With the importance of racing in the mountain bike world, it’s easy to forget that some of the most successful mountain bikers never achieved their success through that kind of competition. Many riders get famous through things like the Whip-Off World Championships, slopestyle events like Whistler’s Joyride competition, and Utah’s world-famous Red Bull Rampage.
One of the world’s most famous mountain bikers is European rider Fabio Wibmer, who has over 7.87 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, where he has a broad assortment of incredibly entertaining movies of himself doing amazing tricks and stunts on his bikes.
Fabio’s most popular video is “Wibmer’s Law,” which came out more than four years ago and has racked up more than 264 million views on YouTube so far. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. The video is about 8 minutes long, and it shows Fabio riding through a city in Austria doing all kinds of amazing stunts, like jumping off the roofs of building, off the top structures of bridges, landing on the roofs of trucks and buses, riding over cars, standing on his bike’s handlebars as he rides down stairs, backflipping down hills, and all sorts of other things. Just so kids don’t get the mistaken idea that these tricks are easy to do, Fabio’s videos also include a minute full of horrific crashes that he had to undergo when he was learning to do many of the stunts in the videos. It all makes for an extremely entertaining video, and it gives kids a strong reminder that it would be easy to crash and get badly hurt trying to duplicate Fabio’s moves.
Photo courtesy of Canyon
In spite of the injuries that Fabio had documented in his videos, Fabio is still making more videos. Getting injured is one of the risks of the kind of work that he does. It’s kind of like being a downhill mountain biker or a motocross racer, two other sports that Fabio enjoyed when he was younger.
Fabio’s dad was a motocross racer who taught Fabio how to ride a motocross bike when Fabio was only 6 years old. “Fabio was riding motocross until he was around 16 years old,” Fabio’s manager, Alexander Schöll, told us. “He was actually really good and did well at the local, national and even some international races.”
That all changed in or around 2009 when Fabio saw a video of mountain bike trials star Danny MacAskill riding. After Fabio started getting good at trials riding, he made a GoPro video of his own riding and entered it in a contest. He had come up with a storyline for his video to tie all his stunts together. Fabio’s video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
NoKDBxu0si4) won the GoPro of the World Award. It ended up getting so many views that Fabio started making more videos of his riding, and his popularity exploded.
While Fabio has since become one of the must successful mountain bikers in the world, thanks to the millions of viewers who watch his videos, Fabio was still a cool, friendly guy when the staff of MBA got the chance to meet him and hang out with him.
Fabio Wibmer may have some of the most amazing bicycle skills in the world, but, when you get right down to it, he’s still just a guy who loves riding bikes, just like the rest of us.
FABIO WIBMER’S CANYON STITCHED CFR TRIAL FW
Frame: “Canyon Stitched CFR Trial FW [carbon]. This is my signature bike that Canyon made for me when we first signed the contract. It’s really the best trials bike I’ve ever ridden, and I’ve never broke one!”
Rear shock: None
Fork: Canyon FK 0097-01. “No suspension on the trials bike.”
Tires: “Pirelli!”
Tire sealant or inserts: None.
(Fabio uses inner tubes.)
Rims: “I’m trying different ones at the moment. Have been running the DT Swiss for a while, but always like to mix it up and try new parts.”
Spokes: DT Swiss TR1700
Front hub: I9
Rear hub: I9
Brakes: Magura MT7. “Simply the best!”
Handlebars: “Custom Canyon G5 bars!”—730mm width, 84mm rise, 9-degree backsweep, 5-degree upsweep
Stem: SQ Lab, Fabio Wibmer Signature Line
Bottom bracket: SRAM DUB BSA 73
Bottom bracket drop: -10 degrees
Grips: Canyon G5
Cranks: Cane Creek eeWings Titan Kurbel, 170mm
Pedals: “Crankbrothers Stamp 7 FW.”
Chainring: SRAM Descendant 6K, 30T, with Canyon GP0361-01 chainguard. “The bike’s integrated chain tensioner keeps the chain running smoothly and securely on the chainring, guaranteeing responsive power transfer and incredible pedaling consistency and smoothness,” Canyon says on their website.
Rear cog: Canyon EP1549-01 16T
Chain: KMC X11-93
Saddle: Canyon G5 Stitched
Seatpost: Canyon Stitched, aluminum, 25.4mm
Headset: Acros ZS56
Head angle: 73 degrees
Seat tube angle: 75 degrees
Reach: 437mm
Chainstay length: 363mm
Weight of complete bike: “Hard to say. Depends on what parts I ride, but with the usual setup, it’s already below 10 kilograms [22 pounds].”
Estimated value of bike: “You can buy it at Canyon.com for 2.5k euros.” (About $2700 in U.S. currency.)
Photo courtesy of Canyon
Photo courtesy of Canyon
RIDER PROFILE:
Name: Fabio Wibmer
Age: 30
Birthdate: June 30, 1995
Birthplace: Lienz, Austria
Height: 186 cm (6 feet, 1.23 inches)
Current home: Monaco
Car or truck: Mercedes V-class and a McLaren 720S
Started competing: Never really competed aside from some DH races
Turned pro: I can’t really say when that one point was, but probably when I was like 20 years old or so
Riding specialty: Street trials and freeride MTB
Favorite riding area (North America): Haven’t seen too much there unfortunately, but Whistler and Kamloops was great!
Favorite riding area (Europe): Bike park-wise, I’d say Saalbach, and for street riding, anything around Côte d’Azur is pretty good!
Favorite food: Pasta arrabiata
Goals: Get more people on bikes
Heroes: Danny MacAskill, Travis Pastrana
Favorite recording artist: The Offspring
Favorite hobbies: Besides riding my bike, filming, moto, and working on my brands
Jobs held (other than racer): I worked at a ski lift and in a sports shop
Always takes on a trip: My Canyon Stitched trials bike of course!
What you would be if you were not a racer: Either an MX racer or filmmaker/producer
MBA Q&A
MBA: How do you pronounce your last name?
Fabio Wibmer: It’s “Veeb-mer.”
MBA: Where do you live?
Well, I live in Monaco. I’m from Austria, but I live in Monaco—Monte Carlo at the moment.
MBA: How long have you been riding bikes?
FW: That’s actually a tough question. I started riding bikes when I was basically a little kid—when I was 3. But then I was riding motocross for quite some time. And I think at the age of 14 or 15, I got really into biking. And then I was like biking every day, two to three hours after school
MBA: Did you start racing, or did you just start doing tricks?
FW: So I got inspired by Danny MacAskill. I watched one of his videos back around 2009. It just inspired me so much, that video and his riding style, that I just wanted to have a bike like he had. And then I got one at a later point, like a similar one. That was the start of everything I do at the moment, like riding bikes. And the thing is, like the style he had, you can make everything kind of like a playground. You don’t need much. Like, you find a wall, you jump up it, you jump up with a 180, you jump down, so there’s so many variations. That’s what inspired me to start.
MBA: When did you turn pro?
FW: I think I turned pro maybe nine years ago. I did a video in my home village. I’m from a village which is super, super small. There’s only a tiny bit over 100, around 103 or 104 people living there. So it’s really, really tiny. It’s like a mountain village in Austria. I made a video there, which is basically like a line going over roofs. I jumped over a police car, which we prepped, and we built like jumps and drops. That video blew up for that time, and that’s when it sort of started for me to actually have it become a career.
Photo courtesy of Canyon
MBA: How many views have you had on your most popular videos now?
FW: Well, I’ve got two videos that got maybe something like 260 million views for each of them, so it’s been crazy. I never thought I could reach that many people making just videos.
MBA: And now you travel around the world a lot?
FW: Yeah, I do. Sometimes I stick to a project, and the project takes a few months, so then I’m traveling less. But, most of the time, I’m somewhere in the world traveling, filming, doing some stuff with the sponsors, and just having a good time spreading the vibes of biking basically.
MBA: What’s the scariest trick or stunt you’ve ever done?
FW: That’s actually a tough one. I had a couple where I was pretty scared to do them. I think one might have been, I’m not sure, people probably don’t have it immediately in their heads, but I’d once been to France, in Paris, and there are those famous Montmartre stairs. It’s like a stair set, which is really, really long—super steep—and I’d been shooting a video, which was a campaign for the train that goes from London to Paris. We’d been shooting that campaign and had been filming in Paris, and I saw that staircase, a long one, and I was like, I think I could hit that and jump double the stairs. So, we just, like, tried to block it off from people. There was not like a big production or anything. It was just me and two or three filmers. It was quite tricky to block it off. And then I tried it, and it was super close to me crashing. If I would have crashed in that place, it would have been pretty scary. So thinking back, that was probably the scariest thing I’ve done.
MBA: What’s another one that was scary?
FW: Another one? I once jumped out of a helicopter, which was also pretty scary.
MBA: What did you land on?
FW: On snow. I had this idea of getting a helicopter and trying to stand on the rails on the side of the helicopter and then try to jump off. I wanted to do it, like, properly in the air, but we didn’t get permission to jump out from the helicopter when it was actually hovering. It’s super hard to get permission over in Europe to jump out, so the helicopter was hovering, but he had to touch the snow so that the rail would also touch the snow, and then, technically, it’s not like something dropping off. So, we were actually able to do that, but then we had like a drop-off. I think it was like seven or eight meters off a drop, and that was scary, because I didn’t know how the wind and the wind circulation on the helicopter would affect me flying. I actually jumped out the third time. I got sideways because of that wind from the rotors and broke my collarbone.
MBA: What’s the worst injury you’ve had?
FW: Hmm…worst injury? It was almost like two or three injuries combined, I would say. I once broke my foot when I was riding motocross, like, four years ago. I broke my lower ankle into a couple of pieces. It was quite a complicated thing, which was nothing crazy, but it was just so annoying, and it took really long [to heal]. As soon as I stepped back on the bike, I jumped against a tree super randomly on a normal ride, like, in the woods, and then I broke the same ankle again and also tore the ligaments in my shoulder. So, that was one and a half years of being not really able to ride. That took a very long time.
MBA: What’s the main bike you use for your videos?
FW: That’s actually tough, because my riding style is so versatile. So, I use a downhill bike, I use mountain bikes, but then I use different mountain bikes with more travel and with more suspension, and then some with less suspension. And then the trials bike. Depending on the project I do, I choose the bike, and I would say, at the moment, I just mix them up so much. I can’t really say I ride this bike more than the others, but when it comes down to it, I think the trials bike is the bike I’m riding the most when I’m training, because that needs like constant training on it, the technical style of riding.
MBA: Did you compete in trials, too?
FW: No, I actually never competed. I think I would have been really bad in that. Competing in trials is so hard. It’s really, really ridiculously hard. If you want to compete in there, you would only need to focus on that, like there’s nothing else, because the people who are doing it are—they’re crazy. My style is more inspired by freestyle bikes, by just going in the city and kind of doing whatever you feel like doing today on a bike. So that’s like my style of riding—not really sticking to competition boundaries somehow.
MBA: How do you get your ideas for your videos?
FW: Well, most of the ideas, I get inspiration from other people. I look at skateboarders. I look at motocross riders, BMX riders, parkour, all kinds of different fields. Sometimes I see a trick someone is doing on a skateboard, or doing parkour, and then I think, “Oh, how can I maybe do this trick on my bike? How could I make it work?” So that’s how I sometimes get inspiration. And then, on the other hand, like movies, films—just like trying to get a bit of inspiration out of there— how they produce their kinds of things, how they can make a joke and make it work in a video. Also, the filming part is quite a big part of what I’m doing and what I love. So, it’s a big mixture of just, like, looking around, what I see every day, and trying to soak in the best things I get to see, and then try to work with them.
MBA: Do you get nervous before you do a stunt?
FW: Yeah, totally. I mean, it depends which one, but, like, I always get super nervous. It’s a mixture of being nervous, a little bit excited, but then also a little bit scared. And I think that’s what’s really important. So you kind of get to know your boundary, like how far you can push it. And then, you know, at a certain point, when you feel like you’re too scared, then you’re not doing it because you have too much of a scary feeling. Yeah, so it’s like you’re trying to find the balance, which is still scary. Still, where you get nervous, but then still where you think, “Okay, I can do it if I do everything like I think I’m gonna do it; it’s gonna work out.”