sometimes fractured English. “I do tricks, like on back wheel, on the front wheel. I do acro-tricks.” He’ll sit backwards on the saddle, pop wheelies, do handstands and headstands, “every kind of position you can imagine, actually. So we do nose-wheelies, back-wheelies, burnouts, drifts…” What’s a burnout? “Like a drifting, but standing drifting,” he replies, a little unhelpfully. Maybe it’s the one where he leaps up in the saddle, flips 180 degrees (all while the bike is moving, of course) and lands facing backwards, then performs a kind of reverse wheelie, making the bike rear up while facing in the opposite direction, and takes off at top speed – though actually I think it’s just the one where he floors the gas and brakes at the same time, making the tyres spin and producing a lot of smoke (hence ‘burnout’). Needless to say, reading about Aras’ stunts in a newspaper is no substitute for watching them on YouTube.
Take, for instance, the “360 unicycle no-hander”, a trick of his own devising which helped him win second place at the 2016 Stunt Grand Prix in Poland. It’s one thing to say that he keeps the bike in wheelie mode, straddles the handlebar with his body inches away from the front wheel, then lets go his hands and waves them while keeping his balance – but it’s something else to watch the play of forces, the bike roaring remorselessly in one direction while its rider climbs from saddle to handlebar with the quick, nimble moves of a human spider. The trick doesn’t actually work at the Grand Prix (at least in the clip on YouTube), though nothing very terrible happens as a result: the bike clatters to the ground and Aras quickly jumps off, eliciting a disappointed “Ayyyy” from the commentator.
Stunt riding isn’t massively dangerous; the bike doesn’t go fast enough for really serious injury. There are probably “more broken bones than deaths,” admits Aras. Racing is obviously riskier – though the dangers in his own sport shouldn’t be underestimated (he’s broken his foot, his wrist and both legs over the years) and besides stunt riding has something even hardcore racers crave, the flamboyance and grace under pressure which is what attracts most young men (it’s usually men) to bikes in the first place. “It’s no secret [that] every motorcycle rider wants to know how to pop a wheelie,” notes Aras wryly. He’ll often do shows at Moto GP and Superbike racing events, “and riders watch my show and they’re so happy, they say ‘Oh man, you’re killing!’… Even the bad bikers” – meaning gang members and Hell’s Angels types – “come up to me and say ‘Good job’.”
He was never in a gang, but he knows about racing. “In 2006, I became a professional motorcycle racer,” he recalls, a profession he pursued for three years before switching to stunts. He knows how it feels to be racing the famous Brno circuit in the Czech Republic, with its 1.2km straight where a bike can hit an almost-unimaginable top speed of 300km/h. We should also mention that Aras Gibieza will be 29 next month, meaning he was barely 17 years old in 2006. He started young.
Aras Gibieza performs at the Limassol Motor Show and Motion 2018 in Limassol, Cyprus on September 15, 2018 (Vytautas Dranginis / Red Bull Content Pool // AP)
Actually, he started very young. He sits in the lobby of the Navarria, blue eyes shining in a frank, relaxed face; as an “official Red Bull athlete” since 2013, he has no fear of interviews. His fair skin has one visible blemish, a scar on his forehead which – ironically, given all the mechanical monsters he’s ridden in the years since – comes from a bicycle accident when he was a child. Aras’ grandfather was a professional cyclist and the manager of the Lithuanian national team (Aras himself was born in Vilnius in 1989), “so I was used to cycling every day” – and bikes turned, inevitably, to thoughts of motorbikes. On his sixth birthday, young Aras asked his mum for a motorcycle helmet. At 10, he got his first scooter “and I started to ride that scooter around my block. I made a wheelie after one week. I was riding scooters for six years, then, when I was 16, I got my first real bike. Real big motorcycle, which was a Yamaha R6”.
Was he already thinking of turning pro someday, at 12 or 13?
At the time, “I didn’t thought [sic] I’m going to be a professional rider. I was, like – I was the kid with the passion. I was doing these tricks every day, winter, summer, doesn’t matter. I was on the street doing my stuff”. Aras shrugs disarmingly: “Somehow everything comes to me, by itself. Maybe because I put a lot of work into it.”
His life, at almost 29, is an enviable one. He’s not allowed to say how much he earns, but he has some big sponsors – Red Bull is the main one, Alpinestars (who sponsor his sports apparel) being another one – and he does around 120 shows a year in 30 venues all over the world, so you do the math. The days go by easily enough, especially when he’s home in Lithuania: he trains every day, practising his moves for about four hours, and goes to the gym every other day. One of his five motorbikes is housed in Barcelona where he’ll often spend a couple of months during the winter break, when shows are thin on the ground. It’s true he has to do what sponsors say, and can’t easily refuse an engagement – but it’s not a big problem, since “it’s always fun to do shows and to ride”.
All well and good; but you have to wonder how this enviable life must’ve seemed – especially to his parents – 15 years ago, when early-teenage Aras was spending a big chunk of every day doing wheelies in the street behind his house. (Was he good at school? “In the middle, I would say.”) His mum is perhaps the true hero of this profile – and there’s also another aspect, the fact that he lost his father to “heart problems” around the same time, a couple of years before turning pro. Must’ve been a life-changing shock, I venture. Did it actually change his life?
“I think so.”
How?
“I don’t know. You know, if he were alive I don’t know what it would be like, so I can’t tell you.”
Did it influence the job he’s doing now? Did it affect the kind of person he’s become?
“Maybe, maybe…” he replies, amiable but unwilling to probe too deeply, at least in public. “I don’t know. Because it is like it is, so I don’t know how it would be. I never thought [about] what it’d be like. It is like it is, and I’m okay with it.”
Mrs Gibieza, as already mentioned, deserves a lot of credit here; not only had she just become widowed, but her only son (Aras also has a sister) was racing motorbikes and doing stunts in the street, every parent’s nightmare – yet she didn’t forbid it. Surely she must’ve been worried? “Yeah, definitely. But she tells me now, ‘You were so passionate, so I couldn’t take this from you’. If something bad happened, [at least] it would happen doing the thing I love.” The family were, and remain, very close – Mum ran a dog-breeding business in his childhood; she now works as a hospital nurse in Sweden – and Aras is also patriotic about Lithuania, despite all the exotic places he sees on his travels. “I have many shows outside Europe, like in India, Qatar. I was four times in India, each time a month” (motorcycle culture is huge there). Last year he spent six months on the road; after Limassol it’s back to Lithuania, then a big show in Belgium.
I’m not sure I got very much of Aras Gibieza the person, as opposed to Aras Gibieza the stunt rider; then again, it may be that the person is more becalmed – more normal, in a word – than the stunt rider makes him appear. I’d pictured a kind of on-the-edge, itinerant life, free from social conventions – but, for instance, Aras didn’t drop out of school when he became a racing pro at 16, indeed he even went to university for a somewhat random-sounding course in “house-selling” (he’s a qualified “makler”, which apparently means ‘dealer’ in Lithuanian; can you study to become an estate agent now?). Further evidence of banal normality: he’s engaged to be married in a few months, his fiancée being an athlete like himself – actually a wakeboarder, which perhaps explains why Aras was by far the more nervous of the two when the couple did some parasailing (the sport where you’re towed behind a speedboat on a parachute) in Napa last week. “I’m a bit afraid of heights,” he admits by way of explanation, then offers an even more convincing explanation: “If it’s something I can’t control, I’m a bit afraid of it”.
This, I suspect, is where the stunt rider comes in, the quest for control being integral to Aras’ professional skill-set. There are other skills too, of course. He’s innovative, having been the first stunt rider to ride on the ice (a staple of winter in Lithuania) and among the few to have done stunts with the front wheel completely removed (!). He’s tough, as well; he believes that any injury sustained through sport should be shaken off, as far as possible, by doing sport, powering through the pain. When he broke his foot in 2010, it was during a practice session and he had a tournament coming up the next weekend; the cast came off two days before, then “I sprayed it with the cold spray”, took part in the contest and won first place. He broke his leg when a bike fell on top of him, but was riding again in 10 days: “You can still feel pain, but…” Physical toughness is the mark of any durable athlete – but it’s surely control that defines his sport. All driving is a form of control, harnessing the mechanical beast, but stunt riding takes it to a fine art, enjoining control not just in general but moment-by-moment.
What’s the secret to popping a wheelie? “You have to find the right balance,” he replies. Too low, and it doesn’t come off; too high, and the bike will flip over. Balance, control: these are the skills he’s nurtured over the years – and I’ve no doubt they bleed into his personal life too, making him bold but not too bold, emotionally open without being sloppy (as he says, “It is like it is”), candid in interview mode but (yes) controlled.
Anything else? Any message to the world? “I would say a message for the motorcycle riders,” replies Aras virtuously, having heard about our problem with boy racers (even more of a problem since, apparently, “the tarmac is very slippery” in Cyprus). “Ride safe, be cautious of the cars… If you want to do wheelie you must go to a closed space, don’t do it in the street. And ride with helmet and full protection, even when it’s hot and sunny day”. He has to say this, not just because of his sponsors but because of his unique position vis-à-vis impressionable youth: not only is he doing what he loves, but what he loves happens to be many a teenage boy’s (and girl’s too, who knows?) idea of the coolest thing ever. I’m unable to watch him perform, having to head back to Nicosia – but I catch another show later on YouTube, Aras roaring into the arena on one wheel with an introductory stunt like the greeting of a circus performer, bouncing around on the saddle while keeping the front wheel aloft (on the left side! on the right! now up on the handlebar!), and the crowd cheering wildly.
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