BMX
Behind the launch of Kriss Kyle's new fashion brand
BMX supremo Kriss Kyle has conquered his craft by fearlessly expressing himself. Now he’s jumping into a whole new arena: fashion.
Kriss Kyle is covered from head to toe in tattoos, but one piece of body art stands out among all the others. Written in italics on the right side of his neck is the legend ‘Unit 23 Home Forever’ – a declaration deeper and more indelible than the tattooist’s ink. At the age of 14, the professional BMX rider moved out of the family home in the small Scottish coastal town of Stranraer and into Unit 23 – the UK’s largest indoor skatepark – about 160km away in Dumbarton. He ended up living there for the next six years, and, now aged 28, still rides there regularly. It's at Unit 23 that The Red Bulletin finds him on a sunny July day.
“Sometimes I would ride this hall until half four in the morning,” Kyle says. “Not much has changed here since then. That’s what I like about it. I travel around the world to ride my bike, and I love it, but it’s always great to come back to this place.”
In the time since he first moved into Unit 23, Kyle has gone on to compete and film around the world, launch his own line of bikes, and firmly establish himself as one of the most creative riders on the planet. In January last year, he dropped from a helicopter and onto the helipad – 212m above sea level – of Dubai’s iconic Burj Al Arab hotel; the YouTube video of the stunt has had more than 13.2 million views and is rising.
Kriss Kyle all in white
© Fred Murray
As a kid growing up in Stranraer, Kyle would watch his brother riding his BMX at the local skatepark and beg his parents for a bike so he could join in. For his 10th birthday, he was given a 16in [40cm] Haro 360 – his first BMX. “It took over my life,” Kyle says. “It’s called ‘freestyle’ BMX for a reason – there are no rules. You ride the bike the way you want and express yourself by doing it.”
The young BMXer devoured magazines on the sport and watched the Road Fools film series that showed pros riding around America. He made his first trip to Unit 23 at 12 years old. “I walked through the doors and saw an 8ft-high [2.4m] quarter pipe,” Kyle says. “I couldn’t believe it. I was used to riding 3ft [90cm] stuff, so this felt like a vert ramp. It felt like Everest.”
A three-hour train journey from Stranraer, with a change in Glasgow, Unit 23 wasn’t exactly around the corner from Kyle’s home. As his brother got older and fell out of love with BMX, Kyle found himself increasingly making the journey alone.
"If you make a great video, people are going to talk about it for years."
© Fred Murray
“I would’ve gone to hell and back to ride that bike,” he says. “It was a lot coming from such a small town and going through Glasgow city centre, not really knowing what I was doing, but I would have travelled for days to ride here if I had to.
“I was a quiet kid, but eventually I made friends up this way. They’d say, ‘You can stay at mine and we can ride tomorrow if you want.’ I’d call my mum up and she’d say, ‘Fine, but make sure you’re back for school on Monday.’ Eventually I’d return home and go to school, but I’d be sitting in a classroom and thinking, ‘I’m wasting my life. I just want to be riding my bike.’
“I’d be thinking about BMX all day, and sometimes I’d fall asleep in class. I was never bad, but they’d send me to timeout [detention] and I’d just walk home, get my bike and go out riding. My mum was a teacher, my dad was the janitor at the school, and my brother-in-law was my geography teacher, so school was quite a [big thing]. Mum would call to ask where I’d been, and I would say that I’d gone home because I didn’t feel well. But really I’d been out riding.”
Kyle came up with increasingly creative excuses to get out of school, including making fake vomit using a bag of crisps and a bottle of Coke. He laughs at the memory, but admits that he didn’t fully realise the toll his behaviour was having on his parents. “My attendance got so bad that the school thought there was something wrong with me,” he says. “It was only when my mum started crying in the car one day that it hit me – I was putting them through hell. She had to keep making excuses for me. I felt really fucking bad, but I was so passionate about riding that nothing would stand in the way of me getting on that bike. It was sheer love, and I felt like it really was part of me. It was what I’d be thinking about when I fell asleep at night, and the first thing on my mind when I woke up.”
It would have seemed unimaginable at that time, but Kyle has since been back to talk to kids at a local primary school, to emphasise the importance of following your dreams. “I always dreamt about being a professional BMXer, but coming from Stranraer I never thought it was possible,” he says. “What I think now is that if you’re passionate about something and you have the drive, you can do it, no matter where you’re from. We’re all made of the same stuff. If you want it badly enough, you can bloody do it.”
A composite of Kyle performing the same trick twice
© Fred Murray
Dedication was never a problem for Kyle when it came to riding. Eventually, his parents let him move closer to Unit 23. He couch-surfed for a few months before eventually the owner of the skatepark invited him to move in. “It was like every kid’s dream,” says Kyle.
For the first year, he was living there by himself. “I was riding every day and working in the café in the kitchen, serving people chips and cheese,” he remembers. “It was amazing, but it was also scary at night. I’d be shitting my pants. Then a few of my friends moved in and it got a lot better. We had the best childhood in the world. It was our passion, and Chick Mailey, who owns Unit 23, was like a stepdad to us.”
Kyle shows us the first place he slept when he moved into Unit 23 – a room at the end of a dark corridor with a light that doesn’t work. We walk into a room that is now home to a huge half-pipe, and he laughs. “This used to be full of couches,” Kyle recalls. “We had a rat problem, though. There’d be rats running over us, and we used to try to hit them with a shovel. When I think back to it now, it’s absolutely mad.” He goes on to describe an incident where a burglar tried to break in during the night and a friend had to chase away the criminal with a baseball bat. Despite it all, you get the feeling Kyle would happily move back in.
It wasn’t all rats and robbers at Unit 23, though; there was a makeshift cafeteria cinema, too, and even a four-person hot tub – “I think our record was 14 people,” Kyle says. They also had a tattoo gun that was put to regular use. “I completely ruined one of my friend’s legs one day,” he laughs, also pointing out an anchor he inked onto his own hand, and a few leg tattoos. “The people who lived here were from all around the country. It was like the Lost Boys [from the book Peter Pan]. It’s weird, but now I have the best friends in the world. They’re like brothers to me. We all have Unit 23 tattoos; even my fiancée has one.”
“I don’t like showing off, and I hate riding in front of people."
© Fred Murray
Subsequently, an actual dormitory was built, which is still there now. “It’s messy because nobody lives here any more,” says Kyle, “but the rooms are actually quite nice.” Boasting 12 rooms, with the Scottish saltire hanging at the end of the corridor, the dorm looks like your standard student-halls set-up, perhaps even nicer. “That was my room,” Kyle says, tapping one of the doors on our way out. “It was the biggest.”
Having a skatepark for a living room brought instant rewards for Kyle and his riding. He picked up a Nike sponsorship at the age of 14, signed on to Glasgow-based bike company BSD not long after, and joined Red Bull on his 19th birthday. Kyle wasn’t only making a living from BMX, he was travelling the world and having a great time doing it. “I’d be calling my mum and dad from South Africa or Australia,” he recalls. “I still can’t believe it. I still feel like that 14-year-old kid. I get the same buzz to go out on my bike every day.”
Kyle took to the filming side of BMX more than to competition. “I don’t really like showing off, and I hate riding in front of people,” he says. “Even now, I get so nervous. I prefer trying a trick for hours and hours until you’re bleeding and sweating and running on nothing. But when you finally get it, there’s no greater feeling. You can win a contest and people talk about it for maybe a week, but if you make a great video, people are going to talk about it for years.”
His breakthrough film, Kaleidoscope, comes up in conversation. The 2015 project, which has garnered more than five million views to date on YouTube, transported Kyle to a geometric sci-fi dreamworld where he landed an array of world-first tricks in a blaze of creative ingenuity. One of these involved a 360 footplant, landing on a trampoline and front-flipping off it. “When I watched the video back at the end, it was almost like a trophy in itself,” he says.
Kyle is an avid Instagrammer. “Social media is the best tool for growing the sport,” he says. His creativity shines through in the clips he uploads from the streets of Glasgow. “Sometimes I feel like I’m insane,” Kyle laughs. “Even when I go on holiday I’m always looking at stairs or a handrail or a roof. I wonder if I’m going to be 50 years old and still doing this. I think I will. I don’t think you can ever switch that off.”
"I’ve had modelling jobs,” says Kyle
© Fred Murray
The BMXer is as creative with his editing as he is with his riding, even on the shorter clips. The photography that accompanies this feature was shot during filming for a recent TikTok for Red Bull, which showed him riding the exact same line numerous times in a range of different outfits. When spliced together, it looks as if the clothing miraculously changes during one single trick – the riding line he takes is precise every time, with the exception of a painful miscalculation when he can’t see out of an inflatable T-Rex costume.
It’s a great analogy for how the different sides of Kriss Kyle all come together for the same end result; whether it’s BMX, mountain bike, motocross or anything else, he’s driven to express himself. His latest manifestation of this is launching his own fashion label. “I’ve always been into fashion,” explains Kyle, who has done a fair amount of modelling work alongside his BMX career. “When I was a young kid, before skintight jeans were even a thing, I tried to find some and had to buy little girls’ jeans because I was a wee guy. I was wearing women’s jeans.
“I’ve always wanted to start my own clothing brand, and now feels like the right time. I’m working with a designer; my sister is helping out, too. [The brand] should drop in November, and it’s called Nevontaii. The name is derived from a powerful tribe [the Novantae, circa 100-200AD] that lived in the region between Dumfries and Galloway where I was born. I’ve taken a lot of what I like and put it into my line.” This presumably includes wee jeans. “Fashion is like BMX in that way,” he says. “People who do extreme sports are creative individuals who like to express themselves. Fashion flows nicely through it. It’s about wearing something in your own way.”
3 min
Kriss Kyle christens StreetDome
Kriss Kyle christens Denmark's newest skatepark StreetDome.
Plans for his own clothing brand are just one of many changes in Kyle’s life over recent years. He now has his own house; he's been a stunt double in a Hollywood movie (for Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft in 2018’s Tomb Raider); he’s just become the owner of a new puppy (a chocolate Labrador named Albert Kyle); and if it wasn’t for lockdown he would have got married to his fiancée Kayleigh and been off celebrating their honeymoon in Bali rather than talking to us. The wedding is now planned for 2021, alongside a number of other fermenting Kriss Kyle projects. “At least it’s been beautiful in Scotland,” he says. “I’d be lying if I said I’ve not been enjoying myself.”
As we wrap up our tour of the skatepark, Kyle takes a moment in the huge Hall Two. “If it wasn’t for Unit 23,” he says, “I wouldn’t be where I am today. I owe it all to this place.” In many other ways, Kyle is still the same kid who moved here at 14. Whatever has changed, it’s clear that one thing has not: Unit 23 is forever his home.
