A cyclist breaks away from the group on the hill. He stands on the pedals, elbows out, shoulders broad. With a crouched upper body, he dives into the asphalt train and picks up the pace at the short, steep driveway. He smoothly pushes the dirt bike over a bump and shoots into the air at the next jump. “Dude!” It sounds approvingly from the group on the hill. The admirer jumps over the second, following “table”, as the jumps are called here, and rushes on through the circuit.
Then a six-year-old starts from the group and approaches the jumps barely slower than his predecessor. The bump in the ground before the jump sucks him through. It is not entirely clear who is in command here: the little boy in the neon yellow and black long-sleeved jersey or the big black BMX bike. At the hill, the duo of man and machine only lifts off a little. Never mind, the boy rushes his bike down the steep opposite ramp, shouts and hisses on.
Elsewhere on the track, packs of children swarm over the asphalt waves on scooters. A toddler on a balance bike, followed protectively by his father, rolls through the track, two skateboarders are on the way, as well as a girl with a bike with a carrier basket, a couple of BMX riders and the hill squadron on their dirt bikes. Parents and other carers sit on the benches next to the train. They read, rattle, hand sliced apples and carrots from Tupperware cans, face fears about the daring maneuvers of their children and marvel at the incredible tricks and jumps of the experts, with whom they have no duty of care.
The traffic on the A96 between Munich and Lindau rushes in the background. Behind the hill is the skate park, hip-hop booms from a fat Bluetooth box. There are no noises from the nearby golf course and the recycling center on the opposite side. Here, on the very edge of Germering, a large cluster of terraced residential silos in the suburb of Munich, has been one of the systems that is at stake here for a good two years: an asphalt pump track. It’s the only completely paved pump track in and around Munich – and that’s why the facility attracts audiences like a strong magnet: people come from Germering, from Munich, from the surrounding area, from Augsburg or even Ulm, around here in the suburbs To ride dirt bikes, BMXs, scooters or skateboarding in the west of Munich.
Banked turns and bumps in the garden
Pump tracks like the one in Germering are still quite rare, but suddenly they are increasing – something is going on. “The pump track issue came up around 2009,” says Claudio Caluori, former mountain bike downhill professional and one of the founders of the Swiss company Velosolutions, which also built the facility in Germering. The archetypal pump track forms probably originated in the BMX scene in California: In order to practice jumps and tricks, the riders built steep turns, bumps and jumps in the garden. “Because it was too tight on the surfaces to pedal on the courses, they set the pace differently,” says Caluori. It is the pure movement of the body with which speed is recorded on a pump track on the waves and in the banked curves – these are called “adjacent curves” in technical jargon. The same basic principle applies to scooters or skateboards. It is: pumped.
“It’s a rhythmic push-pull movement,” says Kathi Kuypers, who has been a professional mountain bike rider for Team Trek for ten years and also competes in pump track competitions. The riders stand on the pedals with their elbows pointing outwards, their shoulders open, the center of gravity as close as possible to the bottom bracket. If the ground rises into a wave, Kuypers makes himself small on the bike and pulls the handlebars towards him. As soon as her dirt bike is over her hump, the 31-year-old stretches out and pushes – or pumps – the bike with legs and arms into the hollow. With rhythm and riding technique, this drives the bike at an enormous pace.
The professional driver from Rosenheim flies smoothly through the pump track and jumps over the two tables with casual understatement: She drives much slower than others and still flies over the obstacles. “It’s about technique and timing,” she says. Kathi Kuypers gives a few tips on riding technique and then talks to a few children who are marveling at their dirt bikes and have many, many questions.
Such a pump track is a multi-generational playground
A ride through the pump track may look effortless, but if you try it yourself and overcome your nervousness because of steep curves and numerous spectators, you will notice: It is incredibly exhausting, and nothing works without driving technique. It’s a little like learning to ski again. At the beginning the hurdle is high, then at some point movements become a matter of course – and the experts still always play in their own, unattainable league.
Next to the pump track in Germering are BMX veterans, three men, probably over the age of 50. They wear full-face helmets, chat, laugh and always go for a round in a good mood. Their safety on the bike and the style of their BMX jerseys reveal that they have been around for a while, but have found a new place here to let off steam. Almost all age groups are represented on the hill, children, adolescents under the control of hormones, who still drive without irony with bare chests in summer and do their laps with garish poses. In addition, young adults, older adults and fathers or mothers are waiting on the hill who don’t want to leave the fun on the pump track in Germering just to their children. You could say: On the face of it, this may be a pump track, but in fact it is a multi-generation playground. “It’s like that on most pump tracks,” says Claudio Caluori, “that’s the nice thing.”
This is largely due to a factor that may initially appear marginal: asphalt. Most of the pump tracks were once shoveled together from earth, sand and dirt. “We used to build jumps and lanes ourselves,” says Tobias Engelmann, a gifted rider who works for the bicycle manufacturer Scott and who, together with others, created the asphalt-free bike facility in Söcking near Starnberg. But such a system from earth requires constant maintenance. “If it really rains, you have to mend everything again,” says Engelmann. If the mayor of a municipality were to think about building a pump track, that would certainly be an exclusion criterion. Too much maintenance.
It is different with asphalt lanes. “In 2012, in Chur in Graubünden, we worked with a road construction company to create the world’s first paved pump track,” says Caluori from Velosolutions. The company has now built more than 400 such systems around the world, on all continents, a good 300 in Europe and more than 100 in Switzerland alone. Compared to tracks made of earth, the asphalted tracks are largely maintenance-free. “In addition, as a driver you almost always have the same conditions,” says Tobias Engelmann. When it is not very wet, the bike always behaves predictably on the ground, unlike on earth. “That’s perfect and that’s why there is usually a lot going on on the paved pump tracks,” says Engelmann.
At the rush hour on weekends, the facility in Germering is teeming with people. Then there are mainly children on the road, which is a risk for good drivers. The behavior of the little ones cannot always be assessed. And when the fast are slowed down again and again, the fun suffers. Nevertheless, the togetherness on the system usually works pretty well, despite the occasional puberty riot, which is probably part of it. The good drivers use the off-peak times anyway, early in the morning, at dusk in the evening – and if there were floodlights in Germering, for example, something would be going on until late in the evening in winter too.
Something is happening, of course there will soon be more good mountain bikers – not only on the pump track in Germering, but on all the lifts. “Riding on the pump track teaches you the best basics in a playful way,” says Engelmann. If you can master the bumps and jumps on the tracks, you will also survive in the bike park or on descents through open terrain. There are also heroes and role models who are adored by the children on the pump track. Fabio Wibmer or Danny MacAskill, for example, whose YouTube videos reach a gigantic audience. Something is growing on pump tracks like the one on the edge of this otherwise unspectacular dormitory town called Germering.