Nick Franklin's Road Less Travelled
WORDS AND PHOTOS: GOBADIRT.COM
We’re surrounded by 2500 Austrian students, over half of them female and many wearing skimpy bikinis splashing around in a large pool more than a little tipsy. Then the familiar “brrraaapppp” sound of a 250cc KTM engine surrounds us as a freestyle rider launches off a metal kicker, rotates upside-down and busts out a perfect Superflip. The students raise their fists in the air screaming wildly as the rider lands safely. For Kiwi Nick Franklin it’s just another day at the office, and after another 20 minutes of his daredevil behaviour, he’s lifted to rockstar status as the night shifts into top gear and things get a little crazy.
I’m at Club Magic Life – a large resort near Antalya on the coast of Turkey that gets transformed into Australia’s equivalent of Schoolies’ Week. The difference is this party goes for a month, with 2500 new students arriving every week.
While Nick’s job is to entertain the 18-21-year-olds with several shows for the team he rides for in Europe named ‘”FMX4Ever”, mine is to get his story on paper, as it’s been a while since FRMX has featured the Kiwi star.
Nick Franklin joins a swag of talented Kiwi moto riders who have enjoyed success on the international stage. The guy has raw talent, and at this point in his career should be competing regularly at the big events such as Red Bull X-Fighters and the X Games against the world’s leading FMX riders. However, as you’ll read, his path has had its rocky patches that have held him back from progressing as fast as this dynamic sport.
“New Zealand isn’t the easiest place to make it in FMX,” says Nick. But all it took was a lucky break, and he got his first when beating Tommy Clowers and Dayne Kinnaird at the 2002 NZ X-Air competition. Well, it wasn’t just luck, as in very windy conditions he put it all on the line to take the win, or as he puts it, “I was young and dumb in those days and went for anything!”
By beating American legend Clowers and the Aussie Kinnaird – the rider he looked to for inspiration when learning new tricks in his early days – Nick’s profile went through the roof and he then made one of the smartest decisions of his FMX career. He sent his CV to Red Bull, as they didn’t have a sponsored rider in New Zealand and he’d just beaten their #1 man.
“They get hundreds of CVs a week from athletes, but I had to give it a shot as I was really pushing hard to get somewhere,” says Nick of the time.
That X-Air win scored Nick the next cover of Freerider MX, and he says this helped secure his sponsorship with Red Bull, who signed him up not long after it hit the shelves.
Looking back now he says, “I was pumped on getting that cover, and if I didn’t get hooked up by Red Bull I’m not sure where I would have ended up as they gave me my first opportunity to ride in Europe, which set me up for many years to come”.
That opportunity came after Nick pulled his first Backflip off a sketchy set-up.
“It was just a big hole in the ground with a ramp coming out of it,” he laughs.
When Red Bull NZ got wind of it, they told RB International, who got excited as he was their first rider to flip.
Next thing you know, Nick received a contract to ride at the Red Bull X-Fighters.
“In the contract they wanted to me to flip, but I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve only flipped twice off a dodgy set-up and am not ready to take it to competition’. Luckily they were cool and still invited me to compete. I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, but looking back it was huge. I finished third and fourth over the two rounds against Nate Adams and Kenny Bartram who were flipping over 45ft, and I was also against the in-form Kinnaird and Frenchman Manu Troux.”
Nick had risen to the top of FMX in NZ, paid his dues in Oz living out of a van, staying and riding with the Cole bros and Michael “Chucki” Norris. They were all good times, he recalls, but when the doors opened in Europe after his X-Fighters success, he jumped through them without looking back.
Invitations flooded in. With shows all over Europe, Nick quickly built on his reputation by finishing regularly on the podium at the IFMXF series, even though he never actually won one.
“I always found myself finishing second or third to Norwegian rider Ailo Gaup, mainly because he had the 8m Backflip down, even though I thought I put together runs with more solid tricks,” he remembers.
This got Nick fired up to learn Backflips off a proper set-up, and when he returned to NZ in the off-season he obtained a superkicker and started learning them to dirt. Only the privileged like Carey Hart, Brian Deegan, Travis Pastrana and Mike Metzger had foam-pits in those days and Nick toughed it out until he perfected the trick.
But he learnt even the slightest mistake can end in tears.
“I over-rotated slightly and my hand came off the bars as I landed. I still managed to ride it out, but at the bottom of the landing I fell over and landed badly on my leg breaking my femur. I remember lifting my leg in the ambulance and it was like I had a knee in the middle of my thigh.”
As it turned out, this was the turning point in Nick’s rapidly blooming career. He was riding at a level comparable to the world’s best, and if he hadn’t broken his leg, he would’ve competed at his first X-Games qualifying round in America, which could have opened another door for him to compete at the sport’s greatest FMX event.
The snapped femur was a big handbrake for Nick. He’d never had an injury so serious, and didn’t really understand the importance of physiotherapy and the recovery process.
“I was young and didn’t take it too seriously,” he admits. “The muscles in my leg were full of blood and hardened because I took it too easy. If I’d left it any longer it would have calcified and turned to bones throughout my muscle. I learned a big lesson from that.”
Eight months off the bike is a long time in the sport of freestyle motocross, especially while the Backflip combinations evolved at such a rapid pace.
By the time Nick got back to business and built his own foam pit with help from Red Bull, he was a long way from reaching the heights he fell from. To make matters worse, he was trying to build his trick list back up with a metal rod still placed through the centre of his femur; this was something he carried in the back of his mind as he worked on mastering the 75ft flip.
“I was too scared to push it. Once I did three or so Backflips to dirt during a practice session I’d stop. In my mind, the more I flipped the greater chance there was of crashing. I know now this was the wrong attitude to have, and I should’ve been flipping 100 times a session like I do now.”
Another downside to a serious injury like a broken femur is the huge loss of income, and this is the reason Nick has returned to riding shows to earn money earlier than he would’ve liked.
Playing catch-up is not much fun as he points out: “In a perfect world I’d practise until my riding was at a high level before breaking back on to the scene, but like many riders I have a mortgage to pay and bills to cover, so I always find myself returning to shows way before I’m 100 per cent ready. And once I am back riding in Europe there’s no time to practise, as we’re always travelling from one event to the next. That means I’m only focusing on my top 10 or so tricks, leaving the rest behind, and not expanding my trick repertoire as much as I’d like to.”
Since having the rod taken out of his femur in 2006, Nick has suffered a major injury every year that has kept him on the low side. Just when he was starting to feel good on the bike again after the recovering from the femur break, an old motocross racing injury to his left knee came back to haunt him: a heavy landing completely tore his ACL and PCL ligaments and dislocated his knee. He soldiered on riding with the injury for four months, but the constant dislocation every time he over-jumped or came up short drove him insane, and forced him to have surgery towards the end of 2006.
This time, Nick made sure he worked hard during the recovery process. Many hours at the gym strengthening the muscles around his knee saw him pull through a month faster than usual. He then carried this momentum into the 2007 season and by the mid-way point felt as if he was riding the best he had in a very long time.
“I started to feel really good again; I was confident flipping, and felt like I could learn tricks whenever I wanted. I was back in Europe and had six good shows lined up, but then I was invited to do another the week before they started, which turned out a disaster. During practice I bumped my gear lever into neutral on the upramp and I had to bail off mid-air, which saw me land feet-first into the dirt downramp. That was OK as it was soft, but the momentum carried my body forwards and my hands sunk a few inches into the dirt, causing them to both break badly as my body went forwards.”
Nick suspects his foot accidentally touched the hose clamps he attached to his gear lever to assist with Nac Flips as he accelerated up the ramp. It’s something that has never happened to him before and it’ll never happen again, as he has since removed the end piece the foot uses to change gears and now uses his hand to click into second before riding off.
Now Nick is back to riding shows for FMX4Ever as his wrists take their time healing. He says the older you get the longer they take to heal, and although he admits he’s a way off reaching the level of fellow Australasian riders Maddo, Bilko, Schuie and Sincs, he’s not content to sit still. And although he has let go of his dream to compete at X-Games, he believes the Red Bull X-Fighters is still well within reach.
But for now he just has to put up with thousands of bikini-clad girls screaming his name and enjoying the highs and lows that come with being a freestyle motocross rider in Europe and beyond.
“It beats the hell out of a 9-5 office job right?”
It sure does, Nick!
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