Nearing the end of his career, the world’s greatest unicycle racer chases the sport’s most elusive record.

There’s something different about world-class athletes. Even if you know nothing about their sport, you can see it. It’s the way they move – precise, powerful. It’s how they carry themselves – focused, intense. It’s the sense that, in this moment, they are doing exactly what they were built to do. It’s Valerie Adams in the throwing circle. It’s Jonah Lomu on the wing. It’s Lisa Carrington in a canoe. And it’s Ken Looi riding a unicycle.

Wellington’s Ken Looi has won almost everything there is to win on one wheel. He’s collected 13 unicycling world championship medals. He’s held both of the sport’s premier time trial world records: the farthest distance travelled in one hour and the farthest in 24 hours. He has performed unmatched feats of speed and endurance. He’s unicycled the 160km Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge 15 times. He’s unicycled the length of New Zealand from Cape Reinga to Bluff. He was the first person to unicycle up Baldwin Street, the steepest street in the world. He’s taken groups of unicyclists through Thailand, Nepal, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and China.

Yet, for all that he’s achieved, ultimate triumph has been fleeting. Looi’s collection of world championship medals includes just one gold, in the 2006 marathon road race. He’s been chasing another ever since. The one-hour time trial record, which he broke in 2005 and reclaimed in 2009, is long gone, shattered by the invention of the geared unicycle hub and the technological arms race it unleashed.

For unicycling purists, the 24-hour time trial record is the sport’s most prestigious title. Over longer distances, however, single-speed unicycles still beat the heavier geared hubs. It’s a true test of balance, focus and endurance – all the things that make a great unicyclist.

Looi set the mark in 2005 at 378.7km, or 814 laps around the Basin Reserve. He held the world record for two years, until the UK’s Sam Wakeling came along. A longtime friend and rival, the Brit didn’t just break Looi’s record – he obliterated it. Wakeling pushed the mark out to 453.8km, 75km more than Looi had managed. The margin was so staggering it sent a message to the rest of the elite men’s field: don’t even bother. And for nearly two decades, they didn’t.

When Looi first broke the record, he was 26. Now he’s 46, in the twilight of his career. He doesn’t know how much longer he can compete at this level. In his quest to reclaim the world record, it’s now or never. It’ll be the greatest achievement of his career. It’ll also be the hardest. If he can pull it off, it’ll secure his legacy as the greatest unicycle racer of all time.

Looi has a small, light frame, compact and rippling with muscle. When he rides, his knees bow inward for balance and his core fires with constant micro-adjustments. His shoulders hunch forward and his arms lock to his aero bars. His face is set in steely determination. His upper body is motionless. Below the waist, though, it’s all work. His legs pump in tiny, furious circles.

On a single-speed unicycle, one pedal stroke equals one wheel rotation. You can only go as fast as your legs can turn. Larger wheels and shorter cranks help, but only so much. At its heart, unicycling is a sport of cadence. It asks the question: how fast can you spin? Looi’s answer is: as fast as anyone on Earth.

As a teenager, Looi was a competitive mountain biker with big dreams. He was great at spinning in low gears but lacked the raw leg strength to compete at the top level. In unicycling, that was no longer a weakness. It was his biggest strength. It’s the sport he was built for.

In person, Looi is polite with a sunny disposition. He’s a little reserved and slightly self-deprecating. He has a technical mind; he loves talking about unicycle specifications and race tactics. He’s a sincere enthusiast, but not in an eccentric way. In fact, he’s disarmingly normal. He’s married with three kids and lives in a cookie-cutter suburban home. His day job is as a GP. He’s just a guy who is really serious about unicycling.

Looi builds his training cycles around the world championships, held every two years. He begins with a long base-building period focused on steady-state cardio, usually mountain biking and running. As the event approaches, his training becomes more specialised, peaking at three hours of unicycling per day, plus skill drills. He gets most of his training volume by unicycling his daily commute – 80 minutes each way between his home in Newlands and his job in Miramar.

Last season delivered two career highlights for Looi. He broke his own course record at the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge, which he’d set in 2004. Then, at the world championships, he won silver in the road race, the same event he’d won in 2006. He realised he was still as fast as he was in his 20s. With that, plus the advancements in unicycle technology, a thought took hold: maybe the 24-hour record he’d considered impossible all these years wasn’t so impossible after all.

Half of the space in Looi’s garage is dedicated to unicycles. He has around 30 in various states of repair. The other half is dedicated to floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with brown leather suitcases filled with puppets. His wife, Anna Bailey, is an internationally touring puppeteer. From their second date, their worlds began to intermingle. Looi taught Bailey to ride a unicycle; she taught him to manipulate a marionette. He proposed to her by performing a puppet show in front of a waterfall during a unicycle tour of Iceland. At their wedding, they taped “Just Married” signs on the back of their unicycles.

For the world record attempt, Looi chose to ride on a 36-inch carbon fibre wheel – half the weight of the aluminium rim he used to set his 2005 record. But lightness came at a cost. Less weight meant less strength, so he brought in Wellington-based Wheelworks to reinforce the spokes. He picked a lightweight tyre and a high-pressure inner tube for maximum rolling efficiency. He swapped his usual 125mm pedal cranks for 100mm ones to increase his cadence.

His usual handlebars weren’t long enough, so he extended them with a set of aero bars, ordered off Temu, secured with electrical tape and cable ties. The bars wouldn’t help much with wind resistance, but they let him rest his upper body. Early in his planning, he built a V-shaped unicycle frame that let him extend forward like a Tour de France time trialist. It was legal under the International Unicycling Federation’s rules. But Guinness has stricter standards – every component must be commercially available. So he scrapped the experiment and went back to a traditional frame.

He spent weeks scouting locations. The track around the Basin Reserve, where he set his 2005 record, was now part of a busy bike lane. Velodromes are too steep for unicycles, and he couldn’t find an athletics track that would let him ride on the rubber surface. Then one day, while on a training run, he discovered the perfect spot just a few hundred metres from his house: a circular concrete track around the lower field of Newlands Intermediate School, his alma mater. He had it professionally surveyed and measured at 390.75 metres per lap – meaning he needed at least 1162 laps. The world record attempt was on.

Looi’s first attempt to reclaim 24 hour unicycle world record began Saturday, November 17, 2024 at 8.17am and ended shortly after midnight. He started strong. He set a new 12-hour world record, 252 km. But at night, the wind picked up and he was blown off repeatedly. After 16 hours, he fell behind the world record pace and knew he couldn’t catch up. He decided to abandon the attempt. “It was really tough. He didn’t want to stop because he thought he was letting everyone down,” says Bruce Richardson, the professional timekeeper Looi hired.

It’s 8.23am on Saturday January 19, 2025 when Looi begins his second attempt. His three children, Gryffyn (6), Anthea (3), and Rupert (5 months) are there, wearing shirts that say “My dad is wheely great”.

For the first few hours, he’s a machine. The unicycle stands perfectly upright. The kilometres tick away. He’s well ahead of the pace he needs. The faster he goes, the less he wobbles. He feels so strong he doesn’t take a break for the first 150km.

Then the afternoon heat sets in. His fluid intake is off. Lactic acid builds up. He can’t digest his food, it sits in his stomach like a brick. At 5pm, he hops off, staggers toward the portaloo like a drunk Bambi, and vomits. It helps. He wipes his mouth and keeps going.

As the halfway mark approaches, Looi settles into a rhythm. His legs pump like pistons. The world is just him, the track and the unicycle. His body is tilted to the left as if contorting in pain. But if he is suffering, his face refuses to show it. He’s on track to break the 12-hour world record. On lap 645, Richardson runs alongside him and yells “You got it, Ken. Well done, mate.” 257.9km. The spectators cheer. Looi gasps out “thanks” and sticks out his tongue. He keeps pedalling.

The adrenaline burns off fast. Looi’s lap times drop. His shoulders sag. A few laps later, he pants instructions to his support crew: “Twominutenoodlespoweradechocolatemilk.” Bailey leaps into action. With a child in one arm and another clinging to her leg, she coordinates the support crew like a pit boss at Le Mans. Looi dismounts clumsily and sinks onto a camping mattress. Bailey massages his glutes. Someone shoves a bowl of noodles into his hands. Three boxes of Domino’s pizzas appear in front of him. He downs a litre of chocolate milk, then starts on a second bottle.

Richardson confirms his new 12-hour record, but Looi doesn’t celebrate. He looks worried. “I thought I would have broken it by more,” he says. In the first 12 hours, he needed to build a buffer for nighttime, when he would inevitably slow down. The darkness means more mental strain. More corrections. More wobbling. Wobbling means slowing down. Slowing down means failure. This will be close.

With an hour to go, Looi’s legs are trembling. He can’t get his muscles to contract fast enough. The micro-adjustments of balance have drained every reserve of energy. The wheel wobbles more. He grimaces. The record is within his grasp, but barely. On the sideline, Bailey is nervous. Missing the record by one kilometre would be more heartbreaking than missing by 10. Worse, she knows he’ll have to make a third attempt. It would haunt him otherwise.

Three kilometres short of Wakeling’s record, Looi’s body seizes up. “I’m cramping!” he calls out, panicked. Two supporters catch him mid-fall. He collapses on all fours and stretches his back out in a cobra pose. “OK,” he says after a few seconds. The supporters ick him up off the ground by his armpits and hoist him back onto the unicycle.

No more stops. No more mistakes. If he wobbles, it’s over. If he falls, it’s over. He blocks out the pain. Eight more laps stand between him and unicycling immortality.

Seven laps. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two.

“It’s the final lap. He’s about to break the world record,” Richardson announces.

The kids in attendance are running around the field after him. Anthea steps on a prickle and bursts into tears, Bailey sweeps her up in her arms.

After 23 hours, 54 minutes, and 14 seconds, Looi crosses the finish line for his 1,162nd lap. The crowd erupts in cheers. The kids jump around in excitement. Looi sticks his tongue out and pumps his fist. It’s the most emotion he’s shown all day.

He pedals on, trying to push the record as far as he can in the remaining five minutes. But he has nothing left. His brain is shutting down. His legs aren’t responding.

For the final lap, Looi doesn’t look like the world’s greatest unicycle racer. He looks like Ken, suburban father of three, trying out a new hobby. He wobbles around, struggling to stay upright. He falls off and needs help getting back on.

He crosses the line for 1,165th time, a distance of 455.2km, 1,400m more than the previous world record. Richardson lifts him off the unicycle and holds him upright so he doesn’t collapse. He tries to sit in a camping chair but can’t control his body. He falls on it with the full force of gravity. The crowd gathers around him. They stare silently, waiting for some inspiring words.

Looi takes a deep breath and says, “That was hard. I won’t be doing that again.”

Ken Looi’s 24 hour unicycle world record was in support of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research. His donation page can be found at this link.