Interbike's Urban After Hours
By Davey Davis
Las Vegas is still Vegas, in case you were wondering. It is still an urban planning joke, still headlining people you forgot existed, still giving away custom choppers, and it is still the last place on earth one would expect to find a Brompton locked up next to a Waterford. Yet mid-September every year spritzes of bike commuters break up the heave-and-wait flow of the Strip’s traffic, providing drunken tourists another fleeting spectacle at which to shout. The bikers shout right back, understandably enough—Sin City gives everyone an open hand to depravity, and anyone who’s swooped down a hill with their hands in the air screaming like a viking knows that bikers can be hooligans when the occasion calls for it. So to the land of Fear and Loathing, welcome. Whether you are interested in spinning until you puke, ripping around a miniature track on a BMX of dubious tuning, copping free beers at every turn, visiting strip clubs with genderqueer vegans, or diving brakeless at top speed against the flow of traffic, there couldn’t be a better, or stranger, location for Interbike.