THE TRACK BIKE THAT LEARNED TO FLY: Trick Tracking to FGFS

Once upon a time, though not in the fairytale sense, unless your idea of fantasy involves aluminium tubing and shaved tyres, there was a bicycle that wouldn’t stop pedalling. You could try to rest your legs, to glide serenely through the city like a Dutch grandma on market day, but no: this bike had other ideas. Its pedals turned with the wheel, remorselessly, like the arms of an old clock. And if you wished to slow it down, you had two options: resist it with your legs, or crash. Many chose the latter. Most came to prefer the former. But some, the odd ones, the brave ones, discovered something more: that this seemingly awkward, obsolete machine was not just a tool of transport. It was, in the right hands, a brush with which to paint motion on the canvas of the street.

This is the story of those riders, and of the bike that changed beneath them. It is the story of trick track and its metamorphosis into fixed gear freestyle (FGFS). It begins in the alleyways of 1990s New York, winds its way through Tokyo and San Francisco, and ends, or rather, continues indefinitely, in dimly-lit car parks, DIY ramps, and the endless loop of online videos where skids become ballet and concrete becomes stage.

Messengers, mystique, and the birth of style

It didn’t begin with tricks, not really. It began with work, the sort that left your calves in knots and your fingers black with ink and chain grease. Bike messengers in the 1980s and ’90s, operating in cities like New York, San Francisco, and London, adopted the fixed gear bicycle for one reason: it made sense. Fewer parts, fewer things to break. No gears to jam. No brakes to fail.

But in time, what made sense became something more. A bike with no freewheel demanded constant attention, you were always “on.” And with that attention came fluency, and with fluency came flourish. Messengers began trackstanding at lights, skidding to impress one another, playing games of one-upmanship between delivery runs. It was Darwin by derailleurlessness. Some fell. Some rose. But all, in some small way, contributed to the creation of a new style: trick track.

This wasn’t yet a sport, and certainly not a discipline. There were no judges, no sponsors, no rules, just tricks performed on bikes that didn’t particularly want to perform them. The early riders used what they had: aluminium Cinellis, steel Pistas, scavenged conversions from 1970s road bikes. If it had horizontal dropouts and a clean chainline, it would do. And if it had brakes, well… those could be removed.

The streets became classrooms. The courier alleycats were where you learned to suffer; the car parks, where you learned to play. Riders swapped stories, then videos, then entire identities. One could spend a week practising a backwards circle or a no-handed skid, only to be upstaged by a teenager from Tokyo who’d just uploaded a grainy clip to Vimeo titled Keirin Style Vol. 3. The internet accelerated everything. Trick track, once a niche courier flourish, began to develop a global following.

Still, the trick track bike was a contradiction on wheels: too stiff to absorb impact, too twitchy to land properly, too narrow in tyre clearance to allow much forgiveness. And yet, riders persisted. Where the bike resisted, they adapted. The result was a strange, beautiful tension, a constant dance with failure. And like all dances, eventually it demanded a new rhythm.

The long, skidded road to freestyle

No one declared the birth of fixed gear freestyle. There was no inauguration ceremony, no summit of brakeless elders who declared, “Henceforth, we shall grind handrails and hop stair gaps.” It happened as all movements do: gradually, then suddenly.

At first, it was a fork swap here, a wider tyre there. Riders began modifying their trick track setups, reinforced tubing, wider bars, lower gear ratios. Soon the standard NJS geometry couldn’t take the strain. Forks bent. Frames snapped. Track bikes were never designed for bunnyhops or 180s, certainly not for rolling off rooftops, as a few ambitious souls in California attempted (with mixed success). If trick track was an act of defiance, FGFS was an act of reinvention.

By the late 2000s, the trick had outgrown the track. Riders wanted bikes that could take a hit, literally. And so, new frame geometries emerged: longer wheelbases, slacker head angles, double gussets. The tyres inflated into balloon-like 45c monsters. Gearing dropped to absurdly low ratios. 29-tooth sprockets, BMX riser bars, and plastic pedals became standard. Riders began treating ledges like launchpads, not boundaries. Pegs were added. Brakes returned (begrudgingly, but sensibly). The bikes were no longer track bikes in any traditional sense, they had evolved, adapted, and freestyled themselves into something altogether new.

The difference between trick track and FGFS was no longer just one of degree, but of kind. Trick track was stylish, smooth, and often defined by restraint, the poetry of control. FGFS was loud, aggressive, kinetic, a blunt instrument of self-expression. If trick track riders looked like acrobats performing ballet on bicycles, FGFS riders resembled skaters who had accidentally mounted an art installation and decided to ride it down a stairwell.

Videos changed, too. Gone were the dusky alleycats set to lo-fi jazz loops. In came hardcore beats, slow-motion stair gaps, and the satisfying clang of peg on coping. FGFS wasn’t better or worse, it was simply louder, gnarlier, more robust. And it had arrived.