21 million youtube views of a guy you've never heard of on a bicycle.

In April 2009, a couple of guys in Scotland put together a video of their friend Danny riding his bike in Edinburgh. It immediately went viral in the bicycling community. This video is a real testament to the power of the internet to spot amazing talent and catapult it into the mainstream.

Even my mom liked it.



Here's a story about it from the Times, London:

...Like the singer Susan Boyle or make-up guru Lauren Luke, Danny MacAskill, 23, has been catapulted into the spotlight by a viral internet campaign with which he is still trying to come to terms eight months after it began. He may cope with death-defying “tail-whips” on his trials bike, but his head is spinning with the speed of his fame.

In April his flatmate Dave Sowerby posted a video he had made of MacAskill’s stunts on an internet biking forum. Overnight it was bumped on to YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 12m times. Within a week, MacAskill was receiving up to 100 offers a day. He was invited on to American television talk shows and bombarded with sponsorship deals. A Korean circus wanted to sign him up.

“It is surreal,” he says when we meet up in Edinburgh, where he has been living for three years. “I never thought I’d be able to make a living riding my bike. So many bizarre things have happened this year, it's impossible to guess what is going to happen next.”

It is 6C outside and MacAskill, who has a broken collarbone and is recovering from food poisoning, is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan of his new sponsor, Red Bull. It is obvious from the outset that he has a cavalier attitude to his own well-being.

The original video took six months to shoot, largely because of the poor weather in Edinburgh last winter. MacAskill was working full-time in Macdonald Cycles and had to grab the occasional lunch hour when the sun was shining and Sowerby was available for filming. Every Edinburgh bollard, tree or wall was assessed as a prop. The resulting film was almost balletic.

“When we finished the film, I had no expectations whatsoever,” he says. “I was doing it for fun. I’d wanted to make something like this for a while, but it was just to document what was going on in Edinburgh.”

Half a dozen friends came to the “premiere” in MacAskill’s Tollcross flat. They watched it a couple of times and switched over to the sitcom Family Guy and forgot about it.

“The next day I woke up to the BBC calling,” he says. “The video was on a specialist biking website originally, but there were enough users to keep bumping it up until it was on the front page of YouTube. It literally happened overnight. For the first couple of weeks, I was doing interviews every day. It was mad.”


MacAskill grew up in a thatched croft in Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye, and while he describes his upbringing as “very ordinary”, even by the standards of island childhoods he was given a reckless amount of freedom.

“From an early age I was the person who jumped off the highest part of the tree,” he says. “I’ve used all of my nine lives and more just being a kid. In my garden we had big fishing nets hung from the trees and I could throw myself into them from the top of the tree.”

His father, Peter, runs The Colbost Croft Museum on Skye and the Giant MacAskill Museum, dedicated to Angus MacAskill, the tallest Scotsman ever to have lived. His mother works for a building company and his parents seem to have had a heroic lack of angst about his escapades.

They didn’t endear him to the local constabulary, however, and there were constant run-ins with the Dunvegan policeman. “I got charged twice — once for doing a wheelie passed a parked car on a Sunday,” he says.

MacAskill enjoyed school at Portree High though more for the sport and company than the academic subjects. He left without taking Highers and went to work for Bothy Bikes in Aviemore. By the time the video was made, he was beginning to wonder where his future lay.

It never occurred to him that the future would involve flying to Lisbon to make a Volkswagen advertisement. The shoot entailed him jumping his bike from a thin ledge, 25ft up, on to another building. On the first two takes, the back wheel slipped, leaving him in danger of crashing to the ground.

He wears only a helmet for safety and gloves for grips when cycling. In the past he has broken both wrists. “Once you learn something, you don’t need the guards,” he says. “I’ve smashed eight helmets and they were potentially lethal crashes. There’s not that much up there, but it is still worth keeping it intact.”

These days he is booked up months in advance. It’s not unusual for him to be asked to do demos in 10 countries in a day. The only reason he has time to do interviews now is because he has broken his collarbone, an injury made worse by him tripping over a kerb back in Edinburgh. He required an operation to pin the collarbone. “Sometimes you spend so long on the bike, you forget how to walk,” he says.

It means MacAskill won’t be able to ride with The Clan for their appearance on Children in Need. Instead, they will do the demo and MacAskill will have to talk.

He is slowly coming to terms with his new profile. He turned down an invitation to appear on the Ellen DeGeneres show in New York largely because they wanted him to dress up as DeGeneres. When an invitation to ride at the Homecoming Scottish Cup Final at Hampden Park came in, he rejected it in favour of a commitment he made at Balerno gala day. He has, however, made a video for the Mancunian band, Doves, and a much-viewed television commercial for S1 Jobs.

MacAskill would love to go back and make a promotional video of Skye to promote the island, ideally featuring the local bobby.

“I love Scotland to bits,” he says. “But I am thinking of moving to Europe. What I do now is much more international. For filming you need good weather.” He stops himself, suddenly aware of the bizarreness of his circumstances. “It’s so strange going from the dungeon in Macdonald Cycles to this.”

Realistically, MacAskill has probably no more than another decade doing stunts. Then he has a vague idea of setting up a bike shop. “I don’t make plans,” he says. “I just want to have the most fun, go to the coolest places and maybe encourage more kids into cycling.”

It will be interesting to see whether, despite the pressures of fame, he keeps his wheels in the air and his feet on the ground.