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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — During a week in which Alaska has hosted the showdown between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a retired fire inspector who rode away with a free new motorcycle may have been the biggest winner.

Mark Warren, who said he spent 30 years as a fire inspector for the Municipality of Anchorage, said he just took his usual morning ride on his Ural motorcycle to run some errands and go to lunch, not expecting to be grabbed by a Russian television crew for an interview that would quickly go viral in Russia and lead to the Russian government sending him a $22,000 gift.

Warren told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he had been on “the same routine for the past two weeks,” heading out on his Ural with a sleeping bag in the sidecar.

Ural was founded in the far reaches of western Siberia in 1941. It currently assembles its motorcycles in Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan and markets and distributes its machines in the United States through a team in Woodinville, Washington.

Warren, 55, already had one Ural. It was a second-hand model, which he bought from a neighbor.

Warren said keeping it running had been a challenge. He said it was difficult to find parts, and demand usually exceeded supply. When the Russians asked him about his experience riding the Ural, Warren told them as much.

“I just said that it was a cool machine, but I had trouble with it because it was a discontinued model and they no longer made parts for it,” Warren said. “You know, just your everyday normal kind of stuff.”

“That went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren added. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”

After his interview, Warren said, his life turned upside down. On Aug. 13, just two days before Trump and Putin were to meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson near Anchorage to discuss the war in Ukraine, Warren received a call from the Russian journalist who first interviewed him.

“They have decided to give you a bike,” Warren recalled the man telling him.

Warren at first thought it was a scam, the AP reported. “Free motorcycles don’t just appear,” he told the AP. “I thought that couldn’t be for real.”

After the summit, a three-hour encounter between Trump and Putin during which the American president left Alaska while the Russian leader stayed behind, Warren received another call. The bike was in Anchorage, he was told.

The next day, Warren and his wife went to a local hotel that was to be the meeting place. He went to the parking lot, where he said there were six men whom he assumed were Russian.

In the lot was the olive-green Ural Gear Up, also with a sidecar. It was new. It had rolled off the assembly line in Kazakhstan on Aug. 12. “I dropped my jaw,” Warren said. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”

Warren said the Russians asked him for little in return. He said they wanted to take a photo of him, interview him, and shoot some video of him on the motorcycle. He obliged. Two reporters and someone from the Russian consulate rode in the sidecar as Warren rode around the parking lot. A cameraman jogged alongside to capture the event.

Warren said he initially was apprehensive. “It was a little unnerving to get a gift from the Russian government,” he told the AP. “I have never gotten a present in my life from the Russian government, and I rasn’t sure what to expect.”

Warren told AP he was concerned he might “somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme.” He added, “I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me because I got a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want this for my family.”

Warren said all he signed was a document to claim ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. The document showed the Ural had been manufactured the day before, on Aug. 12.

“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” Warren told AP.

The bike, which has Russian-English instructions on how to use it, is valued at $22,000.