World first! Dawid Godziek nails a bike flip on a moving train

Dawid Godziek: It turns out that it's possible. Interestingly, it works quite well, but as you might guess, it's a lot riskier than riding a classic slopestyle track. Even if you have your own train, your own driver and your own hops, as they say: 'don't try it at home!'

To be honest, I wasn't particularly excited about the idea at first. I couldn't imagine it. For a long time, Szymon and I thought it was probably impossible. And even if it was, we couldn't do tricks on such a track that would be satisfying to us. Then, when it became clear that the whole thing was indeed possible, there were concerns about whether it would look as good as we thought. In the end, the whole project exceeded our wildest expectations. The execution of the track, my run-through, the whole process - everything came out much better than we expected!

I didn't go into these physics and mathematics issues, but the people I was working with on this project definitely knew what they were doing. It was quite a crazy experience, the opposite of what I usually do; it was me 'hanging in place' and the route going underneath me. We observed something interesting - the lack of air resistance. In theory, this could have made it easier, but the opposite was true. The air resistance creates a tunnel that somehow keeps me in a straight line and doesn't allow me to shift right or left. Luckily on the recordings we had, the headwind gave me artificial air resistance, which helped me to get a feel for the flight on classic hops. On the tests, the wind was blowing weaker or in a different direction, making shooting tricks difficult. Not bad, right? We're always complaining about air resistance, and when it wasn't there, we found that it was impossible to fly without it.

The hardest part was getting all the tricks to come out perfectly in one run. The idea was to film without cuts, in one continuous take. There was no room for mistakes. The track was narrow and even a minimally shaky landing could end in a fall from the train, which could have ended very differently...

I wanted the ride to contain the best tricks possible. Just riding the train would have been cool, but not enough. I spent a long time thinking about combining the tricks into a coherent whole. There was a backflip at the end, so I figured I'd throw in a frontflip before it – a forward flip before a backflip looks good. The double tailwhip came about spontaneously because I wanted to add a banger, and the track was narrow, so straight tricks worked best. I had to give up side rotations, so combinations with 360s were out. I chose tricks that made the ride interesting and varied, but didn't overdo the risk.

On a serious note, this trick had been on my mind for a long time. Nobody had done it on an MTB bike before, so I wanted to try it. I started preparing a few days before the recordings. It turned out to be more difficult than I had originally anticipated. When I saw the train in person, I noticed the stairs were higher than I thought. Of course, I knew the dimensions beforehand, but you know how it is when you see the obstacles live. The punch on landing on the flat was so strong that all my joints were getting hit hard. But I wanted to do a trick that no one had landed before to add more flavour to the project.

It took about a year and a half from the initial idea to realisation. We did tests a year before the recordings. Another 12 months went into designing the track and planning. The track was built by a team of the best Polish diggers for three weeks - from dawn to dusk. The guys tried really hard to make me feel confident and comfortable. We trained for a few days just before the recordings because the project was very complicated. After all, it's not every day that you hire a locomotive or carriages, build a slopestyle track on a train and put a piece of track out of service!

The bike was set up as it would be for any competition. I've got tyres on it that are perfect for plywood obstacles, and the rest of it is well-proven in all conditions. I just changed the colour theme to match the action on the train.