The ride of his life
Posted on May 01 2007 | Tagged as: Raggy Dolls
Meet London’s new stunt-riding teacher
Bira Nicolella pulled his first wheelie aged 24, a young guy messing around on a Honda motocross bike in his native Brazil. Twenty-five years later, he’s still riding, and in July will open his own stunt riding school in London, the first of its kind in the UK.
While other schools only teach students wheelies – and some of them only wheelie launch techniques – his new institution, simply named the Bira Nicolella Motorbike Stunt School, will also coach riders in how to perform endos, burnouts and donuts.
When his Enfield stuntground opens for business, it will be the fulfilment of a long-standing ambition for Nicolella – a school of his own in the city of his dreams.
With the growing popularity of stunt riding and the potential to attract interest from the UK film industry to get his students movie work, Nicolella is excited by the school’s prospects. Good riders are paid up to £4,000 for 40-minute shows in arenas such as Donington Park, Knockhill and Brands Hatch, while the riders doubling for Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 2 and Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies each took home $100,000 paycheques.
“Because the sport is growing so fast, it helps riders get confidence,” says Nicolella. “This course is going to help a lot of people – and it’ll inspire stunt riders of the future.”
His journey from São Paulo to the UK has taken in three continents and one previous school, while Nicolella has changed nationality to get here, taking advantage of Italian grandparents to be able to live and work in the EU.
Moving to Europe for the larger fees and prize money available is common for Brazilian riders, including a particular inspiration for Nicolella, AC Farias, who had helped the sport grow in popularity in Brazil before leaving in 1992, later becoming World Champion in 1998.
Farias recognises the need for new riders to have an instructor, but isn’t sure that a stunt school will have many takers. “It’s good if people begin in the right way – it is a dangerous sport,” he says. “They certainly need to learn correct brake techniques. You don’t really need to go to a school, but it’s helpful to have someone to give you advice, you know? Many people don’t like to go to a school – they just want to get out and try things.”
Nicolella spent nine years learning how to perform motorbike stunts, at first mastering wheelies on his own and going to copy tricks from trial sport and freestyle bike events, eventually creating tricks of his own. After becoming proficient enough to perform, Nicolella set up his own team in 1995, the Radical Performance With Bikes. He and six other riders travelled from arena to arena all across Brazil in “a kind of motorcycle circus”, packing everything into a bus – including the bikes. The team would perform choreographed tricks for crowds of 5,000 people.
“It was like an air display team,” enthuses Nicolella. “It was something different for them. When you see bikes on the street, you see them in the right way, what they were built for. But when you see what we did it’s different – it’s very enjoyable.”
As the leader of the team, he also gained useful experience developing the choreography, as well as contacting companies to get sponsorship, the media to advertise performances and event organisers to sell shows, all of which would come in useful when he came to set up his own schools.
After six years of touring their home country, two of Nicolella’s riders, Odair Salmaro and Little Laugh, travelled to Switzerland in the summer of 2001 to compete in the European Stunt Riding Championships. Although it was their first international competition, they came third and fourth respectively. Their success bolstered Nicolella’s reputation enough for him to move to the US later the same year, where he set up his first school in Atlanta.
Nicolella ran the Wheelie School for two and half years, and although he then only taught students how to do wheelies, he claims to have helped increase the sport’s popularity in America. “I helped get many Americans into the sport,” he says. “It’s growing really fast now. There are a lot of championships everywhere.” Stunt riding has since become a staple on Sky Sports, even featuring on the channel’s advertisements, and there’s a subculture of amateur stunting on busy public roads – though Nicolella discourages this.
“The championships have been attracting more and more people into proper arenas,” he says. “I encourage riders to be safe, and to keep their audience safe – after all, if a rider shows he’s professional then his career as a stunt rider will grow.”
Bored with America, Nicolella returned to touring, travelling across Europe for a few months of 2004, as he had covered Brazil previously. He then returned to his native soil at the end of their European tour, but quickly became frustrated with the state of the sport in his homeland.
“There’s a lack of organisation there,” he says. “If you go to the US, to a freestyle motocross competition, you can see the sport is very organised. In Brazil we don’t have this organisation, although we do have other things – organised teams doing choreography.”
In early 2005, Nicolella left Brazil and travelled to Italy to finish the process of obtaining Italian citizenship that he’d begun during his European tour. Taking advantage of European Union employment laws, he immediately upped sticks and moved to the UK that November. “As soon as I had the Italian passport in my hands I came to London,” he says.
That had been Nicolella’s intention when he had originally applied for citizenship of Italy – he had harboured a desire to live and work in London for even longer than he had been riding motorbikes.
“It was a dream my whole life,” he says. “I thought, ‘I love the language, I love the people, I want to be there’. I had heard all sort of great things about the city.
“It’s going to be a pleasure to do what I know, and what I like, in a place I’ve always dreamed of living in. It’s a dream come true.” We should all be so lucky.
Classes at the Bira Nicolella Motorbike Stunt School are £160 for a one-day course, with bikes and protective clothing provided. See www.biranicolella.com for more details
POSTSCRIPT:
The opening of the school has been delayed until summer 2008