Mike Leahy, Master of the Electric Unicycle

Mike Leahy is not a Onewheeler. “That’s actually that skateboard with a Go-Kart tire in the middle. It's a branded product. I don’t correct people, but mine’s technically an electric unicycle," he explains.

Leahy makes the point because, to some degree, while an actual Onewheel is what got him out of skateparks and onto dirt, it wasn’t what brought him to the level he's at now, hitting Fest-level jumps and clearing canyon gaps in the Utah desert. “I didn’t really even realize that mountain bike culture really existed, until that Onewheel brought me out into the woods,” Leahy admits. He'd only ever gone mountain biking once, with a friend’s dad, on a borrowed bike.

Once out there, however, Leahy was hooked - though he quickly realized that his Onewheel wasn’t going to cut it at the things he found himself eyeing and trying. “It wasn’t that capable. But a friend had an electric unicycle, and he said, ‘ THIS could do all the things you want.’" Leahy smiles. "And yeah, I guess the rest is history."

Leahy says he started dabbling in the terrain the mountains at home in the Pacific Northwest provided, but that a road trip in early 2023 was what really escalated and elevated his progression. “I had just bought a van on the East Coast, and I was road tripping across the country, hitting bike parks - and I wanted to go to Rampage country.” Leahy says he saw a kid on social media hit an old canyon gap down in that region of Southern Utah, and it sparked something within him. “I was like, I know I can do that.”

Leahy ended up linking up with a few freeriders once in the region. “They got my confidence level over the top,” he says of riding with them. “And they helped me groom the takeoff to that canyon cap, and Navi even did a Superman over the gap right before I went, so I was like ‘Oh I got that easy, for sure.’” Leahy laughs. “It turned out to be kind of an ordeal, because I cased it two times in a row. I had to have a serious talk about not continuing to bail on this jump that had really high consequences.”

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Leay says the biggest challenge of hitting bigger and bigger features is judging the speed. “Because the wheel is self-balancing, it doesn’t ever coast, so I need to accelerate downhill and then let up a bit on big takeoffs so I don’t go over the front. I also need to keep the wheel relatively balanced in the air because it doesn’t know it’s off the ground. Any tilt forward or back will cause the wheel to freespin wildly, as it thinks I am trying to accelerate or brake.”

For Leahy, practice really does make perfect: “I don’t need to go quite as fast as bikes because I maintain more speed in the flat and up the takeoff. So I rely on the experience of hitting thousands of jumps to guess how fast I should go.”

He also says that being able to visualize things is important. “I look at lips to see what my flight path is gonna look like and imagine an arc from the takeoff to landing; if the arc is flattish I can stay more forward on my wheel, and if it’s steep I am almost doing a wall sit behind my wheel. The steeper the lip, the more likely it is you’ll get bucked forward, and then you gotta roll the windows down wildly to save your life.”

Similar to his experience in Utah, Leahy says that, in general, the freeride scene has been welcoming. “They’ve kinda taken me under their wing, and shown a lot of support in inviting me to stuff, and just riding with me and helping me progress by showing me what’s possible on a bike in front of me. ‘Monkey see, monkey do,’ is really strong in me; if I see someone do it on a bike, I usually think I can do it too.”

Leahy says that Dylan Stark , in particular, comes to mind as an advocate and mentor. Leahy says he won Stark’s 420 jam in 2023 and Stark responded by inviting him to his next year’s event, Stark Week. “I ended up as Rider of the Week there. In a lot of ways, Dylan’s been the most influential; he saw potential in me.”

Other riders like Nicholi Rogatkin and Szymon Godziek have also played pivotal roles in Leahy’s career. “Nicholi was pretty much my audition to be in Masters of Dirt in Vienna, which was a super sick thing to do,” Leahy laughs. “ I met Szymon there, and this summer, I commented on one of his posts and immediately after he responded asking if I wanted to come to Poland for his Fest.” Leahy grins. “And I was like, ‘Shit - yeah, yeah I do, I do really wanna do that.”

With just ten days until the event, Leahy scrambled to buy a plane ticket and to find a rig he could borrow somewhere in Europe, since the batteries in his unicycle make it impossible to fly with and he worried there wasn’t enough time to ship it. “So yeah, I did all those Fest jumps on my buddy Adam’s wheel, which is kinda nuts - to hit the biggest things I’ve ever hit on someone else’s setup?”

Leahy explains that, while all wheels start off similarly, there are plenty of after-market accessories that riders will add that change the feel of the ride. “The pads that we put on the sides allow us to have more leverage over the wheel by pushing it with our shins. And we can also tuck our feet under a little bit so the wheel doesn’t get away from us in the air,” he explains. “I should have just brought mine, but I forgot them. So it was kinda like learning to ride all over again with the way his pads are set up.”

Leahy says that beyond that, though, he hasn’t really touched much on his rig. “It came with a knobby tire, and has suspension with rebound and compression dampening, but I haven’t messed around with it. I’ve ridden multiple wheels over the past four years, and this one has a very stiff, progressive coil, and I don’t think I go to the bottom of it almost ever.”

He has managed to break parts, and frequently, doing what he does. “I killed the motherboard once casing a jump,” he says of a line back in the PNW he still wants to go back to finish. “I needed to get a ride down the hill because at that point I was just on a seventy-five pound paperweight.”

When asked why he doesn’t just mountain bike, given the challenges and consequences of what he does, Leahy paused. “That’s a funny question. I’ve never really asked myself that. I think it was just the order of operations? Maybe if I had discovered freeride mountain biking first, I would have just gone that direction, but I was already so invested in what I was doing.” he laughs. “And, I think I’m afraid of handlebars? I feel like I would punch a tree all the time, or just twist it and go sideways, jackknife it.”

To watch more of Leahy in action, or to contact him if you’re hosting a freeride event that could use a unicyclist on the roster (it definitely does, in case there was any doubt) , you can find him on Instagram .