PHILADELPHIA - For Phil Dolan, it's dream-like techno. For Matt Wilhelm, it's Def Leppard. For York Uno, it's Japanese rap. For Trevor Meyer, it's Weezer.

Every flatland biker rides to a different type of preselected music. They don't want to seem to have the same musical tastes as anyone else. They don't want to seem to be the same as anyone else.

Such is the world of flatland bike riding, where creativity is the credo and a lack of differences gets you dissed.

"You can get a good score if you're not creative, but you're not so respected," said German flatlander Matti Rose, who finished ninth at yesterday's X Games finals.

So that's why you see such a vast array of riding styles in flatland biking, an event where athletes construct 90-second routines of twists, turns and twists from pedals to wheels to handlebars to pegs on a flat asphalt surface.

Dolan took the silver yesterday with his long, looping, slow-motion style. Stephen Cerra placed fifth with a dizzying routine of spins. Meyer earned a fourth-place finish with unequaled tricks like one in which he used the pegs on his front wheel like handlebars, pedaling as his bike made a right angle with the ground.

"That's why flatland is so cool," said Wilhelm, the bronze medalist yesterday. "There's no correct style. If it's pretty difficult, people are going to respect it."

But even if it's difficult, if it's like anyone else's routine, that respect isn't going to come easily.

"It isn't cool to copy anyone," Meyer said. "But there are certain tricks everyone does. It's not like everyone can be completely original."

But the bikers try to be completely original. Alex Jumelin, wearer of a "Flatland - life is a course" tattoo, put his hands up in ballerina fashion while spinning yesterday. Dolan did a trick where his handlebars scraped against the bottom of the ground. Rose bowed to the crowd during some of his tricks.

"To me, it's more about having your own style rather than copying someone else's," Cerra said. "I do the spinning, but I try to take it to a different world."

Wilhelm is also more of a spinner than most, but it's easy to tell the two apart on the flatland course (and not just because Cerra has braided brown pigtails and Wilhelm short, blond hair). The 6-foot, 150-pound Wilhelm is long and lean, and was compared to a tornado for his interspersed tight, quick spins. Cerra, meanwhile, is in almost constant motion.

Both use their spins creatively, but both end up looking completely different on the asphalt.

"It's the most important part of flatland biking," Rose said. "There are so many people out there, you have to be creative."

The most creative of all, though, is 22-year-old Finland native Martti Kuoppa, yesterday's winner.

"Martti is the creator," Cerra said.

And Kuoppa isn't just creative in his tricks. His music choice, some rap-industrial rock song, was perhaps the least radio-friendly of the 10 the finals competitors chose.

But it wasn't as unusual as Wilhelm's choice - "Photograph," a 17-year-old song by a hard rock group. Wilhelm usually listens to punk music, but he chose Def Leppard because, unlike the punk tunes, he doesn't get nervous listening to it. Of course, it didn't hurt that none of the other competitors chose anything remotely like it.

Tuesday, August 21, 2001