After pro BMX rider Nigel Sylvester’s last Go! video took viewers on a fantastical ride through the streets, shops, and arcades of Tokyo, we wondered how he could possibly make the next one any better. Tokyo was the third entry in the series and Sylvester’s longest video yet, setting a precedent that would establish the new normal. If Go! 3 was a proof of concept, Go! Dubai is a refinement of that vision. It is the busiest, slickest, and most exciting Go! video yet.
Sylvester’s videos have an inexplicable way of painting a smile on your face that only gets bigger until it ends. Go! Dubai is no different, opening with Sylvester and his trusty red BMX bike inside a small airplane, high above the desert. (Fans of the series will no doubt remember that at the end of Go! 3, Sylvester rides up to a taxiing airplane, yelling “Wait!” before the video cuts to black). A few quick cuts later and he’s out the door, skydiving with his bike until he touches down, wheels first, on the bright orange sand.
But that is the last we see of the bike for a while, as Sylvester links up with a crew on a variety of all-terrain vehicles and they tear off across the desert together. In fact, there are only about 10 seconds of actual BMX riding in the first minute and a half, but this is exactly what makes Sylvester’s videos so entertaining for the average viewer; they are so much more than a stunt reel. Over the course of the video’s roughly 6.5-minute run time, Sylvester skydives, races supercars, rides a jet ski, goes snowboarding, goes down a slide at a water park, swims underwater with fish, feeds a giraffe, and even practices a bit of rooftop falconry. And yes, somewhere in there, he pulls off a couple of bike stunts. It is like a flip book tour of the city, a fast-paced adventure that you will want to replay again and again just to see how it all works.
This was also the first video in which Sylvester officially partnered with GoPro, having switched over from Sony Action Cams before filming Go! 3. Both the Hero5 Black and Hero5 Session cameras were used.
We do not know exactly where Sylvester is headed next, but he serves up a possible clue at the end of the video when he accepts a call from English rapper Tinie Tempah, who invites him to link up in London. There is a lot of ground to cover between Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and London, so we suspect (hope) that Sylvester will be making several stops along the way. This would make sense; as he said when we spoke with him previously, “We’ll continue to go around the world in the same direction, from east to west. The goal is to hit as many cities as possible.”
