The sun was already dropping toward the horizon when Danny lined up for what everyone around him suspected might be his last real shot at it. Hours of attempts, soaked tires, burning arms, and a course that had beaten every single rider who touched it. The question was no longer whether the course was beatable. The question was whether anyone would still have legs when the light ran out. Red Bull had built what it was calling the craziest bike obstacle course on the planet, and so far, that claim was holding.
Nine obstacles, three sections, and a course that earned its name
The layout was blunt in its design. Nine features split into three sections: easy, hard, and impossible. The first three obstacles were meant to warm you up. The middle three were meant to hurt you. The final three were designed, by all visible evidence, to finish you off. A panel of UK riders went through the course first, and not one of them came close to a clean run. The impossible section lived up to its billing immediately.
Chris and Danny arrived as the two riders tasked with actually solving it. Their styles could not have been more different. Chris was relentless in the most physical sense: drenched from repeated falls into the water, stripping off his wetsuit with a shrug (‘All the way from Scotland. It ain’t that cold, to be honest’), and immediately queuing up for the next attempt. He attacked the course aggressively, grinding through the wall ride and the ladder section on willpower and wet tires, but the final stretch of narrow zigzag poles kept catching him just short of the finish. His closest run left him agonizingly within reach of the end before he went in.
Danny took the opposite approach. He watched. He sat back during Chris’s runs, studying the ladder’s two options (bounce over the rails or ride the skinny board on the left), tracking where balance broke down on the zigzags, and timing his own attempts around what he had learned. His runs were slower and more deliberate, his body position markedly more upright and controlled through the sections that punished aggression.
What finally got someone across the finish
The zigzag poles at the end of the impossible section were the true eliminator. As Danny described it mid-run: ‘It’s like going up a brutal climb and then looking to the top to see how far you’ve got to go and realizing you’ve got another third of the way to go and you’re already peeking.’ Even for him, the final poles were a matter of survival rather than style, arms burning, breathing hard, the whole structure moving underneath him.
Then, on a late attempt with the light failing, Danny made it through. The reaction from everyone watching was immediate and unguarded. ‘That’s unreal,’ came the call from the side. ‘I’m delighted,’ Danny said, barely catching his breath.
Chris, soaking wet and still game, had pushed the furthest of any rider before Danny’s final run, finishing just short of what would have been a shared completion.
The final pole at the end of the course
A single skinny pole, the last obstacle in the impossible section, sat completely still after Danny cleared it. No fanfare around it, no marker. Just a narrow strip of wood over water that had ended every attempt before his.
As Danny put it plainly after his run: ‘Turns out it’s not impossible.’ The course designer standing nearby offered the only honest reply: ‘Well, it turns out it wasn’t far off.’
