Nova Scotia BMXer uses shipping containers to achieve dizzying new heights with “Uncontainable”

Drew Bezanson might be the sort of BMX rider for whom acrobatics verge on aerobatics, but it’s not like the daredevil Canadian is totally without apprehension. 40 feet, after all — the precise height of his latest dizzying challenge — is right about where the Nova Scotia-based cyclist’s nerves kick in, he admits.

Still, that taste of fear, Bezanson said, is the point of his newest project.

“Everyone feels fear,” Bezanson said of Uncontainable, his challenge to launch himself off a 40-foot ledge and on to a curved wall suspended six feet away, then return safely to where he started. “But that was my goal, to ride stuff that would really scare me. Setups that I enjoy riding that were much bigger than what I’ve ridden in the past. To push my personal limits on a bike and to ride stuff I would never get the opportunity to ride unless it was built.”

Over the summer, Bezanson put a couple months’ worth of labour into that daring objective, working with top ramp builders at a site in Truro, N.S. to put together a huge, downright intimidating BMX obstacle. To pull it off, enormous shipping containers were used, stacked and arranged like Lego to achieve varying configurations. With each of those containers topping 9.6 feet in height on their own, you can imagine what a pile of four, as Bezanson set up, would produce. Towering 38.4 feet above the ground, Bezanson’s BMX megalith is about the same height as a four-storey building; put another way, it rises eight feet higher than the highest platform in competitive diving.

Ramp architect Nate Wessel, an expert known for his work in everything from BMX to designs for car stunts, described the project as taking stunt riding to the next level. “In terms of bike ramps,” he said, “this is for sure the biggest I’ve ever built. Everything is twice the size of what other guys are riding. Drew lives in a different world right now, and [is] by far a game changer for BMX.”

It’s a fitting project for the airborne Nova Scotia cyclist, whose overall goal as a BMX competitor is to refine his skills in the most harrowing, outside-the-comfort-zone manner possible, and in so doing, to elevate the sport of BMX. Attaining that objective — literally, in this case — meant Bezanson’s pursuit of bigger, higher and bolder involved a step or two up from the standard BMX track or skatepart, with the largest obstacles of the latter tending to top out at around ten feet. In the case of Uncontainable, a bit of do-it-yourself ingenuity was needed to raise the bar.

Get your palms sweating by watching a video of Bezanson’s latest hair-raising project here: