It’s September 10, 2020 at exactly 9 minutes to seven in the evening. Peddling leisurely, Erik Fedko rides his slopestyle bike over level ground toward a steep drop into a quarry. As the ground falls away beneath him, he flicks the bike, turns his head to look back over his right shoulder and allows his body and the metal frame to follow its lead. After completing a 360-degree spin, Erik lands in the scree on the 30-degree incline. In the process, gravity accelerates his bike to reach “about 50 to 60 kilometers per hour” as he lands. Known as an opposite 360, this flip is just an appetizer for what’s to come.

Reviewing his performance later, he says of the trick repertoire seen in the video: “I came pretty close to the edge of what I’m capable of. I’d give it a 9.5 out of 10 on the difficulty scale. That last jump especially is the most difficult but it’s also my favorite in my bag of tricks. No other rider does it, and I have to pluck up courage every time I go for it because it requires a lot of time in the air.”

This daredevil, go-getting attitude to slopestyle shredding has propelled Erik Fedko to his current success. He is ranked fourth on the Freeride Mountain Bike World Tour. Born in 1998, Erik hasn’t been on the pro biking circuit for very long, although it was pretty clear from his childhood that this is where he was headed. He received a motocross bike for his eighth birthday. The fact that he happened to “ride his bicycle through the forest” was merely incidental. Four years later, he had an accident in a motocross race and his parents decided that the motorbike had to go. So Erik switched over to a BMX. Today he rides and competes with slopestyle and freeride bikes.

For Erik, that meant riding, riding and riding some more. Hitting the jumps, again and again. At his private training ground, 20 minutes from his home in Fröndenberg near Dortmund in Germany, Erik spent more time in the saddle than ever before, practicing jumps and building his confidence. There, he not only builds the ramps, hills and landings exactly the way he wants them but also set up an airbag so that he can land safely even when he eats it. “I only think of moving across to the ramps with soft bark mulch landings once I’m landing a trick safely on the airbag. And only when I’m nailing it there is it time for the real thing.”

None of that happens on the bike before Erik has got each trick’s choreography perfectly visualized and committed to memory. “With every single trick, you have to know exactly what you’re doing from one millisecond to the next throughout the flight path. That means, I have to hammer the entire sequence of each trick or course into my head.”

But there’s more because, even more so than in competition, video performances are all about style. In other words, it’s not enough to just focus on the tricks and perform the entire run as flawlessly as possible. Or to stand calmly at the start of a competition run, take a deep breath and let go of the pressure and all those expectations. Or even to have the drive to be the best. Instead, you have to internalize self-belief and courage. And you have to do it in such a way that it not only translates into success, but also makes everything you’re capable of and eager to express as an athlete on a bike look playful, effortless, easy, fascinating—yes, fluid. And to make sure that magical feeling athletes get after a perfect run can be felt by viewers, too, just watching the video of it.

So how did Erik pull it off in the “One Shot” clip? Nico Zacek thinks the answer is simple: “For a lot of other riders, it’s a hard grind. It just flows with Erik because that’s Erik. He eats, sleeps and breathes slopestyle.”