The Red Bulletin_0112_ZA

Jim Carrey / Marc Coma / Jon Free / Stefan Glowacz / Gonjasufi / Duane Lawrence / Kevin McCallum / RZA

a beyond the ordinary magazine

January 2012

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MOUNTAIN

hong kong high life On duty with the sky-scraping ‘spidermen’

the b-boys are back Backstage at Red Bull BC One

on the Roof Of Africa Chris Birch and the Enduro epic with nowhere to hide

Bullhorn

cover photography: Nick Muzik. photography: philipp horak

off-season’s greetings Not every day you get met at the airport by a legend. Choppered home by a world champ; invited into his house, shown around, then taken for a stroll in the Swiss Jura mountain foothills that open out from his garden gate. The champ in question is one Sébastien Loeb, the eight-time winner of the World Rally Championship for drivers and a sportsman who has come to dominate his field like no other. Think Michael Schumacher’s good, with his seven Formula One title wins and 91 Grand Prix victories from 286 starts?

Well Loeb’s haul of eight titles and 67 wins from 151 rally starts gives him a win:start ratio of 41.61 per cent over nine full WRC seasons. Schumacher’s hit rate over 17 full seasons is 31.81 per cent and, unlike Loeb, he won’t enter 2012 as sure-fire favourite to win another world title.

So it’s kinda cool that he found time for The Red Bulletin (“Le Bulletin Rouge” as he once affectionately referred to it) during a brief off-season pause, to share a slice of his life and a swathe of his thoughts on sport, rivalry, skill, speed, competition, love, laughter and – of course – winning.

Nice guy that he is (and he is a very nice guy) Séb Loeb – Super Sébastien Loeb pictured exclusively for The Red Bulletin near Séb to those who work with and his home in foothills of the Jura mountains in Switzerland. around him in the WRC – remains Read our interview with the motorsport legend on page 42 a ferocious competitor, one who’s aware that when the competitive fire is lit, he burns like no other. But aware, too, that the light will dim and that he doesn’t want to be around to face the day when someone else might tell him what he already knows: that he isn’t as quick as he used to be. That day appears still some way off, and we can relish the prospect of another season watching a true master.

There was talk last year that Loeb might have grown weary of the fight against younger rivals, but a word from Jean-Marc Gales, boss of Citroën, with whom Loeb has achieved all his World Rally success, allowed perspective to be regained: “Citroën without Sébastien Loeb,” Gales said, “would be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower.”

That’s about as ringing as endorsements get and certainly it was enough to convince Loeb to stick around for another season or two.

Maybe this time he’ll get caught. Though if history is our guide…

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THE WORLD OF RED BULL

CONTENTS

IN JANUARY

72 76

50 42

88 58

PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK MUZIK, JUERGEN SKARWAN, CHRIS BALDWIN, THOMAS BUTLER, DENIS KLERO, MARCEL LÄMMERHIRT/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, PHILIPP HORAK

Bullevard

Action

14 HERE IS THE NEWS 17 ME AND MY BODY Marie-France Roy, bone-breaking ’boarder

32 BAMBOO SCAFFOLDERS It’s a different kind of high life for the construction ‘monkeys’ of Hong Kong

18 DUANE LAWRENCE Using dance to force social change

42 LOEB: A LION IN WINTER An eight-time world champ, almost without rival. At home. Exclusively

20 KITBAG: SKATEBOARDS Decades roll, but boards keep on truckin’ 24 WHERE’S YOUR HEAD AT? Jim Carrey’s just differently wired up 26 MATT GILLMAN Trials biking’s tough. Imagine it blind 28 SCIENCE OF SPORT A dive deep into underwater competition 30 LUCKY NUMBERS: DOOMSDAY 2012: It’s the end of the world… Maybe

BODY+ MIND MORE

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50 RED BULL BC ONE MOSCOW The B-Boys are back in town and they’re not here to dance like Cossacks 58 STEPHEN REDMOND There’s cold, then there’s swimmingfor-long-periods-in-open-water cold 64 ROOF OF AFRICA The Lesotho epic that’ll break your spirit if it doesn’t break your bike first

Every month

72 THE TIN CAN GUITAR MAN Take a chair leg and a biscuit tin. Fashion with luthier skills. Create musical magic

06 KAINRATH’S CALENDAR 08 PICTURES OF THE MONTH 98 MIND’S EYE

76 BLADES OF GLORY Think ice hockey meets Rollerball then add speed. This is Red Bull Crashed Ice

84 TRAVEL: UP HELLY AA Viking heritage ablaze at this smokin’ Shetlands fire-fest 86 FOOD FOR FRIENDS A world-acclaimed chef and a dish from Romania 88 GET THE GEAR Stefan Glowacz’s cliff-face tent 90 PRO TIPS Biking the Dakar is way tough.

Better train hard…

92 WORLD’S BEST CLUBS Budapest’s ritziest night haunt 92 MUST LISTEN The experimental Gonjasufi 93 TAKE 5 The discs that spun the head of hip-hop pioneer RZA 94 WORLD IN ACTION A guide to all the top events around the world 96 SAVE THE DATE Ink these in your diary 05

illustration: dietmar kainrath

K a i n r at h

06

mau i , HaWai i

ALL’S SweLL

Pacific Ocean storms are welcomed by those who make use of the resultant big waves. The North Swells can take 10 days to travel the thousands of miles from Alaska to Samoa; halfway along, they hit Maui’s north coast and forge some of the best conditions found anywhere for board watersports. Bernie Hiss is a long way from his roots here, but he’s in the zone – he shaped his first surfboard aged 14, in his parents’ garage on the island of Fehmarn, in the Baltic Sea between Germany and Denmark. In the 30 years since then, Hiss has won windsurf championships and established a leading kite and kiteboard manufacturing firm. But better days than this? Few. Breeze it all in: www.prokitetour.com

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Photography: Thorsten Indra

Hai m i n g , au str ia

New New StoNe Age

PhotograPhy: reUters/domInIc ebenbIchler

The rock skier (in this case, Lukas Ebenbichler, cousin of the man behind the lens here, Dominic Ebenbichler) says goodbye to the surface on the underside of his skis, but there are advantages to his increasingly popular pastime – mainly that the lack of snow is no hindrance. You just head for the scree slopes and push off. Turns are harder when there’s no white stuff, and doing that thing at the end of your run where you turn sharply to shower your pals in whatever you’re standing on is absolutely forbidden.

Otherwise the rush and the challenge are the equal of regular skiing. Could this be the dominant mountain discipline in a climate-changed future? Hmm. See for yourself now by downloading the free Red Bulletin iPad App. www.redbulletin.com/ipad

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Most practitioners of slacklining string their not-tight ropes between two tree trunks, a few metres up, so that any falls are decidedly non-fatal.

Then there are people like Florian Ebner. The guy’s an artist on the slackline, and here he stretched his canvas between the south and south-west faces of the Laserzwand, in the Lienz Dolomites of East Tyrol. And when we say ‘canvas’, we mean flat nylon webbing, between one and two inches thick, the slackliner’s medium of choice, regardless of height (the thinner the width of a slackline, the more it sways). Ebner was about 300m up when he did this, but he’s also a dab hand much closer to Earth. Last year he became the first man to land a backflip on a slackline. www.elephant-slackline.com

HIgH LIFe

Li E n Z , au str ia

13 Photography: Martin Lugger

Bullevard Sport and culture on the quick

All on my own Best thing about Twitter?

You get to see how funny the funny people are without the help of the writer’s room RUSSELL BRAND (@rustyrockets) Followers: 3.61m and rising

Paying for sex is like making your cat dance on its back legs – you know it’s wrong, but you like to pretend they’re enjoying it as well.

JONAH HILL (@JonahHill) Followers: 860k and rising fast

I want to meet the man who saw a turtle and said, “People will LOVE the ninja version of that.”

CONAN O’BRIEN (@conanobrien) Followers: 4.5m and rising

Turns out, “Cowboys & Aliens” is NOT about Arizona’s immigration laws. www.twitter.com

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M-YOU-SIC A miniature music-making machine that comes one part short: it needs a human body British record label Mute, home to artists such as Nick Cave, Moby and Depeche Mode, is putting the means of music production in the hands of the people. The Mute Synth is the same size as a 1980s hand-held computer game: a fitting defunct-tech aesthetic to match the low-fi sounds it creates.

Sounds come when fingers and thumbs touch certain areas on the front and back of the copper circuit board. The conductivity in the body connected to those fingers and thumbs affects the resulting sound: the better the electricity flows through you, the sweeter the synthesiser tweets. Which makes things unpredictable, but all the more engaging. There are also tilt switches in two planes, so that the position of the Mute Synth also determines the noise it makes. If the Theremin, with its don’t-touch, handwaving method (see Good Vibrations) is the most hands-off of all electronic instruments, this is the most hands-on.

Bleep of faith: to play the Mute Synth, you have to feel it inside you

www.mute.com

PICTURES OF THE MONTH

EVERY SHOT ON TARGET

Taken a picture with a Red Bull flavour?

Send it to us via our website: www.redbulletin.com Every month we print a selection, and our favourite pic is awarded a limited-edition Sigg bottle. Tough, functional and well-suited to sports, it features The Red Bulletin logo.

Kowloon BMXer Daniel Dhers (centre) schools the rookies at Red Bull Under My Wing in Hong Kong.

Raf Sanchez

B U L L E VA R D

Bio picks

Oscar faves with real-life stories

ROCKER OF AGES At 64, Sammy Hagar shows no sign of slowing

Louis Vito: going for gold at the 2012 X Games

J. EDGAR Will Leonardo DiCaprio ‘Hoover’ up an Academy Award playing the very cross and crossdressing FBI legend?

WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: PA PHOTOS, GETTY IMAGES (2), CORBIS, GEORGE BENSON/DIRTY ELECTRONICS, NEIL ZLOZOWER, PAUL BACHMANN

Higher and higher and higher still Last year, Louis Vito tricked his way to the bronze medal in Superpipe – the really big halfpipe – at the Winter X Games in Aspen. But that just isn’t good enough.

“I want to reach the next level,” says the 23-year-old American, who has the chance to do just that at Winter X Games XVI, also in Aspen, from January 26-29.

With that goal in mind, he overhauled his nutrition and pre-season preparations.

He’s also switched focus and is now 100 per cent about the boarding. In 2009, he appeared on Dancing With The Stars on US television, which got him known by 22 million viewers, but as long as he wore dancing shoes, the snowboard boots stayed in his locker. The following year, he secured fifth place in the halfpipe at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and Vito has his mind set on upping levels again, at the next Games, in the Russian city of Sochi in 2014: “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t thinking about it already.” www.louievito.com

MONEYBALL As Best Actor, likely Leo foes include Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the baseball manager who outstatted the rest.

A hard-rock superstar who hit it big both solo and with Van Halen, Hagar is currently on tour in Europe with Chickenfoot, the supergroup he fronts with guitar legend Joe Satriani, Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Michael Anthony, former Van Halen bassist.

Excessive behaviour was an 1980s rocker’s must. What are after-parties like now?

Oh no, you’re not getting that!

I’m a married man! Seriously, I’m a lot more sensible now, even if I don’t always find it easy. My fans are 50 per cent female, at least. They come to shows with girlfriends. Their husbands stay home with the kids. They party their asses

off. They’re mature women, man, but more wild than the young groupies used to be.

How do you keep fit?

Two-hour shows are all I need to stay fit. Plus, I do extensive walking. Longer exercise is better than killing yourself for 30 minutes in the gym.

It’s like sex: you want to take your time, you don’t want to jump in and jump out.

What about those shows?

We take chances on stage, we do not play it safe for one minute. Maybe fans should come with a hard hat and goggles so they don’t get hurt. It’s a reckless show that we do. Our drummer beats his drum kit to death with his sticks at every gig. www.chickenfoot.us

THE IRON LADY How to guarantee a record 17th acting nomination: be Meryl Streep, play Margaret Thatcher.

Oscar noms, Jan 24: www.oscar.com

Fowl play, from left: Joe Satriani, Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar

WE HAVE A WINNER!

al-Khobar Motorsport, Saudi Arabian style at Red Bull Ras B Ras (‘head-to-head’).

Naim Chidiac

Johannesburg At Red Bull Beat Battle, Artistic Intelligence turn things upside down.

Tyrone Bradley

Santiago Red Bull Soap Box Race: more aerodynamic vehicles are also available.

Marcelo Maragni 15

b u l l e va r d

Behr (left) faces the music

Behr in mind

Shabba. Mr Desert Man He might have experienced the pressure-cooker situation of playing in the FIFA World Cup, but Bafana Bafana star Siphiwe ‘Shabba’ Tshabalala had never experienced anything like this. The Kaizer Shabba’s big test Chiefs midfielder joined Dakar Rally star Giniel de Villiers in Namibia for the testing of his new Toyota HiLux Dakar racer.

“Man it was scary, but what an experience,” says Shabba. “The roads were very bumpy, which was uncomfortable enough going in a straight line… but I couldn’t believe a car could corner on roads like that at the speed Giniel was going. The needle hit 150kph!” www.dakar.com

Porto Alegre Freerunner Ryan Doyle gets a heads-down in the Cayman Islands Marcelo Maragni

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Watching out for baboons is recommended

down at heels

The Hot Heels Africa is SA’s premier downhill skateboard comp and final event on the World Cup tour. Brazilian Douglas da Silva braved the asphalt and wildlife it’s not just the gradient that’ll catch you out. it’s the baboons, too. the infamous ‘Baboon Bend’ – so-named for the troop of primates that like to hang out there and generally disrupt proceedings – is just one element skateboarders have to take on as they navigate their way around the course down the Buffelsdam access road at the cape’s Kogelberg Biosphere reserve. now in it’s ninth year, hot heels africa is the season-ending round of the international gravity association world cup tour, and the event saw some of the planet’s best downhill skateboarders roll up to pringle Bay, cape town, to go head to head for points and prizes. with categories for luge and standup, the 1.9km course is tailor-made for speed and the inevitable spills that come with up-close-and-personal racing down a narrow course. winner of this year’s standup race was a rather modest Brazilian by the name of douglas ‘dalua’ da silva. “it was pure luck, man! Besides focusing on a really strong push-off at the start, strategy wasn’t much use,” he says. “i was second going into the first corner, but two guys, including canadian legend mischo erban passed me. i managed to get back to the front before the finish line, though. it was so close… i just had the luck on the day.” and fortunately for dalua, it was a welcome return to good fortune after some distinctly bad hot heels luck. in the 2010 heats, he fell and broke his kneecap – “three very long months of recovery” – and on arrival this year, he discovered his skateboard had been broken in transit. www.sagra.co.za

Porto Alegre

Brazilian rapper Marcelo D2 (right) enjoys a Red Bull Soundclash on home turf Marcelo Maragni

Moscow At a Red Bull Crashed Ice qualifier, obstacles are to be cirumvented, not limbo-ed Daniel Kolodin

words: steve smith. photography: dan wilton/red Bull content pool, craig KolesKy, sharon le grange

Emile Hoogenhout, aka ‘Behr’, is a young composer, musician and DJ who in November of last year spent two weeks as the South African representative at the 2011 Red Bull Music Academy, held in Madrid.

So what was his most inspirational moment there?

“Man… where do I begin,” he says. “I mean, the very first lecture we had was by Paul Riser. This was the guy who did all those great string arrangements for Motown Records back in the 1960s and ’70s. He’d seen it all and to see and hear from someone who’d been in the middle of all that music right from the beginning was just mind-blowing.” www.redbullmusicacademy.com

B U L L E VA R D

ME AND MY BODY

MARIE-FRANCE ROY The Québécois queen of snow is one of the world’s best boarders, but breaks, bruises and accidental backflips have made her journey to the top a painful one

OH, SNA P

I started boarding aged 11 and didn’t break a single bone until March 2010, which is lucky considering I’m now 27. I was being filmed in Whistler [where she lives, in British Columbia, Canada], and I saw a snow cornice I wanted to drop off.

But it was overhanging more than I thought, so I went much faster and got 45ft of air! I landed on hard ice and I was thinking, ‘If I land on my back, it’s going to break’.

So I landed on my feet but my head whipped back and hit the ice and I broke the C2 vertebra in my neck.

A lot of people don’t walk away from that, but I was lucky. A neck brace for seven weeks, and by December I was back hitting handrails.

IN NE R BE IN G

The mental side of coming back after an accident is definitely a challenge.

You have to follow your inst incts: sometimes you’ve got to tell yourself to stop being such a pussy and just go for it, but other tim es it’s too dangerous. Knowing the difference between the two is a big challenge.

ANY THI NG YOU CAN DO…

There are scars on my hips, from falling onto rails. It was my first time riding with [US snowboard legend] Tara Dakides. I tried to hop on the rail and slipped, sliding from the very top straight to the flat part on my hips. It hurt so bad I was bent double. Then 10 minutes later Tara broke her collarbone. Not a great day.

THE BENDS

WORDS: RUTH MORGAN. PHOTOGRAPHY: BLAKE JORGENSON

In 2005 I was riding with friends, going off a tiny little jump for fun, and I was riding away after landing when I caught an edge.

I put my right arm back to catch myself and it bent the wrong way – what the doctors call hyperextension. The pain was so bad I was puking and nearly passing out. It took a month in a sling to heal. I still have a lump sticking out of my elbow.

SCRE W LOO SE

At the X Games in Aspen in 2007, I didn’t notice a big screw sticking out of the course that ended up causing a huge gash under my board. When I went for a jump, the gash caught the snow and sent me sideways. I went into an accidental backflip off a 65ft jump, landed headfirst and bounced onto my back – but I was fine! I mean, I popped four ribs, which was painful, but in the air, I’d been thinking, ‘OK I might be paralysed after this’, so it seemed like a small price to pay.

LA CU ISI NE DE MA RI E-FRA NC E

Generally I try to eat a lot of vegetables, and buy organic and sustain able food, but I’m not psycho about it. I don’t want to be that person who ’s like, ‘Oh no, I can’t eat that!’ You’ll still see me eating poutine. It’s a clas sic FrenchCanadian meal of French fries with gravy and cheese. It’s fat, but a classic.

TRAINING, NATURALLY I’m probably at the gym less than any other snowboarder. I just can’t stand it.

I like to be outside. I spend the summer surfing every day, then in winter I go riding and I go on hikes. I was out snowshoeing just the other day. I just prefer keeping in shape in a natural outdoor environment.

twitter.com/mariefranceroy

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B U L LWA R

B-BOY ACTIVIST

DUANE LAWRENCE

The leader of renowned crew Ubuntu, this B-Boy lives and breathes hip-hop’s fundamental life philosophy

Name Duane Lawrence Born April 15, 1984, Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Town Hero “My father, Gregory.

He runs a community church in Mitchell’s Plain. He’s the most positive person I have ever met” Unleashing his music “I have two singles that are getting airplay at the moment – one on Ready D’s Good Hope FM show and one on Kfm. I’ll be releasing an album in February”

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“You weren’t born to be a preacher my son, but you were born to preach.” These are the prophetic words of Duane Lawrence’s father. Early on, Gregory Lawrence, an actual preacher, saw in his young son the ability to spread a different kind of gospel… that of hip-hop.

Growing up in the poor Cape Flats suburb of Mitchell’s Plain, Duane Lawrence had a decision to make: drugs and gangsterism, an option many of his peers had little choice but to adopt, or a more positive route upwards. So hip-hop, and more specifically B-Boying, became – to stick with the evangelical metaphor – his salvation and redemption.

“I remember seeing the Run DMC vs Jason Nevins It’s Like That video, which featured a B-Boy called Kujo,” says Lawrence. “He had this whack style and I was like, ‘Hey man, this is me! This is what I want to do.’ And I’ve been practising ever since.”

Fame and recognition came early for Lawrence.

It’s timing, though, made for another tough decision.

Near the end of his matric year came an invitation to take part in the Battle Of The Year in Germany.

Basically the world champs of B-Boying, this could

be his ticket. Time for more wise words from Lawrence senior: “I made you and I’ve given you all I could, but you have to make up your own mind now. You can make it all the way to the top or you can drop all the way to the bottom.”

Lawrence chose B-Boying and just weeks before he was due to write his final exams, he jetted off to Germany for the start of what would become a B-Boy career littered with titles, at first with legendary crew Black Noise and then, from 2004, with his own crew Ubuntu, recent finalists in the Red Bull Beat Battle held in Joburg (see redbull.co.za/beatbattle).

“Initially, for me, B-Boying was all about the skills, being the best, and getting the attention. But the more I travelled, the more I learned about the message and the foundation of hip-hop and B-Boy culture. Not everyone understands the five elements of hip-hop culture: MCing, DJing, B-Boying, graffiti, and knowledge of self hip-hop – knowing yourself and knowing the history of hip-hop. Watch hip-hop on TV these days and it’s all about the bling, the cars, and the ladies. That’s not what hip-hop was about when it started out. It was about positive upliftment.”

And that’s the reason that, alongside the classes he gives in Gugulethu, Delft, and Mitchell’s Plain, every Thursday, you’ll also find Lawrence in Westlake, a small community next to Cape Town’s notorious Pollsmoor prison. “I was given a gift to be the best, but also to spread the world of positivity and help uplift people in the kind of situation that I grew up in. When I go into communities to teach, I’m not only teaching them the physical skills of dance, but also

WORDS: STEVE SMITH. PHOTOGRAPHY: SUICIDE MONKEY (2), FLO HAGENA/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, ZANDY MANGOLD, JEROME HOUYVET BILDER:

Duane Lawrence (second left) and the Ubuntu crew use dance to make social change

B U L L E VA R D

how to use B-Boying to elevate everything else in life. As a top B-Boy you need to be original, to create new moves, and be the best. In life it’s the same – you need to aspire to more than just the norm.”

Unfortunately, for all the good that Lawrence is trying to do, getting people to support him has proved tough. It seems not everyone in the hip-hop community aspires to the culture’s underpinning philosophy…

“Quite often in this industry we don’t support each other. We bring each other down. It’s ‘crayfish mentality’. If one crayfish tries to climb up out the bucket, the others climb on top of it… and then everyone falls down. Even people I looked up to and respected are not opening doors for me. I don’t know if they’re jealous or afraid of change. People don’t understand what I do. They think I just want to be big and flashy winning battles with my crew, but they don’t realise that I have to be that… I have to be the best for the kids to look up to me and listen to me.”

One organisation that has been listening to Lawrence is The Ackerman Foundation, and it has been lending a hand and funding his work in Westlake.

“You can’t reach everyone, but I can spot the ones who have potential and who want to listen. I try and teach them that once they can be the best B-Boy, there are opportunities beyond maybe working on the taxis.

I tell them, ‘Listen, if there’s no money for education and you love dancing, let’s push through all of this and make it to the top.’ I can open doors for them.” wwww.ubuntubboys.com

HARD & FAST

Top performers and winning ways from around the globe

In Düsseldorf, Team Germany – Sebastian Vettel and Michael Schumacher – won the Nations Cup at the F1 v rally v NASCAR v touring cars drivers’ Race of Champions.

South Africa’s Ryan Sandes won the 155-mile, six-stage RacingThePlanet: Nepal ultramarathon in 25h 15m 25s, over 2h ahead of second.

“I was given a gift to be the best, but also to spread the word of positivity and help uplift people in the kind of situation that I grew up in”

Singapore has its first-eve r wakeboarding gold medal thanks to Sasha Christian’s victory at the SEA Games in Indonesia. Her brother Matthew won men’s bronze .

Reaching out: “I can spot the ones who have potential and who want to listen,” says Lawrence

BILDER:

The Professional Windsurfers Association crowned Alice Arutkin of France as 2011 world youth champion in the Women’s Wave U20 category. “I am very honoured,” she said.

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B U L L E VA R D

KIT EVOLUTION

ON DECKS

THE LONG RIDER SIMS TAPERKICK, 1976 It was in California more than 35 years ago that skateboard world champ and future founding father of snowboarding Tom Sims developed the Taperkick. The 915 x 197mm longboard with single kick tail was built to surf sidewalks, mimicking the guys down at 20

the beach on the water. The deck is a three-ply composite construction of an oak plank and two laminated hardwood veneers. The Sims Pure Juice wheels are made of polyurethane (which replaced cumbersome clay wheels in the early 1970s)

accommodated by wells in the board; the ACS 580 trucks are aluminium alloy with a 147mm axel. Retailing for US$100, the Taperkick was a top-end deck skaters either treasured or desired (and thanks to replicas like this one, they still do.) www.simsnow.com

WORDS: ANDREAS ROTTENSCHLAGER

They don’t look so different at first glance, but 35 years of skateboard smarts have led from one skater’s dream ride to another, with significant changes along the way.

PHOTOGRAPHY: THEO COOK, KURT KEINRATH

NOW BOARDING PLAN B RYAN SHECKLER PUBLIC, 2011 California is still the home of skateboard innovation. Plan B Skateboards, in Vista, makes decks and sponsors an A-list team of skaters including Cali local Ryan Sheckler.

It’s flexible, with kick tails at both ends for street skating tricks. At 206mm across, it’s

wider than the Taperkick – greater stability is needed to land the big aerial tricks of vert skating (hence 200mm axles). The deck is a seven-ply Canadian maple construction: its three slim core plys bonded with militarystrength glue keep it strong and light. The

similarly light and strong Superthane wheels are 22 per cent smaller than those on the old board – no wheel wells required.

Thanks mainly to the lower materials cost, this is 85 per cent cheaper than the Taperkick. planbskateboards.com 21

SKINNY

KINGJAMES 22491

THE UNIFORM OF PROGRESS

b u l l e va r d

where’s your head at?

Jim Carrey

There might be a teeny tiny wrinkle on that rubber face as he turns 50 this month, but his career – comedy and the serious stuff – sails smoothly on

Can adi an Ma kin ’

Be Se ri ou s

There is knockabout Jim Carrey, and there is the serious Jim Car rey, star of Eternal Sunshine of The Spo tless Mind and The Truman Sho w: movies loved by people who ’d tell you, “but I don’t like Jim Car rey”.

Making ‘straight’ film Man On The Moon, Carrey stayed in cha racter at all times, to the chagrin of cas t and crew, apart from weekends with his daughter.

James Eugene Carrey was born in .

Newmarket, Ontario, on January 17, 1962 rent appa me beca ns essio His gift for impr at a young age, and, encouraged by his father, Percy, who had enjoyed stage time in a jazz band, little Jimmy Carrey made his comedy debut at Yuk Yuk’s Komedy Kabaret in Toronto, aged 14. By the time he was 19, he was the headline act.

Hea d Spi n

Go West. Like, Really West

Carrey, like many comic entertainers, has the light sidedark side thing going on. “I can get too intense. I’m a circular thinker,” he told The New Yorker. “I get on the carousel of thought and break things down about a thousand times…

I think I’m moving to the centre, though, in my life.” Peek inside his mind at his candid video blog, Jim Carrey TruLife.

Carrey moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and began appearing at the legendary Comedy Store. Rodney Dangerfield caught his act, and signed him to open for Dangerfield’s show in Vegas. The two became friends and later toured together for two years, sharing, Carrey remembered, “a lot of laughs, and a lot of bad airplane meals”. Carrey was one of the pallbearers at Dangerfield’s funeral in 2004.

Who’s The Grandaddy?

Next Ventu re: Ace

Six weeks after he turned 48, Jim Carrey announced on Twitter that he had become a grandfather, to little Jackson Riley Santana. Carrey’s daughter Jane was born in 1987, during his fist marriage. He was later married to Lauren Holly, who played his love interest in Dumb And Dumber, and went out with Jenny McCarthy for four-and-a-half years. And Renée Zellweger for a bit before her.

Twe et Sme ll Of Succ ess

Eter nal Optimist of the Dre ami ng Kind

Carrey starred in the 1984 sitcom The Duck Factory, as a cartoonist at a run-down animation company.

(YouTube reveals the pilot episode’s first joke to be a good one. Not so much after that.) It lasted half a season and later, still doing late-night stand-up and TV movies and dreaming of success, he wrote a cheque to himself, payable Thanksgiving 1995, for US$10m.

A pretty good prediction.

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“Somebody Stop Me!” In 1994, three Carrey films were released. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb And Dumber were global hits, followed the next year by a Ventura sequel and Batman Forever. In 1996, he was paid US$20m to star in The Cable Guy. Pre Ace: crew on TV sketch show In Living Color. Two years on: Hollywood’s highest-paid actor.

Who’s the biggest movie star on Twitter? Ashton Kutcher does TV. Justin Timberlake is an actor slash musician. Charlie Sheen is Charlie Sheen. Counting followers as a measure of Twitter success – there is no other way – then Carrey is Twitter’s leading leading man, with just over five million. That puts him 34th overall; Lady Gaga rules with 16 million. Carrey only follows one Twitter page: his daughter’s band’s. www.jimcarreytrulife.com

Words: Paul Wilson. Illustration: Lie-Ins and Tigers

“Boom: it’s Steve Carrell and Jim Carrey as two warring magicians, and the girl who comes between them is the hot stuff from Tron: Legacy.” That, students of the Hollywood machine, is known as a ‘killer pitch’, and somebody will make a lot of money when the film from this idea, Burt Wonderstone, is released in 2013.

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b u l l e va r d

The vision guy

Matt GilMan

Trials biking is one of cycling’s toughest disciplines, yet one man rides hard despite being blind. Fellow rider, Tom Öhler, holds him in the highest regard Name Matt Gilman Date of birth April 28, 1980 Riding trials bikes since 2002 Endurance tests 22 operations on his eyes in two years YouTube Search for “blind bike trials” Bike Inspired

Matt Gilman is 31, lives in baltimore, Maryland, and, just like i do, he rides trials bikes. Matt is established on the scene; you’ll find photos and videos of him on all the relevant trial web forums. but what sets him apart from other trials riders is that he only has about 30 per cent vision and is legally blind.

What you notice first and foremost about Matt is his joie de vivre and the unusually open and positive way in which he deals with his lot. He lost most of his sight at the age of 24 because of diabetes.

Matt, who had been an enthusiastic bMX and trials bike rider until then, fell into a deep depression.

His passion for the sport helped him out of it.

Matt had to train hard to be able to ride trials bikes again. The extraordinary perseverance he had to muster to relearn the basics impressed me enormously. i really can’t imagine trying to do trials biking without being able to see. even if Matt can’t perform at the same level as the top riders, he rides in open country, always accompanied by a friend to make up a well-honed team. Matt has some residual vision: he can perceive light and dark, and outlines at high contrast, but

he cannot visually perceive distance, heights or uneven surfaces and must therefore count on his companion’s experience and direction.

One of the most important aspects of trials biking – aside from balance and mental strength – is judging distances. Without knowing distances, you would constantly crash into things or jump too far. Matt has to get to know distances on foot and feel them physically. research is important here. He can’t just approach an obstacle like other trials riders and go for it; he has to recce the area in great detail first and then commit it precisely to memory before he goes out and attempts it.

An important part of training for us trials riders is being able to fall well. if things get hairy, we jump off the bike in a controlled manner, which helps us avoid a lot of bad falls and injuries. When you jump off your bike, sight obviously plays an important role: you look for somewhere to land safely on both feet. Matt completely lacks that visual check. When i asked him how he falls, he said, soberly: “When i crash, i crash hard!”

Matt’s slogan is, “Vision is more than sight,” a point he always makes demonstrably at his trials bike shows. He also wants to give others courage not to give up on their dreams, even if there is a lot standing in their way. When Matt Gilman says, “You can achieve anything if you want it bad enough,” it rings very true.

Tom Öhler is a former world trials champion. www.blindbiketrials.com

WOrds: THOMAs ÖHler. PHOTOGrAPHY: Aki lAcOunT, TOMMY bAuse

Tom Öhler, 28, won the FIM Trial World Championship in 2008

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Dive master: Record-breaking freediver Herbert Nitsch knows how to avoid the bends

b u l l e va r d

winning formula

depth charge

It is said that freedivers don’t get the bends. The world’s best says his one-breath brethren are as susceptible as anyone who goes deep. Our scientist explains why

photography: mauritius. illustration: mandy fischer

The diver “some believe it’s not possible to get the bends as a freediver,” says austrian freediver herbert nitsch, 41, whose world record dive of 214m in 2007 earned him the soubriquet the deepest man on earth. “But that’s completely untrue. there’s no perfect formula to staying safe, it depends on the dive’s depth and length, if you’ve done other dives that day, your fitness and hydration. going to 200m can be safe and going to 20m can be unsafe. “on the way back up from a deep dive i decrease my speed, and make a stop of one minute at a depth of 10m. then, after i’ve reached the surface, i go back down with a supply of 100 per cent oxygen. this helps remove potentially harmful nitrogen from the system. freediving is safe when you know what you’re doing.”

The docTor “consider for a moment a bottle of sparkling water or fizzy drink,” says dr martin apolin of the institute of physics in Vienna. “Why, when you open it, does the liquid inside effervesce? understanding this helps us to understand how a freediver stays safe on his return to the surface. “as he descends deeper, the pressure experienced by the freediver increases. the dependence of pressure, P, from the depth of water is described by pascal’s law: P = x g x h – where is the water density, g is the acceleration due to gravity and h stands for the depth of water. Water density is a constant, as is g. thus, the pressure of water is proportional to its depth. total pressure under water is the sum of air pressure – given as one atmosphere, 1atm – and water pressure. the latter increases by 1atm per 10m of depth. “now consider henry’s law: the amount of gas that dissolves in a liquid is dependent on its pressure above the liquid. the higher the pressure, the more gas is dissolved. in our sealed bottle of fizz, there is more pressure than normal, or overpressure, and so carbon dioxide dissolves in the liquid.

When the bottle is opened the pressure decreases and a portion of the previously dissolved co2 in the water escapes. “diving in deep water, more gasses dissolve in body tissues. if the diver returns to the surface too quickly from too great a depth, it’s like opening the bottle: dissolved gas escapes, most often as tiny bubbles of nitrogen in the blood, and can result in decompression sickness, more commonly known as the bends. symptoms of the bends include pain, nausea and seizures, and in extreme cases, strokes, paralysis and death. “divers using tanks are more likely to get the bends than freedivers, because they are taking in more gaseous nitrogen with each breath. (helium and hydrogen, found in some mixtures of breathing gas used in dicing cylinders, can also cause problems in rare instances.) But all divers are susceptible and all divers, whether on one breath or two tanks, carefully monitor rates of ascent, dive durations and depths to counter potential problems.” www.herbertnitsch.com

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B U L L E VA R D

LUCKY NUMBERS

APOCALYPSE: NOW?

Solar storms, colliding planets, alien invasions. The mystics are still debating exactly what will happen in 2012, yet there’s one thing they all agree on: that the world will definitely end this year

The Mayan people of what is now Central and South America used three calendars, one of which, the Long Count, began in year 3114 BC and ends 5125 years later on December 21, 2012. Some think this signifies the end of the world, but others suggest that for the Maya, this date is what Millennium Eve was for us – a numerically interesting end of an era and nothing more.

The Maya actually looked way beyond this date; inscriptions on the tomb of Mayan ruler Pacal the Great point to his reincarnation in 4772 AD.

3,600

Prophets of the apocalypse, led by alien contactee Nancy Lieder, believe that a planet – as yet undiscovered by science – is on an irregular course around the sun, lasting 3,600 years. According to their calculations, 2012 is the year this Planet X will collide with the Earth and destroy all life upon it. “These claims are not based on any fact,” NASA states. If a planet really was on a collision course with Earth, we’d see it coming. A dwarf planet by the name of Eris is on an unusual orbit, but it is unlikely to pass within 6.4 billion kilometres of Earth.

445,000 US author Zecharia Sitchin believed the planet Nibiru, out way past Neptune, was home to a race of Extraterrestrial life forms who came to Earth in search of minerals and especially gold 445,000 years before the Christian era. As extracting the gold was too arduous, they put apes to work for them and crossed the apes’ DNA with theirs in the process. The result was Homo sapiens. Sitchin – who felt that the Anunnaki gods documented on Bronze Age clay tablets were actually the race of Nibiruians – died in 2010, two years before his predicted collision of Earth and Nibiru.

11

The sunspot cycle – intense bursts of solar activity – reaches its apogee every 11 years, with the next due in 2012. Some astrometeorologists expect a “solar tsunami” that will devastate Earth. A 2006 NASA study said, “the next cycle will be 30 to 50 per cent stronger than the last”.

Electricity supplies could fail and our atmosphere could heat up and throw all satellites off course.

However, an updated report says the next solar storm will be in 2013 and of below-average intensity. The astrometeorologists are sticking with their global catastrophe thing.

340,000,000 But it’s not all doom and gloom! For December 31 this year, the Mayans also foresaw an aligning of all the planets in our solar system, and the sun, along the equator of the Milky Way. Such a set-up would open up a gateway to Heaven: not the end of humanity, but the beginning of our next journey. Astronomers, with their maths and their measurements and their absolutes, tell us that alignments like this only happen once every 340 million years, with perfect alignment occurring only every 180 trillion years. However, they aren’t saying if the heavenly pathway comes too. www.endoftheworld2012.net

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WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: PICTUREDESK.COM (4), LAIF

5125

250,000

Nancy Lieder also warns of worldwide doom in 2012 that will be caused by polar shifting.

(Before or after the planets collide, Nance?)

Aliens from the star Zeta Reticuli told her as much telepathically, reporting everything from impending floods to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

The pole shift hypothesis suggests that the north and south poles switch every 250,000 years. In 2001, evidence of ‘true polar wander’, a rotational phenomenon due to the Earth not being a perfect sphere, said the poles had shifted just five degrees in the last 130 million years.

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Action

Spidermen Displaying gravity-defying skills as they construct web-like support structures made of bamboo around the towers of Hong Kong – no it’s not something from a comic book, but the local ‘spiders’ doing their scaffolding day jobs Words: Jeremy Torr Photography: Palani Mohan

32

Action

t 250m above ground in Hong Kong, you’re so high you can see beyond the city limits.

You can see past the neighbouring islands and across to mainland China. But even at that height, if you glance sideways you might see a young man with one leg hooked around a swaying bamboo pole, doing his job. He’s building a bamboo scaffold with his bare hands.

Still swaying, he reaches down to grip the end of a long bamboo pole, passed up by another scaffolder.

He swings it elegantly and accurately into place, balancing its weight against gravity. He sets it at 45 degrees to the upright and, without stopping, reaches down to his waist-belt and pulls out a 2m length of thin plastic banding. With the pole held fast in position against his upright, he spins the banding round and round the two bamboo lengths, tying them tightly together. His pole stops swaying – and another piece in the bamboo scaffold jigsaw is safely in place. He edges a metre sideways to the next tie point, concentrating hard. He is Yu On, a taap pang (Cantonese for bamboo scaffolder).

“Every scaffold we build is different,” says On, a muscular, crew-cut veteran of the taap pang who weave together one of Hong Kong’s most recognisable features. “It has to fit the site we’re working on.”

Tied noT died

On, who has been in the trade for decades, now works as a team manager looking after gangs of scaffolders who work on a contract basis. He doesn’t get up into the elegant, delicate bamboo structures as much as he used to, but he hasn’t forgotten how it’s done.

“The important thing is being able to build straight and strong even with curved poles – and do it fast,” he says. And build they do. Bamboo scaffolding isn’t just used for small jobs. It’s used for massive projects like the multi-million-dollar Chatham Gate development in Kowloon. That’s a two-year job. Elsewhere it hangs over the tiniest of back streets, clinging to walls and buildings, cantilevering out of windows and stairways, giving access to an army of workers reconditioning, upgrading and demolishing existing buildings.

According to Dr Francis So, the only man in Hong Kong with a doctorate in scaffolding technology, using the right bamboo is an art as well as a skill.

“The best bamboo grows halfway between the river and the hill,” he explains. “Hill bamboo is stiff, but can have kinks in it and too many knuckles or knots.

Riverbank bamboo is long and much straighter – but can be too flexible.” Of the thousands of species of bamboo that grow in the wild, only two are used, and mostly grown in China’s Guangxi province.

The two species are Mao Jue for the big verticals and diagonals, and Kao Jue for horizontal struts.

The exact dimensions between joints and poles are usually planned out in advance by construction engineers to a standard set of guidelines, but sometimes the site or the building shape demand onthe-spot design. This makes bamboo scaffolding an unusual mix of tradition, art and skill. And friction.

“The workers use the plastic ties,” explains Dr So, “and they wrap them round a joint six times, really tight. Then they twist the ends of the tie around each 34

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building on TradiTion

“Parts of the Great Wall of China would most likely have been built with bamboo scaffold, and the traditions they had back then have been passed down to us today,” says Dr Francis So, chairman of bamboo scaffolding contractor, WLS Holdings. The complex support structures around the buildings of Hong Kong are still made of bamboo – though now the process of building them is orchestrated by construction engineers to a rigid set of guidelines.

Scaffolders like this one (left) are highly skilled, yet despite earning bonuses for working through typhoons, their relatively low wages do not afford them the luxury of living in the buildings they help build and maintain.

Below: the bamboo is usually shipped in from China’s Guangxi province.

Different types are used in scaffolding – Mao Jue for the big verticals and diagonals, and Kao Jue for the horizontal struts.

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36

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very green recycling

A new approach to making bamboo scaffold even greener is being developed by Dr Francis So’s ‘Blue Ocean’ research.

“At the moment we just dump the old scaffold,” he explains. “If it has been up for a year or so it might have dried and become brittle, or developed some fungus inside, which weakens it.”

The bamboo will eventually rot away and doesn’t leach out any kind of hazardous substances, unlike metal scaffold poles – but even so it’s a waste, and the companies have to pay for its disposal.

As a result, Dr So’s company is looking at ways to recycle the used bamboo into paper, textiles and even charcoal for barbecues. “We are hoping this will both solve our disposal problem and make bamboo scaffolding even greener than it already is,” he says.

Bamboo poles are attached to each other in a complex grid (left) using layers of plastic ties (below) to create the scaffolding of Hong Kong.

37

Action

danger? WhaT danger? It’s not dangerous – as long as you take care, says Sunny Yau, senior manager at bamboo scaffolding contractor WLS. It’s more a case of taking the right precautions, so if something happens you have a back-up plan. Like wearing a helmet, always strapping on a harness (and snapping it to something solid). And never, ever taking safety for granted. “The problem sometimes comes when you get a scaffolder who 38

Action

has been doing it for a while and thinks they know everything,” he says. “That’s when workers start to take short cuts, putting themselves at risk.” The safety record for scaffolders is generally good and notably better than that of Hong Kong building workers in general. Most accidents happen during dismantling, when the delicate web of tension and compression forces is sprung apart by men with knives – while they are still standing on poles.

39

Action

uP Where They belong

Known locally as ‘spiders’, Hong Kong’s bamboo scaffolders are a common sight high above the streets of the city.

They are a tight-knit group who go out together at weekends to drink and bet on horses. But with long hours, scary conditions and no job security, only 30-50 new trainees sign up to do the job each year.

40

Action

other and tuck the twist into the gap between the poles.” So that’s it? No mechanical fastenings, no screws or clamps, no spring-loaded tensioners – no knots, even? Up to several hundred metres above ground? “That’s right,” says Dr So. “These huge lattice structures are all held together by friction.”

Its supporters say bamboo scaffolding is more flexible, safer to work on, more resilient and simpler to erect than metal. One thing’s for sure – bamboo is light, so even smaller scaffolders can scramble into position with a 5kg, 7m pole slung across a shoulder.

The list goes on: it’s cheap, biodegradable and if you want some more you just grow it.

Bamboo, clearly, is great stuff, but making those wonderful airy structures that creep around the highest buildings across Hong Kong’s neon-splashed precincts and islands takes more than just a great raw material. It takes an experienced bamboo spiderman who can work all day long in difficult and extremely scary conditions, year round, on a contract basis with no job security. It’s enough to make you wonder if it’s worth it. According to Yu On, the answer is no.

no Job for young Men

“I have three sons. They all followed me into taap pang, but eventually they all gave it up,” says On. They have gone into other construction work, easier jobs. He says scaffolding is very tough, and the pay isn’t that good either. He’s right – a good scaffolder will typically earn only about $HK1,400 (R1,500) a day. “The pay rates do go up if there’s a typhoon, when it gets more dangerous,” he says matter-offactly. “Then you can get double or triple that.” So a good scaffolder can keep himself and his family in food and under a roof, but won’t be buying into any of those apartments he is helping build or maintain.

There are other consolations. Because the scaffolders are a small, tight-knit group, kind of the edge-dwellers of the construction industry (“some people look down on scaffolders, usually the people who don’t want to study come and work on the bamboo,” says Sunny Yau, senior project manager at scaffold contractor WLS), they go out together at the weekend, drink beer, bet on horses and play cards. It’s a man’s life – but where are the women?

“There used to be a couple; they managed OK because the poles weren’t so heavy, but they didn’t stay,” admits On with a shrug. But women do feature.

One scaffolder says the rugged, dangerous, muscular image worked to his advantage when scaffolding overseas. “It was great! While I was there I hooked up with several different women,” he laughs.

Nonetheless, with a sign-up rate of only around 30-50 new trainees a year thanks to the dangerous image and poor work conditions, the number of certificated bamboo scaffolders is dropping – even though demand is rising. The main reason for that is price, as a bamboo structure costs 30 per cent less than a metal one, so its unlikely to die any time soon.

It’s also much easier to manhandle in tight situations – like fixing and cleaning the thousands of neon signs that litter the streets of Hong Kong.

Even better, it needs only two components: poles and ties. “The big difference is it takes skill to put

bamboo scaffolding up safely,” says Yau. “It takes longer, several years, to learn how to do it properly.”

No two bamboo poles are the same, which doesn’t make it any easier. They can vary in diameter and length, and the quality has to be just right – not too green, not too dry. A good taap pang worker can select the best poles and rig 100m2 in one day.

That’s about 70-80 poles selected, hoisted, positioned and tied. A big construction job could use a total of 20,000m2 of scaffold. That’s 16,000 individual lengths of bamboo that have to be tied into place by a bunch of guys that work six days a week, every week of the year. No wonder they’re fit.

There are accidents. Dr So’s brother was hit by a dropped pole. Luckily, he was wearing a helmet, so the pole glanced off and only gouged a massive chunk out of his leg. The taap pang know the dangers and live with them. Hong Kong has typhoons every year between April and October, and although the high winds don’t usually blow workers off the scaffold, they often smash part of the structure.

“That’s when climbing up partly wrecked scaffolds to dismantle or repair them can be really dangerous,” says Yau. It’s not a job for the faint of heart.

neW ciTy, old TradiTions

Because the job has its roots in thousands of years of tradition (it goes back at least 1,500 years), bamboo scaffolders have their share of ceremonies and superstitions. “Parts of the Great Wall of China would most likely have been built with bamboo scaffold,” says Dr So, “and the traditions they had back then have been passed down to us today.”

Taap pang respect three main Old Masters, or Elders. These are Luo Pan, the Master of the Nets, and Wa Quong. All are venerated and respected in ceremonies on their dedicated lunar calendar days, when processions and offerings, ceremonies and incense take the place of a normal workday. There are deeper beliefs, too. “To keep bad spirits and ghosts at bay, scaffolders used to hang bamboo peelings around their waist,” says Dr So. They also used to hang bamboo loops on the scaffold at night to keep it safe from harm; some still do.

“There aren’t many of the old traditions still going today, though” says Dr So. Curiously, then, there are still hundreds of tiny tinplate altars with smoking joss sticks and food offerings at the base of construction sites across the island.

Meanwhile, back at the 80th storey, the construction work goes on. Don’t think about the tiniest mistake being the last one. No matter, it gets so hot you dehydrate in minutes, or get lashed by tropical rainstorms and drained by 99 per cent humidity. Being a taap pang isn’t about nice working conditions and a top-tier salary. It’s about the skill, the agility and the feel for a craft that has survived for thousands of years. It’s about building something nobody else in the world can.

And what about not looking down from those gut-wrenching heights, so you don’t get scared?

“That’s rubbish,” says Yu. “If you get scared looking down then you’re in the wrong job.”

Watch the ‘spiders’ in action on www.youtube.com

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Action

At home in Switzerland within sight of Mont Blanc, Sébastian Loeb reflects on nearly a decade of seamless success in the World Rally Championship.

Since 2004 he has painted the record books gold, winning an unprecedented eight straight world titles

‘Greatest Of All Time’ was how Muhammad Ali came to be described, and it’s an accolade that could equally well apply to Sébastian Loeb.

With eight consecutive world titles (2004-11) and 67 rally wins, his stats simply crush those of his peers and past ‘best ever’ contenders. He is – no hyperbole – a living legend and The Red Bulletin visited him at home to talk wheels, winning and world domination

Words: Christophe Couvrat Photography: Philipp Horak

G.O.A 42

.T?

S Action

cratch watches over his protégé.

He never leaves his side.

Sébastien Loeb’s mascot is displayed proudly on the rear of his helicopter and adorns most of the Frenchman’s helmets. It gives clues about the personality of this remarkable eight-time World Rally Champion.

Scratch, an Alsatian, is a good host, too. He takes us for a walk near his home, a couple of hundred metres up into the Swiss foothills of the Jura mountains. “You see over there? That’s Mont Blanc,” says the man usually reckoned to be the sports darling of France, alongside Sébastien Chabal and Yannick Noah.

Today, there are clouds either side of Lake Geneva, but they can’t prevent the 4,807m of Europe’s highest peak from soaring over the horizon.

Loeb is affable and all smiles when we meet in the heart of Switzerland’s Vaud canton, just a couple of weeks after his latest world rally title conquest. No doubt he’s relishing this downtime at the hillside home he shares with his wife, Séverine, and daughter Valentine, during the brief off-season lull in the sport he continues to dominate so consummately. He suggests a coffee. Then another. And soon he’s away, talking informally and with no holds barred.

44

The Red BulleTin : Sébastien, can you remember all 67 of your WRC wins?

SéBaSTien loeB: [Surprised] No. That’s terrible!

OK, well where have you had the most wins then?

[Without hesitation] Germany. [He’s won there eight times.]

The Monte Carlo Rally, which has been off the WRC calendar since 2008, gets the 2012 season under way in a few days’ time [January 17-22]. Almost like being at home…?

It’s really a rally for my co-driver, Daniel [Elena]. That’s where he’s from. It’s a shame the Monte was dropped for a couple of years. There was a desire from the sport’s organisers for a new schedule, which would keep some races but not others. They must have forgotten you need to keep a solid base, because the ‘Monte Carlo’ was removed at the same time as the Tour de Corse. But it’s good that it’s coming back. It’s run in France, so it’s special for us.

How many times have you won it?

I don’t remember…

Five, actually. It also has the famous Col de Turini stage.

Séb Loeb in family mode: a rare glimpse of one of the world's great sportsmen, getting some downtime at the Jura mountain home he shares with his wife and daughter

" my first job was in a factory, making plastic supports for baths and sinks"

aDDITIoNal phoToGRaphy: GEpa pICTuRES

2011 Daniel used to be a spectator on the Monte Carlo course when he was younger.

I didn’t even know what it was back then.

Did you ever go to rallies when you were a kid?

I once went to the Vosges Rally, I think.

My father took me there. Maybe when I was about 10. after that, I didn’t go to another one until I was competing.

Which drivers impressed you back in those days?

The problem is, I didn’t even know what rallying was back then! So I was never a fan of anyone’s. It wasn’t till I was almost 18 that I started watching rallies on TV with my mates. We used to say: ‘It’s amazing what those guys can do with their cars.’ But no more than that.

What was your first job?

I was a pE teacher, like my dad. he was a gym trainer at a club and then a Departmental Technical advisor before going to work in a school. I could see myself following in his footsteps. I wasn’t really into studying. and I knew that I might like it.

And what was your dream job?

To be a fighter pilot! But I screwed up.

I was told: ‘you have to do further maths

and special maths’. But some people managed to get there without doing all that. I got on board a Rafale [jet fighter] one day and I spoke to the pilot about it. he told me how he’d got to where he was, and it was nothing like what I’d been told. Sure, his studies were slightly technical, but nothing out of the ordinary. and of course, you’d be doing something that interests you.

So what was your precocious first contact with cars?

It started with my neighbour. he used to push me around the back garden in my car. I didn’t touch the pedals. I used to go backwards and forwards… My father used to take out me out driving in the fields. Sometimes I used to nick the car and take it for a spin. I had to be the fastest in moped races too.

What type of school kid were you?

I didn’t get my baccalaureate as I left school early. I got 20/20 in maths in the National Diploma without ever working.

That was fine by me, getting good marks without doing anything. later on I had to work a bit. I wanted a sports car and my parents insisted I work during the holidays. My first job was in a factory,

citroën ds3

This is the Citroën DS3 in which Loeb last year won his eighth consecutive World Rally title. It was a tough season, but eight wins sealed the deal ahead of Mikko Hirvonen and Seb Ogier

making polyurethane supports for washbasins and baths. Eventually, I’d earned a bit of cash and I said to myself: ‘If I carry on working, I’m going to buy myself the car.’ I carried on and never went back to school. But pretty soon I’d had enough of that kind of job, so I did a year of electrical engineering vocational studies. I finished that, then went from one job to the next until I started rallydriving. For the first two years, I was still doing both.

So, tell us, what was that hankeredafter first car? a Renault Super 5 GT Turbo.

Maybe you were destined to be a fast driver. Your parents are a maths and a PE teacher, which would explain why you have such quick analytical and reactive skills...

That’s a good point – and I’ve never actually considered that. My dad, yes, he was the French university gymnastics 45

Action

1997

peugeot 106 Pocket rocket: this is Loeb cutting his teeth in a Peugeot 106 Rallye. Aged 23, he was already two seasons into his rally career and showing talent

2000

toyota corolla All Loeb’s notable successes have been in French machinery, but his first taste of a true WRC car was at the wheel of a Toyota Corolla WRC, in 2000 Wife Séverine and daughter Valentine give hubby/dad some ‘Apple’ time. Wonder if Séb’s checking his WRC stats to make sure he’s still top of the pile?

2006

pescarolo-judd Séb was one of a three-man team that finished a notable second at the Le Mans 24-Hour race, his rare talent proving adaptable to circuit racing

" you have to be in control of your body, to have balance. to drive fast your car and body must be as one. it must be natural, like walking" No shortage of silverware in the trophy room of a driver who could easily be reckoned the best ever

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Driver Digits

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French World Champions pre-Loeb: Didier Auriol in 1994

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Citroën models he’s driven to eight titles: Xsara WRC (2004-'06 titles, 28 wins); C4 WRC ('07-'10 titles, 34 wins); DS3 WRC ('11 title, 8 wins)

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WRC titles won

by Loeb’s closest rivals, Finns Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Mäkinen

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The most times he’s won the same event (WRC Rally Germany)

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Advertising contracts

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Rallies Loeb has won at least once

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aDDITIoNal phoToGRaphy: DppI, MCKlEIN, GETTy IMaGES

WRC wins [ongoing record]

champion. I used to spend time in gyms from an early age, and I would accompany him when he was a trainer, too. It’s so important to be in control of your body, to have balance. and in order to drive fast, your car and body have to become one. It’s all got to be natural. like when you’re walking. I don’t think about driving. Ever. you’ve got to be relaxed in the car.

Sorry? You don’t think?

It’s true. I don’t think. It all comes naturally. I don’t have the time for it to be otherwise. For example, once, on a special stage, I wanted to adjust my brake balance to add a bit to the rear. I know very well that you turn the knob to the right to shift the brakes to the rear. But with all the notes, concentrating on the driving, listening to your co-driver, remembering the route, adjusting your entry speed, adjusting your speed according to grip and the line you’re going to take, there are lots of calculations to make in a hurry. It’s got to come naturally. I haven’t got time to think of anything else.

I guess that’s where your ‘symbiosis’ with [co-driver] Daniel Elena comes in?

Well it works like this: basically he tells me what I’ve dictated to him after our recces of the stages at every rally on the Tuesday and Wednesday. on the first run, I dictate to him; on the second, he repeats back to me what I dictated to him. Then I tweak it a bit in the evening when I watch video footage.

And do you ever disagree?

If he says, ‘Careful’, to me, it’s because I’ve told him to say, ‘Careful’. he writes down what I said to him word for word. he is my memory. The role he plays isn’t the same role a co-driver at the Dakar plays, for example. There’s more navigation there.

And speaking of the Dakar…

It’s not a priority for me. I’m more about the rally circuit than I am about Dakar.

I’d like it for the adventure and the landscapes, but the rallying I do is more like circuit racing than Dakar as you’re constantly taking things to the limit. If I did it, it’d be with a mate, for fun, but then I can’t do that because there’d be expectations. I’d have to go there as a professional and bring back the result.

I’ll think about it later.

OK, so no Dakar for now, but you might have gone over to Formula One if you’d been granted the necessary ‘superlicence’ by the governing body… opportunities like that don’t come knocking every day. I did some good

lap times during a practice session with Red Bull, and their idea was to have me race several Grands prix. But it wasn’t possible. I didn’t have a specific ambition going into it. I would have been driving for Toro Rosso and that wasn’t a car that could have won, so I wasn’t prepared to do it. I would have got in the car at abu Dhabi in 2009 and driven the race without any advance practice sessions.

But the Le Mans 24 Hours proved to be a very successful attempt at circuit racing for you. You were part of the team that finished second in 2006 and you almost went on to drive the race for Peugeot. Why didn’t it happen?

I ended up with an overloaded schedule: I had the tests of the Citroën C4 and DS3 rally cars, not to mention competing in the C4. We were testing both cars because we were going to change at the end of the year. My daughter was two-and-a-half years old and I must have been at home three days over a two-month period!

I also wanted to do proper testing in the peugeot. I’m sure there’ll be other opportunities to race at le Mans in the future, but if I do it I don’t want it to be a limitation on other things.

After eight world titles, where do you still find the motivation to compete?

I enjoy everything I do. I love driving, I love rallying, I love scrapping, although driving for driving’s sake is of no interest.

There’s no particular thing that motivates me. I can’t explain it, but my motivation comes naturally and I don’t like losing.

So if I think there’s a way of being out in front, I go for it. I have nothing to prove.

If I hadn’t wanted to take risks, I’d have stopped. It’s better for me to do it when I’m at the top of my game than when I’m getting beaten. I wouldn’t like that. I was still up there in 2011, although I’d almost left to go and do circuit racing at the beginning of the year.

Sébastien Ogier, your teammate in 2011, won’t be a title rival next year as he’s working with Volkswagen to develop their new WRC car for 2013.

Will that make 2012 easier?

I expect Mikko hirvonen will be my main rival [Finn hirvonen joins Citroën for 2012 and 2013]. and there won’t be a strategy like last year. If he beats me, he beats me. If he’s ahead of me, no one’s going to say to him, ‘hey, wait for loeb’.

That’s not how things work. unless I’m leading and he’s in sixth place at the end of the season. Then it’d be oK. We saw what happened at Ford in 2011 – JariMatti latvala was faster the whole time, hirvonen had more points, so latvala was held back every time. If hirvonen wins in 47

A rare treat for The Red Bulletin's journalist and photographer: riding shotgun with Séb in his private helicopter between Geneva Airport and his Swiss home

Monte Carlo this year, then comes home first in Sweden and Mexico, no one’s going to tell him to wait for me. There are no number-one and number-two drivers. at least not at the start of the season. I think things will happen on a more logical basis this year, as they will at Ford. It’s ogier’s own choice not to be taking part this year. he decided to go to Volkswagen. and that’s that.

Smart move?

I didn’t keep track of his negotiations.

We all thought he was going to sign for Ford. I think Ford didn’t have the money to pay him much in 2012. I thought about Volkswagen myself in the middle of the season, but in the end I stayed at Citroën as that’s where I have developed and have been successful. They showed me how important I was to them. I’m not at the same stage of my career as ogier is. he’s got all the time in the world [he’s 28], whereas I’m at the stage of wondering whether I should do another one or two years. Three would be too much.

Eight world championship titles in three different cars, but all Citroëns: the Xsara, the C4 and the DS3. Which one did you like most? all of them! They were all four-wheel drive… The first two had 2-litre turbo engines… The third, the DS, has a 1600cc turbo engine and it’s almost as powerful as the Xsara now. But that’s not what matters. I like the DS a lot as it’s the most nippy and playful of the three. you can hurl it from one side to the other. It responds really well. The three of them 48

Loeb-Heintz, the other duo Sébastien Loeb knows how to work as part of a team. There’s his official partnership with Séverine since their marriage in 2005. Then there’s the partnership with Daniel Elena, from whom he is often described as being inseparable.

And not to be overlooked is the partnership with first-timer Dominique Heintz, which was formed at the beginning of Loeb’s motorsport career and is now looking to the future. He explains: “I’d signed up for youth rallies. First there are regional, then national selections. The registration fee was 15 French francs. I was an electrician at the time. There were 15,000 participants nationwide. Dominique noticed me and entrusted me with a car from his team. That first year, I won, but the jury gave the win to another driver. I went home. The following year I made a mistake in the final leg but won in the end.”

Now the two of them want to help another young driver live his dream. Loeb continues: “That was the idea when I introduced Ogier to Guy Fréquelin [former Citroën WRC boss]. At that point, Dominique and I wanted to help him. I went to watch my brotherin-law who was taking part in the

Limousin Rally and saw Ogier go past. I said to myself, ‘Wow, he’s quick!’ We thought, why not meet and see if we can do something for him? I spoke about it to Fréquelin who subsequently met him. Dominique and I didn’t even get involved, so good luck to Ogier. Since then, we’ve continued in conjunction with PH Sport who rally private Citroën cars. The two of us set up a separate company.”

It works like this: Heintz does the concrete stuff; Loeb approves it. “It’s a lot of work,” he says. “We speak on the phone every day. We have to find partners, that sort of thing. If we can help one or two youngsters get on, we’d be happy.” This is Loeb thinking like a team boss, with an eye on the future. “It would mean I could keep my hand in with motorsport,” he says. “If I stop driving tomorrow, I’ll be all on my own. What would I do?

I’ve earned enough money.

I don’t need to work.”

Loeb on co-driver Daniel Elena: “He is my memory’’

Loeb on Séverine: “She’s a really good co-driver”

Loeb on Dominique Heintz: “He's the guy who noticed me”

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2009

citroën c4 wrc

aDDITIoNal phoToGRaphy: GETTy IMaGES (2), DppI, GEpa pICTuRES

Flying high in the car that has brought Loeb the most success: four driver titles, from 2007-10 and 34 rally wins. There was talk of retirement this year before Seb re-committed to Citroën for 2012

are all great on tarmac. The C4 is more sluggish and has slower reaction times on dirt roads. The DS has better reactions.

The Xsara is somewhere between the two.

Who’s been your toughest rival since your first World Championship win back in 2004?

In some rallies, Marcus Grönholm [World Champion in 2000 and 2002] was the fastest, but he made more mistakes. he would often make one mistake at a crucial moment. at the end, he wasn’t the most difficult to beat. But speaking only of pure speed, he was the most surprising. It’s harder to dominate hirvonen because he’s so consistent. ogier has shown how quick he is on all surfaces. latvala had a pretty bad start to the season, but he’s quicker than ogier on tarmac. They’re as quick as each other on dirt roads – latvala is the real deal.

Last summer you committed to Citroën for another year with the option of another year after that. Will you still be here in 2013?

I don’t want to have to force myself to drive. It doesn’t matter to me if I have seven, eight or nine titles. I want to give myself an exit route. If I sense mid-season that I don’t feel like going on, I want to be

" i don't want to be forcing myself to drive. i want to give myself an exit route, if i want to do some circuit racing before i'm too old"

able to stop. I don’t want to have a year where I’m going to have to force myself to drive, that wouldn’t interest me. If I want to start out in circuit racing or elsewhere, I don’t want to leave it too late.

What are you most proud of?

I am most proud of the eight titles and my career as a whole. Ten years ago, I was only just beginning to dream that maybe one day I’d be World Champion, and now I’ve been crowned World Champion a total of eight times. I was nobody before the San Remo in 2001 [where he finished second]. all the big teams called me after that rally. That’s when everything changed. That was the rally that triggered everything. But it easily could have ended up with me becoming an electrician a year later!

As a rule, if you want something, do you get it? as a rule, yes, but it’s not foolproof. The helicopter pilot licence was no trouble.

If I’m interested in something, I find the motivation I need to get it. like my boat, motorbike or hGV licences, for example.

I drove a tank in the army. I told myself I might as well do something useful, which is why I’ve got the hGV licence.

I was 2km from home. That was easier. www.sebastienloeb.com

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ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN

Red Bull BC One is the event where the world’s best B-Boys come to vie for the accolade of ‘numero uno’. And with so much at stake, it’s all about the winning…

Words: Florian Obkircher Photography: Denis Klero 50

Uprocks, windmills, turtles, freezes, headspins and hand hops, US B-Boy El Ni単o really puts the moves on the Red Bull BC One crowd in Moscow as he aims to take the championship belt at the first attempt

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After practising his moves and signing a few autographs, El Niño sits down to gather his thoughts before stepping into battle on the Red Bull BC One stage. The B-Boy’s real name is Alex Diaz; his cousin dubbed him El Niño in 1997, a reference to the weather phenomenon that was causing massive storms and cyclones at the time: “Man, you’re just like El Niño when you dance.

You spin so fast!”

The spotlights come to life. Red and blue beams scythe through the arena. The DJ drops the needle on the record.

Boom! Cheers explode from the audience. Pimply youths in baseball caps leap from their seats and throw their arms in the air.

A guy with dreadlocks steps onto the stage and roars into the microphone, his voice barely audible over the roar of the fans. “Moscow, are you ready?!”

They’re ready all right. Many queued for hours in snow at Moscow’s Circus Arena to buy tickets. They’ve travelled from the farthest corners of Russia to be among the 3,500 here at Red Bull BC One. Because this is their World Cup. The world’s 16 best B-Boys against each other in an instant knock-out format.

“I’m on the road all year, watching the most important competitions,” says German B-Boy and promoter Thomas Hergenröther. For the past 30 years he’s been organising the biggest battles in the scene. Eight years ago he established Red Bull BC One and is constantly looking for new talent. “I’m looking for B-Boys with personality who can entertain on the stage, because at Red Bull BC One you not only have to be a perfect dancer, you also have to perform with the crowd as well as your opponent.”

Hergenröther has recruited 10 dancers who fulfil these criteria. Five further competitors have qualified through national elimination competitions on four continents. The only certain starter: last year’s winner, Neguin from Brazil. That’s 16 B-Boys from 10 countries. But only one can take the championship belt home.

Five minutes before the first battle, the B-Boys are in the training room behind the stage. As the crowd howls outside and camera crews and security staff rush past the back entrance, all is quiet in the lounge.

Roxrite from the USA warms up on the small dancefloor. Neguin, eyes closed, chills out on a bean bag.

One false step can send you out of the contest – all the participants here know that. El Niño certainly does. The US B-Boy with Venezuelan roots is here for the first time. He stares straight ahead, as if dance scenes are playing in his mind’s eye. His gaze then wanders over 53

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to his opponent, who is doing stretches a few metres away. For a moment they make eye contact.

A quick, respectful nod. Then, “ding!”

The bell chimes, someone calls out his name. El Niño jumps up. He twirls his head, hops like a boxer from foot to foot as if he were trying to shake off the trance of the last few minutes. The gate to the ring swings open, El Niño takes one last deep breath and steps into the spotlight.

At 21, he’s the youngest Red Bull BC One participant and outside the ring, he’s a bit of a joker. His real name is Alex Diaz, but here he’s El Niño (‘the kid’ in Spanish). At first glance the name fits, and not just because of his size. His brown eyes sparkle, his moustache is downy. He comes across like the guy in school everyone likes: funny, but still cool.

“This is like a family reunion,” he says. “It only gets serious when we meet as opponents on the dancefloor.”

That moment – when your friend becomes your rival – is one he knows well. For despite his youth, he’s already been dancing longer than most of his colleagues. The New York breakdance pioneer, Float, used to change his nappies when he was a baby. And he’d nudge the baby’s feet so that he spun around on his back. “Thanks to Float I was doing spins before I could talk,” he says.

At the age of three he was getting breakdance lessons from his uncles.

At 14, he was on tour with rapper Missy Elliott and appearing on stage with Busta Rhymes. He’s been a pro dancer for two years. He’s on the road for three weeks of every month – travelling to workshops, taking part in competitions or judging other dances. In September he was invited to a Red Bull BC One elimination round in Chicago and won easily.

“I went in there and knew I was going to make it,” he says. The qualification meant one of his biggest dreams had come true. “It’s like when you’ve been working in a job forever. You do everything to get promoted – and then it happens. When you’ve got Red Bull BC One on your CV, you don’t have to worry about job offers anymore,” he says. “The whole breakdance world will be watching online – and that’s amazing.”

It’s been a week since his last major event, the Battle Of The Year, 54

Roxrite puts in an assured second-round performance that’s bang on the beat before his friend El Niùo wheels out a routine of equally impressive moves

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Above: Host for the evening, Rakaa (from LA hip-hop group Dilated Peoples), stands between Red Bull BC One entrants Roxrite (left) and El Niño (right) as the jurors cast their votes.

Left: As soon as the last juror lifts his board with Roxrite’s name on it, El Niño storms the stage and embraces his friend, despite being outdanced on the night.

Below: Roxrite went on to win the whole event, beating Venezuelan B-Boy Lil G in the final

in Montpellier, France, in which he was a losing semi-finalist.

The aim here is to do better, indeed, to win. But a likely opponent in round two is this year’s favourite: Roxrite, a gangly 20-something who’s already won every major competition in the breakdance world, except this one. He also happens to be El Niño’s hero and friend. Each despatches their first-round opponent with ease, so in round two, they’re matched in a head-to-head worthy of any final.

It’s a cold, rainy Moscow Saturday night and backstage as they catch sight of each other behind the stage, they smile. Bump with the right arm, hug with the left. “It had to happen,” says Roxrite. “Good luck kid.”

One last bump and it’s on. The DJ lays down a Latin beat, Roxrite yanks his cap back, pulls up his trousers and starts with some toprocks. Clean legwork, then a freeze – headstand with bent legs – into a horizontal.

He starts spinning on his own axis…

Then it’s El Niño’s turn. He’s been holding back with mischievous gestures, but there’s no sign of fraternal respect when he starts his routine, with uprocks, turtles, hand hops, windmills, freezes and headspins. The audience roars. The two step up to the judges and the five scoreboards go up. Roxrite. Roxrite.

El Niño. El Niño. And: Roxrite.

El Niño looks down. He’s out in the second round. Then he turns to his opponent, claps, the two embrace. “At the last moment I decided not to make my risky move because I thought I would need it in a later round,” he says. “If I’d done it I would have gone through.

But Roxrite is flawless and the judges respected that today. Anyway, losing to my big brother, I can live with that.

I went up to him and said, ‘You threw me out, but now you have to win.’”

And that’s exactly what Roxrite does in a break-neck finale against Lil G from Venezuela. As disappointed as he was after his own elimination, El Niño’s joy for the winner is all the greater. “He was incredible. Even when Lil G had the audience onside, Roxrite’s combinations were perfect.

A worthy winner,” says El Niño, slapping his friend on the shoulder.

“We’ll see each other next year. We have some unfinished business.” www.redbullbcone.com

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the long way

home Stephen Redmond has one goal: to be the first swimmer to cross the Ocean’s Seven channels and straits. With three down, four to go, we headed for the California coast near Los Angeles for what turned out to be the toughest swim of his life Words: Nicolas Stecher Photography: Chris Baldwin

n

othing is going according to plan. It is 5.57am on the frosty morning of October 20, 2011, and a vile retching can suddenly be heard bellowing out from the starboard side of our boat – a sound not unlike the primal scream a gutted hyena might make. It is a howl that summons all, from the insides of the boat to the railing. From a distance of about 40m away in the pitch-black night, you can see open-water swimmer Stephen Redmond projectile vomiting like a hosepipe on full blast. It is a nasty sight: his jaw unlocks violently like a transforming werewolf from a 1980s horror film.

This is not really what you want happening only four hours into an expected 13-hour swim. Alongside Redmond, seasoned marathon swimmer and official observer Forrest Davis lies

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words, he’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s dedicated his life to taking on the salty seas.

As he starts playing, the melancholy tones ring out over the water to the lone swimming figure. The skipper may have hoped for the desired effect of welcoming the morning and infusing his swimmer with a regained fortitude, but the results are decidedly different.

“I wanna get out! Pull me outta the water, you bloody bastards!” bellows Redmond, now only a couple of feet from the side of the boat. He has swum over to the boat and he is angry and exhausted. “I’ve never called it before, but this time, I’m callin’ it!”

“We’re not lettin’ ya in!” retorts Anthony Redmond, Stephen’s younger

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With that in mind, open-water guru steven Munatones came up with something a bit more challenging – actually, a lot more challenging. stephen redmond, who has completed four of the swims, wants to be the first to do all seven 50 miles

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1 IrIsh Channel Straits of Moyle, 35.5km Done: 31.08.2010, 17 hours, 17 mins.

Water temp: 12°C “I was attacked by box jellyfish for nine hours.” One of only 14 to swim it.

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sea of Japan H o aomori nSH u 100 km

2 englIsh Channel England–France 34km Done: 02.08.2009, 20 hours Water temp: 14°C “My wife, Ann, sang to me during the swim.”

He also lost 7kg.

4 sTraIT of gIbralTar Gibraltar 13km Done: 08.05.2011, 5 hours Water temp: 16°C “Swell so large, I could not see boat or land through waves.”

6 Tsugaru sTraIT Northern Japan 20km Done? Not yet Water temp: 18°C With fast currents from the west to east, this is best swum at a very quick pace.

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Water temp: 16°C Areas of ice water, tidal flows, and pods of jellyfish. One in six swimmers encounters sharks.

5 MolokaI Channel Hawaii 42km Done? Broke off.

25.10.2011 Water temp: 24°C “Waves as high as buses, they couldn‘t see me over the water.”

7 CaTalIna Channel California 34km Done: 20.10.2011 12 hours, 40 min Water temp: 15ºC “The hardest swim of my life.” Known for fast currents and sharks.

ILLUSTRATIOn: kEn ULRICH

“he’s being a bitch,” says brother anthony (right)

brother and official feeder. “It’s my call, and I’m callin’ it. I always finish, but this time it’s for real – I’m callin’ it!” barks Redmond in his rough Irish brogue, complaining about severe stomach cramps and a sore shoulder. He appears punch-drunk as he hurls expletives at his sibling, who is refusing to let him quit.

His brother turns to us with a halfcocked smile and says, “He’s just being a bitch.” Anthony’s trying to be light, but you can see he’s concerned. Redmond has now been treading water for 10 minutes without swimming, a lifetime in a sport where half a degree of body temperature loss can spell doom.

The drama is steady. There’s no panic, but there’s sincere anxiety – not enough to pull his brother into the boat, but enough to know that if Redmond keeps allowing himself to wallow down that mental path of despair, the crossing will be cut short. Of course, if he really wanted to quit, all Redmond would have to do is touch the boat – the protocol to open-water swimming is a strictly enforced, strictly observed rigmarole.

Anthony converses in hushed tones to Davis, who’s in the water on the paddleboard, and Davis swims over to Redmond and whispers in his ear. It is

n IS or la tH n d

flat on a paddleboard whispering words of encouragement, trying to steer Redmond back in motion.

After two minutes, Redmond has collected himself. Without a word, he again begins his breaststroke, slowly, methodically, relentlessly moving – the steady slap of his massive arms smacking against the water, sloshing ever forward.

Off in the distance, Los Angeles isn’t a line or bright light, but rather a faint glow of a city shining up into the cloud cover from the black nothing of the sea.

The City of Angels looks far away.

Half an hour later, light has broken over the horizon and the sky is an inclement, soft blue-gray. The skipper, Greg Elliot, emerges from the bowels of his boat with a sack of plaid bagpipes wrapped around his body and ascends to the bridge overlooking the wide deck of his 63ft vessel, the Bottom Scratcher. It’s a tradition: every sunrise, Elliot rises to the top of the 42-year-old, purpose-built diving boat and plays the bagpipes to welcome the morning and help motivate his crew.

Elliot’s appearance is somewhere between Blue from US comedy movie Old School and the weathered sea captain from The Simpsons – in other

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bizarre. Redmond gains a sort of clarity in his eyes that had acquired the lost swirl of a concussion. “Gimme some chocolates and a sweet tea,” he orders.

Quickly, the hot tea is produced and held out to him and a Milky Way is ripped from its wrapper and tossed toward him. It falls in the water.

Redmond dives out of sight to fish it out, surfaces, and stuffs the small, wet chocolate into his mouth and without grabbing tea to wash it down, he once again strokes forward towards Los Angeles, slowly, methodically, relentlessly sloshing on his long trek across the lonely channel. From the boat, everyone cheers and hollers.

It is a small step, a critical victory.

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ery few human beings could put themselves through the physical torment, mental hazing and seemingly terminal fatigue that Redmond is withstanding.

You have to put your mind through a Sisyphean ordeal, with your only reward being the sharp rocks of shore under your feet some 20-odd kilometres away.

Redmond isn’t just doing this once, either. He aims to be the first human

stephen redmond came very close to giving up

to cross the Ocean’s Seven – the openwater marathon swimmer’s version of mountaineering’s Seven Summits.

He has so far conquered three (see opposite page), but he’s not alone in his quest. In his hometown in Ireland, the €3,997 (R44,220) needed for this swim was raised when friends, local farmers, fishermen, pub owners and shopkeepers all paid for the pleasure of ‘a rip’ of waxing strip stuck to his chest. (“I’ve never seen so many happy people in all my life,” Redmond quips.)

He claims to do it all for his country, but it is clear he draws his strength from a much closer familial well.

The eldest son of Irish pub owners, Redmond was born in London and raised hell from the cot. He was no

good at football, so swimming was his sport of choice from a young age and he spent several years as a commercial diver off the coast of Scotland, plucking scallops for cash. Stephen Redmond is stout and gnarled, sharp-witted, loquacious (when he cares to be) and amiable.

But you can easily discern the damage he might have done as a young lad.

“For me, the swim’s all guilt, a way of trying to make up for all the stuff you did when you were young. Because I was such a crazy bastard, drinking and whoring around and having fun, and it’s kind of payback time now,” says the 46-year-old. “You realise there isn’t much time; all of a sudden you’re 40 and you haven’t achieved much.”

Epiphany struck when his wife, Ann, gave birth to their daughter Siadbh (pronounced “Sive”), now 11.

Redmond stopped drinking, started training, started a triathlon club and tried to focus his substantial energies into more productive endeavours.

“Everybody wants instant gratification; everyone is celebrating mediocrity now. You can sing a song, and all of a sudden you’re a celebrity,” he muses. “But I always find that the harder you work, the more you get out

6.52 am With official observer forrest Davis: “In the water, you don’t talk to anybody but the guy that’s feeding you,” says redmond. “There’s an invisible umbilical cord between the two of you”

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of something. It’s like building a statue out of salt; the doubts can chip away at the mental side of things and you get very weak and exhausted quickly.”

But watching him treading water, you question his very sanity. At that pivotal moment in his swim, shortly after the pipes were played at dawn, Redmond had nothing left in his gut, no strength. His hours were all over the place; he didn’t know what time it was, day or night. He couldn’t get warm for some reason and the feeds – critical 1,000-calorie cocktails of protein powder, bananas and strong tea delivered every 45 minutes like clockwork – weren’t agreeing with his digestive tract.

“Then Forrest just whispered into my ear: ‘Siadbh is thinking of you,’” recalls Redmond. “And that was it, just like flipping a switch – you couldn’t really quit, because you were letting everyone down. I thought, ‘A complete stranger comes over on a boat in the middle of the water in a faraway country and tells you your daughter wouldn’t want you to stop?’ It makes you pause; it becomes a surreal moment in your life.

“See, you don’t know – I don’t think anyone really knows – much about pain. none of us. But we don’t know how far we

12.05 Pm Twelve hours into his swim, redmond began to lose it.

“I thought it was a spaceman under me!” he said of photographer Chris baldwin

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“oh stevie boy...”

The bagpipes drone

can go either, you know? That’s what we’re testing: how far can we go.” near-failure seems to be integral to Redmond and his esoteric quest.

Without touching that edge of failure, that precipice of despair and the very threshold of his abilities, there would be no victory. There would be no reason.

There would be no swim. “I think people

are all looking for some golden happiness, but it doesn’t really exist out there, does it? You have to create that yourself. By having all these possessions, it’s not going to make you any happier; it’s all gonna come back down to your family and friends in the end,” he says. “After that, nothing else means much.

“In Ireland, we see it with the economy going down – people are living quieter and concentrating on different things.

Everything is back to normal again and maybe the swims are my way of figuring out how to get back to normal. Because you go out, then you come back – and you keep going until you can’t go any further. It’s just that you have people on the boat that will keep you going, and that’s all life is in the end.”

In moments of near-failure, Redmond applies a mantra on each hand: Siadbh on one hand, his seven-year-old son Stevie on the other. “Siadbh and Stevie, Siadbh and Stevie, Siadbh and Stevie,” he repeats in a trance, rhythmically pushing his meat cleaver hands through the air.

“I know that sounds crazy, but after you get into a rhythm, you kind of feel like you’re only skidding in through the water, like you’re going through a tunnel

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1.36 Pm “You never think you can finish it until the last half mile,” says redmond after reaching land.

“You spend three days afterwards thinking, ‘Did we really get it done?’”

in a water park, and you actually feel like it’s effortless in the end. It’s the nearest thing to being dead when you’re alive.”

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ust after 1pm, Redmond is making his final, slow, methodically relentless push to the shore. He looks like a strange, xenomorphic beast – a blubbery, aquatic juggernaut, flabby around his barrel-like stomach, but muscular and enlarged around his massive shoulders and arms.

He looks fluorescent white, almost pink, against the dark navy blue of the early morning water. From his armpits to his shoulder blades, there are whiter patches where viscous lanolin is smeared; it’s much less foul-smelling than the goose fat he usually slathers over his body.

The overall effect lends him the look of a two-tone porpoise, strangely bonier and fatter in alternately strange places. now he’s nearing the coast. Only there is no smooth sandy beach to land on, the rock-filled breaks are numerous and treacherous – two swimmers have already cracked ribs here this winter. But he fights his way through the thick kelp beds, around the spraying rocks, and after 12 hours and 20km, he hits ground and begins making a wobbly ascent to the

“ it’s a funny sPort. the whole swim is Just for that one blinding second of brilliance; you couldn’t describe it to anybody”

shore. Yet he can’t quite stand up – his blood pressure is shot, his massive, pillarlike legs as shaky as a newborn giraffe’s.

Then he stands. “I never want to see this bloody place ever again,” is the first thing that angrily spills from his mouth.

Redmond flops on board with a loud thud. Thanks to the pallor of his Irish skin, the lanolin smeared across his wide body and the ample blubber he has built up to survive the cold and dire energy needs of the swim, he looks like a beached manatee (for his marathon swims, Redmond’s body fat swells from 10 to 18 per cent). He sits motionless, a glistening mound of bluish flesh heaving with each shallow breath.

The skipper throws a set of thick towels around him and tries to get him up, but Redmond isn’t moving. “That was the hardest swim I ever swam,” he says with a protracted sigh that betrays the fatigue in his bones. “I couldn’t get over the current, I really didn’t think we were moving a lot of the time. Christ, everything was hard. The dark…”

Soon Redmond is in the shower, shivering violently as steaming hot water pours over his body. His head falls heavily into his hands, where it remains as the water cascades over his shortly cropped scalp. He can’t believe he is finished. Clutching his head in his hands, it’s not clear his mind is even in his body at the moment. “I don’t wanna swim again. For a long time. I don’t even want to see water; the sooner I get off the boat, the better.” He curses under his breath, muttering something about an “abject hatred of swimming”.

But as rotten as he’s feeling – eyes bloodshot and swollen shut from the brine, stomach empty and knotted, shoulder limp and battered, body convulsing, muscles in shutdown – there is a sparkle of recognition, even if he’s not totally there to witness it himself.

“It’s a funny kind of sport; that one second touching the rock and everything becomes quite crystal clear.

Simple. The whole swim is just for that one blinding second of brilliance; you really couldn’t describe it to anybody – the finish,” says Redmond, more to himself than anyone, still in some sort of post-traumatic shock.

“It’s cataclysmic – it’s like a blinding flash in your head that you’ve made this swim. You try to imagine it over and over again, what it’s going to be like and every one of them is different.

You’re hooked into it, and you can’t help yourself. You have to go again.” follow redmond’s progress on facebook

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SHELTER

Running through the wild, untamed mountain kingdom of Lesotho, the Roof of Africa is a three-day extreme enduro that takes riders to the very edge of their resilience Words: Mike Behr Photography: Nick Muzik

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Only the brave: The Roof of Africa race is tough on man and machine, as South African rider Charan Moore found out

Mountain madness: Even the easy routes can be frightening – riders encounter loose rock, boulders and sand

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Even the sensible route down Free Fall Pass will scare you. Myriad switchbacks zigzag across a 40-degree slope of loose mountainside rock and sand, before merging into an even steeper boulderstrewn, floodwater-carved ravine.

For the competitors in the Roof Of Africa enduro, Free Fall has always been more of a launch point than path. You practically need a parachute to get down this mountain pass, hence the jokey name. This year, in a wicked twist to mark the 44th running of the legendary Roof, the organisers have chosen to send the riders up Free Fall instead of down.

“That’s where you’ll get the real taste of the Roof,” says event organiser Mike Glover, pointing to the inflatable blue arch positioned about 400m below. “That’s where you’ll find your guts and glory stories.”

S

itting next to his bike, slumped in the shade of the arch and slugging a can of Red Bull is Gary Bennett, a chubby bloke in his 30s. It doesn’t look like it’s going to give him wings, but common sense has long flown the coop. “It’s very tough,” he pants, “but I can’t stop now…”

Back in the saddle, Bennett guns his KTM 300. His brother who’s been cheerleading from various points all day, yells: “C’mon boet! Do it for the amputees!” With that Gary bumps off up the track, albeit for only 50m or so.

It’s a moment to be dumbstruck.

For the amputees?

The 35-year-old Bennett, who lost a leg above the knee in a motor accident nine years ago, is about to finish the Roof as a Bronze rider (there are three categories of riders, Gold, Silver and Bronze, based on ability). Over two days this warrior has ridden 167 gruelling kilometres across the toughest mountain terrain imaginable.

Following his grinding procession upwards. His stops are as frequent as brother Rob’s words of encouragement.

“It’s yours boet!” he implores every time Bennett pauses to suck in air. “It’s yours boet! C’mon it’s yours boet!” And off Bennett roars again. It’s his second Roof after being time-barred in 2008.

“I came back because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. That disabled people can also ride the Roof. But I don’t think I’ll do it again…” says Bennett, who

From top: You can see from Calvin Wright’s face, just how challenging the course has been; Eventual winner Graham Jarvis skips over the tough terrain; A young boy gets in on the action at the start; Duplicate GPS devices keep the riders on track

nearly didn’t make it to the start after he fell so hard in training three weeks ago that he thought he’d broken his ribs.

Eventually, Bennett pops out of the track onto the red carpet to the finish line. Fittingly, he’s riding the KTM 300 XC-W that last year gave New Zealander Chris Birch his third Roof victory in a row.

The difference, though, is that while the top riders like Birch dance over the steep passes, Bennett and the bulk of the field claw their way over. It’s like watching the last survivors of a damned superheroes convention fight their way out of Dante’s Inferno.

Tears in his eyes, Rob’s bursting with pride. “I’m so humbled and so proud. It sums up what the Roof is all about. And the kind of person it takes to finish.”

And Rob is the kind of spectator this race attracts. There are around 5,000 this year, many of them astride their own bikes. Some are content to sit on a rock in the baking heat, sipping ice cold lager, but as many immerse themselves physically and emotionally. Not a moment goes by when spectators aren’t wading in to help a fallen rider or drag a bucking bike back onto the track. Some of the race’s most evocative images are of locals and tourists joining hands in a chain and hauling bike and rider like a Great Trek ox wagon over a section that has him beat.

Spectator interaction makes the Roof special. But it also racks up the tension as riders enter the ‘no-help zone’ in their burst for the finish. Like the closing moments of the final day in this year’s event, when South Africa’s Jade Gutzeit and Birch fight each other out of the energy-sapping Bushmen’s Pass for second spot.

Gutzeit takes a tumble and loses his Yamaha 290 down a rocky ledge. As Birch blasts past on his KTM, several spectators scramble down off the track, knowing this time words and advice rather than muscle will have to do. About 100m away at the finish line across the ravine, Clerk of the Course Clint Rieper waives the no-help rule. Spectators in earshot haphazardly shout the news across to Gutzeit’s helpers. But the overhead TV chopper slaps away their words.

Undeterred, more voices join in, quickly finding the unison of an English Premier League crowd: “Help him! Help him!” they chant, but to no avail. Spontaneously, several spectators take up the call and set off from different mountainside positions, picking their way across the rocks.

Encouraged, the gallery redirect their chant, willing them to go faster.

By now there are tears all around.

Suddenly, like a cork out of a champagne 67

Balancing act: Briton Dan Hemingway on his way to 18th place

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bottle, Gutzeit pops back onto the track and both sides of the ravine erupt in a collective roar. It’s lump-in-throat stuff drama, echoing last year when South Africa’s Brian Capper succumbed to fatigue about 500m from the finish line with 20 minutes to cut-off.

By the time he reached Rieper, who had heard of the drama below, the crowd were hysterical. Unable to help and with around five minutes remaining they were screaming at Capper, slumped over his handlebars, to move the last 100m.

“When he got to me he was out of it,” recalls Rieper. “He was throwing up in his helmet and his eyes were glazed. It wasn’t going to affect the leaderboard so I waived the no-help rule.”

With minutes to spare spectators hoisted man and bike and ran the lot over the finish line. Exhausted and dehydrated, Capper left the finish on a stretcher but returned this year the fittest he has ever been to finish fifth on the final day, seventh overall.

“The biggest problem in these mountains is you get dehydrated,” explains organiser Glover, himself a Roof veteran. “It gets very hot and by the time you feel thirsty it’s too late. Altitude doesn’t help either. From 1,500m riders climb to over 2,200. So there’s just no air.

You get light-headed. Just picking up your hand takes a huge effort. And that plays havoc with concentration. You start to see stars and hallucinate. As physical exhaustion sets in you make mistakes.”

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xhaustion is a Roof rider’s Achilles heel, says Glover. “Riders are up at four in the morning and start around six. The top guys are in the saddle for eight hours, the rest for up to 12. You can never relax. There are rocks and rocks and rocks. It’s like a title fight. Your body takes such a pounding that eventually you just can’t hold onto your bike any more.

“But when you fall and your bike slides down the mountain, you’ve got to go after it and pull it back up. It weighs 120kg, so eventually, after physically manhandling your bike all day it takes its toll. That’s why a woman has never finished the Roof. Lots have tried, but they just haven’t had the physical strength to finish.”

Probing riders for the deeper meaning behind racing the Roof yields little philosophising, possibly because it’s so jock. Most riders do it because they

The Roof

by Numbers Day 1

Run over November 24-26, 2011, the Roof opens with a 50.1km time trial around the Lesotho capital of Maseru. This determines starting times from Molengoane, the following day, when the Roof proper kicks off.

Day 2

Leading contenders set off at 6am and race 198.4km for around eight hours up and down passes appropriately named things like ‘Pressure Cooker’ (notorious for blowing engines), ‘Mad Cow’, ‘Black Neck’, ‘Spiderman’ (because you need to be), the arduous ‘Classes Classic’ that really sorts the men from the boys, before the notorious ‘Free Fall’ at the finish.

Bronze and Silver riders do the same route, but call it a day sooner at 85km and 135.8km respectively.

Day 3

Starting according to the previous day’s finishing time, the Bronze category competitors do 81.8km of intense climbs and drops, while the Silver crew continue for another 65.1km, including a charactertesting climb up the 6km Mankaluba Pass which summits at 2,286m in the clouds before finishing at the top of notorious Bushmen’s Pass.

Gold forge on for another 41.8km, looping around and up to 2,350m before dropping back into the valley for a morale-breaking second assault up Bushmen’s to the finish.

Out of 234 entrants from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the UK and Portugal, just 53 finished the full race distance of 387.1km. There were 82 Bronze finishers and 65 Silver.

When the sun set on the final day there were two riders missing.

They were rescued by lunchtime the following day, one of them on horseback.

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can. Extreme enduro riders are very in-the-moment. Like 17-year-old Carl Donaldson, who is walking away from his Bronze finish between two emotional parents. “It’s my first extreme enduro and I loved it,” confesses Donaldson, who’s been riding bikes since the age of two. “It’s good fun. I enjoy a challenge.

Chris Birch didn’t win three times by watching the Roof on TV. You’ve got to get out there and do it.”

But why this? “I love riding my bike more than anything,” he says. “Being out there is where I’m happy.”

The song remains the same even with one man who should be the wiser, enduro legend Alfie Cox, who from 1988 won nine Roofs, three of them on the trot.

“Humans want to be challenged,” says Cox, now the dynamo in the KTM pit for Birch and other overseas riders. “They want to be taken out of their comfort zone and pushed to the limit. And the Roof does that. It’s the ultimate adventure. It’s one of the toughest events in the world.”

Tougher than the 89km road-running Comrades Marathon, reckons last Gold finisher in 2009 Jaun de Heer, aged 29.

“You need much more endurance. I was klaar in 2009. I was like a zombie for a week. I wanted to quit but my pit crew pulled me through.”

So did the consequence of baling. “If you quit in Comrades you can just jump in a bus. Here you can’t unless you want to spend the night under the stars in the middle of nowhere.”

100 per cent freedom.” When it comes to combining fun and challenge, there’s no other race like the Roof which he describes as “a big adventure”, it’s just full of nice people eager to help one another.

His range of race emotion is as extreme as the rocky terrain which “smacks you around” all day. “You go from having loads of fun and the best time ever to almost in tears because you’re so fatigued you can’t get up this one stupid rock face,” says Birch. “It teaches you a lot about yourself, how to control your body and mind while you’re up against extreme hardship.”

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nly the third rider in the Roof’s 44-year history to claim a hat-trick of Roof wins, Red Bull’s Birch was denied an historic quartet by the UK’s Graham Jarvis.

With his victory in the Roof, Jarvis has now won all but one of the world’s Top Five enduros in 2011 after also collecting the first place trophies at Hell’s Gate (Italy), The Tough One (England) and Red Bull Romaniacs (Romania). Only the Erzberg rodeo in Austria remains unclaimed. A man of many trophies, yes, but not of many words... even at the supper table.

Birch, though, is more forthcoming.

Surprisingly, I find him not back at his hotel, but tucked in with the finish line crowd. “It wouldn’t be right to leave when my mates are still out there,” explains the Kiwi, who fought back on Saturday after crashing early and injuring his foot. It says a lot about the egalitarianism of this race.

Birch loves Lesotho. “It’s really a beautiful country to ride motorbikes in. It’s 70

From top: In 2010 Brian Capper suffered exhaustion at the finish. In 2011 he was seventh; Gary Bennett (left), who lost a leg in a motor accident, finished in the Bronze category; The race takes its toll – Wayne Everton receives treatment for a broken wrist, but he still finished 22nd in the Silver category

control that Wayne Everton, 43, has fine tuned. About 45km from his 6.35am Saturday start he crashed his KTM 300 and fractured his wrist. Around seven hours and 140km later he was the 22nd Silver rider across the line.

“I wanted Gold today, but I can only manage Silver,” puffs the ashen-faced rider while race doctor Jacques Theron splints his arm and paramedics scan him for other injuries. In his red racing gear minus his jacket, Everton resembles a crocked Spiderman.

“I hit a lurker [a big rock in the grass] flat out and went flying over the bars and landed on my wrist,” says Everton.

“I was in a lot of pain the whole way and only got painkillers an hour and a half back. But I had to finish otherwise the missus would’ve killed me. The training and shit takes up too much time.”

Doc Theron is full of admiration.

“Sheer balls and vasbyt. He overrode the pain mentally and went for it. It shows you the power of the mind. Most guys would have quit then and there.

It’s guts and glory.”

Played out against a spectacular backdrop of ever-changing mountain, valley and sky, these stories of bravery and finding self not only make the Roof unique but also quite meditative.

“When you’re on the bike you don’t have a worry in world you are so focused,” explains Roof veteran and former SA enduro champ Hilton Hayward, 43, now the Dr Suspension of enduro, who finetunes bikes from his mobile workshop.

“And that goes on for hours. You are so in tune with the bike and yourself it’s like surfing the sand. For me, watching a top rider is like watching ballet.” www.roofofafrica.org.ls

Joy and relief: Graham Jarvis wins the 44th running of the Roof of Africa enduro in Lesotho

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ROCKIN’ IN THE FREE WORLD Musical inventor Jon Free makes guitars from old tins and chair legs. And guess what? They sound amazing Words: Ruth Morgan Photography: Thomas Butler

Jon Free’s workshop in north London, UK, is an organised chaos of small plastic drawers, wooden compartments and tiny tins bearing intriguing labels. ‘Bone dust’, ‘chicken head knobs’ – their contents the collected solutions to a thousand problems you never knew existed.

A layer of sawdust covers a workbench and the clutter of tools littered across it.

It has reached a row of guitars leaning against a wall in various states of disrepair. They wait in line to be restored to health, an echo of the patients who once queued in this Georgian house when it was a doctor’s surgery.

The room is small and every bit of space has been claimed. The walls are adorned with musical memorabilia – 72

Johnny Cash tour posters next to signed seven-inch records from Nancy Sinatra and Nick Cave. In the workshop’s one window, which overlooks the bustling Church Street in Stoke Newington, hangs a row of small guitars different from the others. They are Free’s ‘Tin-Tone Sonic Fascinators’ – unique four-stringed instruments lovingly fashioned primarily out of the old tins and table legs which lie stacked in one corner of the room.

What started out as a quickly thoughtup present for a friend has become a thriving business over the past two years, as word of these beautiful yet gritty little creations has spread.

Free now spends most of his time here bent over his bench, working on the

constantly evolving line, as intrigued passers-by peer in from the street.

Free enters the workshop carrying a part-finished Fascinator, and half the available space seems suddenly filled. With his 2m frame, oversized beige apron and elongated spikes of hair, 40-year-old Free is larger than life – the real-world incarnation of a mad comic-book inventor. He’s currently working on number 93, the body of which is a light blue sandwich tin, cut to house its hardwood neck, that was once part of a 1940s drop-leaf table.

Free names each one of his Sonic Fascinators – ‘The Esquire’, ‘The Lux Box’ – taking inspiration from the magazines the tins once housed, or what’s happening

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in his life while he makes it. But this one, number 93, is as yet unnamed.

“It’s getting trickier!” he says, in jovial tones. “I never thought I’d make this many. The original idea was to try and make a really simple turn-of-the-century cigar box guitar, as I’d heard about them.

Someone had dumped a couple of table legs near my house and that inspired me.

But I couldn’t find a single cigar box – Brits don’t smoke a lot of cigars, they drink tea and eat biscuits. So I started experimenting with antique tins and found they worked perfectly. After a few were given away as presents, people started to ask me about them.”

Free sources every tin individually, so no two Fascinators are the same. He uses microwave parts (“the bit that makes it go ‘ping’”) to amplify the sounds of the vibrating strings, which find their way out of the tin through a repurposed tea strainer. And no Sonic Fascinator would be complete without an old British penny used as a nut at the top of the neck, with slots gouged out to hold the strings.

The resulting instruments are bigger than the sum of their parts – beautiful enough to be hung on a wall, but when Free picks up a finished one and starts to play it’s clear they’d be wasted as an ornament. He plucks out a blues riff, conjuring images of warm evenings in America’s Deep South circa 1920, before plugging in an amp housed inside a tobacco tin – another of his innovations – for some proper rock ’n’ roll. It’s a versatile, unexpectedly gutsy sound which has helped win Free’s instruments famous fans, including Deep Purple’s Richard Glover, Sonic Youth and Seasick Steve to name a few. “A French guy came 74

in last week saying he’d seen Sonic Youth playing one of these in Paris,” says Free, “so he’d come to buy a couple for himself as he loved the sound.”

With a passion for guitars that dates back more than 25 years, there’s not much Free doesn’t know about making a good racket. He’s played in bands most of his life, enjoying the highs – touring the world with band Penthouse, and supporting The Gossip and The Kills – and enduring the lows – living on the dole and squatting in various tower-block flats. But necessity is the mother of all invention. “I started doing all my own guitar repairs,” says Free. “When you’ve got to live on £20 (R260) a week and

someone asks for £30 (R390) to basically put a bit of lollipop stick in the neck, you quickly learn how to do it yourself.”

His innovative streak had already been unleashed at the age of 13, when his uncle gave him his first guitar, a battered Czechoslovakian-made Futurama. “It had three strings and a piece of Lego for a bridge,” he remembers. “I sat for hours in a corrugated plastic greenhouse with a knife and a pair of pliers, pulling out all the frets and sanding them back, hammering them all back in, spray painting it. I worked it out as I went along.”

As his proficiency grew, people began asking him to turn his able hands to their injured instruments. “I didn’t realise I had different abilities,” he says. “I never even considered you’d take your guitar somewhere to get it restringed or tuned.”

He still repairs guitars one day per week for a client list that includes Laura Marling and Martha Wainwright, his reputation built on his attention to detail and inventiveness. “Over the years, I’ve fixed pretty much anything that can break. There’s always a way,” he says.

“I started out without any of the expensive kit – I had a cheese knife and a bit of sandpaper! There’s a lot of ingenuity in the job of repairs as most of the bits aren’t designed to be broken or fixed. You see something in a catalogue for US$20 and think, ‘Well, I’m sure I could rustle one of those up for 50c.’”

Free thanks his father, a research scientist who helped develop the technology behind lasers and jump

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Give a man a table leg…

Anyone who happens upon John Free’s northLondon studio from the street will peer in through a sash window to find him busy at work.

A biscuit tin here, a table leg there, he’s creating exclusive four-stringed tin can guitars out of anything he can lay his hands on

jets, for his ingenuity. He recounts how his father once dismantled their almostnew oven in order to fix their TV aerial.

“He’s definitely a fan of being hands-on,” says Free. “He’d never say, ‘Just take your bike to that shop down the road, and for £3 (R40) they’ll save you a day’s work.’ He’d say, ‘Go and scrape all the skin off your knuckles doing it yourself.’”

Back in his workshop, Free is working on number 93. “Maybe I’ll give it all up and disappear when I reach my 100th,” he jokes. But nothing could be further from the truth. He’s been known to get off a train mid-journey to grab a discarded table leg he’s spotted from the window.

“It could equally be described as an obsession,” he smiles. “I’ll see something out of the corner of my eye – it might be the curve of a wooden chair, and I’ll think, ‘That looks like the back of a guitar.’ I’m constantly hallucinating musical instruments. I suppose that’s why they end up coming into being.

“I want my guitars to bring the fun back into playing,” adds Free. “There’s so much conservatism in guitar playing, when I thought the idea of rock ’n’ roll was to be yourself. It’s not about spending £7,000 (R90,860 on a guitar, but realising what a great gift it is that, thanks to the laws of physics, this amazing noise comes out of an arbitrary combination of things.

These creations make a great racket and it makes me excited to hear it.”

Take a walk along this street in north London, look past the Sonic Fascinators in the Tin-Tone window, and you’ll see a large figure tinkering away with his latest creation. Jon Free wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. www.tin-tone.com

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the icemen cometh

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What if skaters built for ice hockey raced against each other on a track? What if that track was downhill and featured hairpin turns, big air, and of thousands of screaming fans? Welcome to the dynamic and exhilarating world of Red Bull Crashed Ice Words: Werner Jessner Photography: J端rgen Skarwan

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From top: The fastest men in the Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championship are last year’s champion Arttu Pihlainen from Finland and Canadian brothers Kyle (second) and Scott Croxall (third).

Below: the right type of ground skate blade can make a big difference in a race

he closer the final heats get, the quieter the atmosphere in the starting tent becomes. The skaters, up until now banded together in national cliques, exchanging advice and firing each other up, become quiet, focused. White headphones are standard. Warm-up exercise bikes are busy.

Bananas, cans of Red Bull and carbohydrate supplements are all to the fore. In the background, the skate-sharpening machine is working away, a racer presumably having had a last-minute change of heart that will secure him victory.

The starter calls out the names for the next round and hands out bibs – red, yellow, blue, grey. The four sportsmen, in full hockey gear with helmets, totter in the protectors on their skate blades to the start, where they remove them and fling them into waiting boxes. They scrape a grip into the ice with their blades, their hands on the starting gate. They no longer look right or left.

Their eyes stare straight ahead, down a track almost four football fields in length, filled with tricky turns, exhausting bumps and jumps. They concentrate on the initial surge and the first curve.

They do not look to the thousands of fans trackside.

They do not lend an ear to the DJ spinning tunes above the cheers. “Riders ready?” the starter asks.

“Watch the gate…” As soon as the starting gate opens, the world becomes a long white blur of adrenalin and endorphins, an exquisite rush…

An exact science

A sport that’s been in existence for a little over a decade, Red Bull Crashed Ice first took place on a track constructed around Stockholm’s fish market in 2001. But in recent years Ice Cross Downhill has taken on more polish. Out of a few unconnected races, the Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championship series was born in 2010. Last year’s tour stopped in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Canada. This year the championship comes to the USA for the first time at St Paul, Minnesota, on January 13-14, the first race in the 2012 four-stop championship series.

This sport comes into its own with the skates.

In the early years it was enough to give your hockey skates a quick sharpen before you started Ice Cross Downhill, but those looking to avoid belly flopping have reviewed and refined their approach.

Ice hockey skates come with a swashplate installed, so the steel is higher in the middle than on the edges. This comes in handy when you need to be able to turn while stationary because the puck has changed direction, but it’s more counterproductive than anything else when you’re going downhill at speeds of up to 70kph. So many competitors grind the swashplate away, right to the edges in some cases. Others use T-blades or the skates used for playing bandy (like ice hockey, but with more players, a ball instead of a puck, a slightly bigger goal and a much bigger pitch), which are flatter and have longer blades than ice-hockey skates.

Inside the racer’s tent, there are specialists working away at skate-sharpening machines, preparing the skates of every athlete to exact specifications. And if a racer doesn’t feel good about the skates, they can be adjusted after every training run – after all, with these things, it’s always the tools that are to blame.

For the 2012 season, most will have their own special Ice Cross Downhill skates made of highstrength steel which warp less, offer greater stability and maintain their grinding for much longer.

Finland versus canada

Last year, the battle for the overall Red Bull Crashed Ice title came down to a clash of the same schools that dominate the world of ice hockey: Scandinavia and Canada. Though Ice Cross Downhill is its own sport, it still can’t deny its roots in ice hockey. In

ADDITIONAL PhOTOGRAPhy: JOeRG MITTeR (3)

t

Finn Arttu Pihlainen (right), is the favourite again in 2012 after capturing the overall crown last year

Good reAction times, quick Feet And heFty thiGhs Are bAsic requirements 79

shirt-pullinG is Forbidden, As is pushinG, shovinG And checkinG

brit with the bit

The UK’s Red Bull Crashed Ice hopes are pinned on a pro ice skating instructor from Hull. Meet 34-year-old Adrian Jack “When I first saw Red Bull Crashed Ice on TV, I thought it looked absolutely mental, brutal, but I knew I really wanted to do it. I’m a skater through and through: a skating instructor in hull for nine years, a pro since 1996 and I started when I was nine years old.

I can also ski, snowboard and rollerblade.

Three days before Christmas 2010, I was on a ferry bound for a Red Bull Crashed Ice qualifier in the Netherlands.

“Nothing can prepare you for Red Bull Crashed Ice. There are 25,000 people screaming, banging the hoardings lining the course, and you’re shoulder to shoulder with three other guys. The closest thing I’ve experienced to being at the top of the track is a bungee jump.

Stood there, toes over the edge, heart racing, hanging on with both hands, looking down a sheer drop. Then it’s like someone’s given you a massive kick up the backside and you’re racing at up to 70kph. It’s an amazing adrenalin 80

rush. I made it to the second tour stop in Valkenburg, also in holland, and finished 33rd out of 64. Not bad for a first-timer.

This year, I’m in the new Great Britain team. I think coming from the UK is only a disadvantage if you let it be. Last summer, I trained on rollerblades in skate parks to get used to going downhill and over jumps. I also had meetings with elite performance coach Faye Downey and Red Bull’s strength and conditioning coach, Darren Roberts. Faye devised a training programme: now I’m on ice six days a week, with running, cycling and gym work. Darren gave me a nutrition plan and a rule to live by: ‘Anything served through a window is not food!’

“There’s no reason us Brits can’t be a force to be reckoned with. Competing before has given me a heads-up, and this year I’m on the attack. The Canadians and the Finns are always super-fast in this sport, but this year, hopefully, they’ll be looking at the back of my helmet.”

Adrian Jack

Last year’s Red Bull Crashed Ice in Moscow saw thousands of fans line the track.

In Québec City, Canada, it was tens of thousands

Action

Åre (Sweden) February 17-18, 2012

one corner, current champion Arttu Pihlainen, a gymnastics teacher from Finland; in the other, the Croxall brothers, Kyle (who came second) and Scott (third), two typically outdoor types from Canada. Pihlainen is married and has two children, aged three and one; the eldest, it goes without saying, already goes out on the ice.

Pihlainen is one of those people who are good at all sports. he’s an all-rounder in the art of movement who trains in the summer months on mountain bike rides with a friend who used to be on the Finnish national downhill team.

Kyle Croxall, on the other hand, is a fireman, while his brother works as a water-skiing instructor in the summer and makes enough money from it to enjoy himself for the rest of the year. For the Croxall brothers, the winter is all about ice hockey, or, better still, Ice Cross Downhill.

The sport’s leading players are as fundamentally different in style as they are in their everyday lives.

Pihlainen’s Finnish friends jokingly say his hobby is “training hamsters” whereas the Croxalls love to bum around the Canadian wilderness in their pick-up trucks. Pihlainen is a sportsman who, thanks to his quick legwork, sprints to the fore at the start of almost every race, stays out of trouble on the track and controls the race from the front. The first body contact he makes is high-fiving at the finish line.

The Croxall brothers, in contrast, adopt a typically Canadian approach: if there’s space there, I’m coming through it. “I’d like it more if any kind of physical contact was allowed,” said Scott Croxall, before being disqualified for shirtpulling in the quarter-finals of Race Three in last year’s Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championships.

That disqualification cost him valuable points and a chance of winning the overall title.

Shirt-pulling is forbidden in Ice Cross Downhill, as is pushing, shoving and checking. everything that you mustn’t do in the school lunch queue also applies to one of the toughest and quickest winter sports. There’s enough action as it is.

ADDITIONAL PhOTOGRAPhy: STePheN JB KeLLy

Finding the line

No one concedes any ground, especially at the start.

A good start as you go head-to-head against three others doesn’t guarantee victory, but it gets you a decent part of the way there. The first man into the opening turn steers clear of all the turmoil behind him. Good reaction times, quick feet and hefty thighs are basic requirements if you don’t want to see a sizeable gap open up between you and the leader.

The athletes’ preparation has become even more important for the 2012 season, as this year there are longer tracks up from about 350m last year to 500m, bringing with them the potential for higher speeds. In addition to Pihlainen and the Croxall brothers, this season should see Germany’s talented Fabian Mels and Russian rocket Andrey Lavrov

3

Québec City (Canada) March 16-17, 2012

2

4 1 St Paul (USA) January 13-14, 2012

Valkenburg (Netherlands) February 3-4, 2012

FAst FActs Where?

The 2012 Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championships makes four stops around the world (see above)

Who? In 2011, about 14,000 athletes from 23 nations competed in qualifiers for one of the 128 coveted final berths across the four tour stops.

hoW? It can take 180 people two weeks to build a track, typically in a city centre. There are 15 people alone tasked with the job of spraying water onto the track around the clock in the 11 days leading up to a race

FAst? Oh yes. It takes racers on average around half a minute to make it down up-to-500m courses, at speeds reaching 70kph

competing for overall victory – not to mention the prize of a brand-spanking new Mini.

In each heat, a minute’s racing separates the good skaters from the excellent ones. every jump is different. Banked curves make several lines of racing possible and allow for overtaking manoeuvres.

Doubles pluck half-hearted competitors off the ice, while men with bigger hearts, or other body parts, forge ahead. Sometimes the chicken line is the wiser option if the main line means carnage ahead. Red Bull Crashed Ice is more than just speed and skill, more than balls and guts: brains are crucial.

crumbling ice

Perhaps the greatest challenge from a technical point of view is the texture of the ice itself. Frozen water isn’t just frozen water.

Last season, the ice surfaces in Munich and Moscow were as different as they come. Munich’s track, a 350m course constructed in the city’s Olympic Park, had ice that was watery and deep and exhausting to skate on. Moscow’s was more brittle, but no less treacherous.

Low, dry temperatures of -30°C meant the water on the surface of the Moscow course froze in an instant, rather than freezing solid from below as it would at more agreeable temperatures. A sharp skate coming into contact with the new ice was like a cheese knife cutting through Parmesan, tiny chunks breaking off.

The way the athletes adjust to the different tracks and conditions is very similar to the way that rally drivers take things to the limit on snow, gravel and tarmac. Although, admittedly, the atmosphere at the start is more relaxed during a Red Bull Crashed Ice event. During qualifying especially, the mood in the starting tent – where the athletes get changed, prepare and await their turn in the warmth – is tense yet cordial. But the numbers shrink as the competition claims its victims. Out of more than 100 racers that were in the starting tent, only a few remain. The vibe hushes as they make their way to the starting gate. www.redbullcrashedice.com

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Body+ Mind More

Contents 84 TRAVEL IDEAS Up Helly Aa fire festival 86 GLOBAL FOOD One chef’s inspiration and a recipe to follow 88 Get THE GEAR Stefan Glowacz’s climbing essentials 90 TRAINING Tips from the pros 92 BEST CLUBS Symbol, Budapest 92 MUST LISTEN Gonjasufi’s new mini album 93 TAKE 5 RZA talks influences 94 WORLD IN ACTION 96 SAVE THE DATE 98 MIND’S EYE

Photography: Klaus Fengler

Extreme equipment: Stefan Glowacz (above) is scaling the mountains of Patagonia this month.

See what he’s taking with him on page 88

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Fire starters: At the high point of the festival, the Vikings form a circle round the ship and set it on fire with their torches

Island lIfe this month’s travel tips

Fire in the Helly

Up Helly AA At the end of this month thousands of fauxVikings will carry a longboat by torchlight to a fiery end in Lerwick. The Scots send their wild history up in flames at Up Helly Aa, Europe’s most spectacular fire festival

The old song The Norseman’s Home is sung as the galley is burnt

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All is dark and a flare scorches the night sky with a raucous bang. It’s a signal the assembled masses react to with a menacing roar. Thousands of men with beards wearing iron helmets, chainmail and carrying shields, excitedly light their torches and bathe Lerwick in a fiery light.

This isn’t northern Europe circa 950AD. It’s 21st-century Scotland, at one of its northernmost outposts, with the streetlights turned off and just moments away from the highlight of Europe’s largest fire festival.

To rapturous applause from locals and tourists alike, the wannabe-couldabeen-Vikings drag a 10m-long ship through the streets. After a half-hour procession, they reach the spot where the galley will be sacrificed. The men set her alight with their torches. The flames rage as the crowd erupts in approval. There’s music and the night’s festivities begin. On a night like this, men in tights and helmets storm the taverns and dancehalls and stay there till the sun sends them home.

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From start to FinisH

Firefest facts aa-Ha! Why do Shetlanders torch a newly built ship every year? Even the Vikings couldn’t answer that question, because they weren’t the ones who brought the Up Helly Aa tradition to life; the festival of fire only came about in the late 19th century. Back then it was an attempt by Lerwick’s older generation to try to rein in the high spirits of island youth. Soldiers and sailors home on leave after Christmas would rip up the town at night – drinking, brawling, even gunfighting. Their energies had to be channelled somewhere and a more constructive solution became this ritual burning of a dragon boat in remembrance of Nordic ancestors on the last Tuesday in January.

sHe’s a Guizer The holiday Vikings are well organised – just like the real thing. The Guizer Jarl, newly elected every year, is head man, in charge of organising the festival. At his side, a retinue of 50: the Jarl Squad. They pull the longboat to where it will be burnt. Another 45 groups of Vikings march alongside.

Women used to be excluded from the tradition, but even Vikings have grudgingly arrived in the 21st century and in 2015 the first female Guizer Jarl, Lesley Simpson from Maywick, will run the show. In the past, the extent of her participation was limited to serving the men with their breakfast. How times have changed.

spark to a Flame For the Vikings, the flame festival begins long before the procession.

The Guizer Jarl and crew wander

around town all day before lighting their torches on the square at Hillhead at 7pm. The best tourist spot is the harbour at 10am, when the Vikings pick up the ship, or at the Shetland Museum at 3pm, when the men in helmets stop for a break and pose for cameras. Handily, the museum shop sells all you need for a one-night Viking experience, from shields to horned helmets. But no pillaging, thank you very much.

Guizer Good The party really starts after 9pm, once the Vikings have sent the ship to Valhalla. The 46 squads make their way around the pubs and halls to entertain visitors with sketches, shows and dance routines. This is a carnival with a very Hiberno-Viking twist and you’ll need tickets for the dancehall fun. They’re available online in advance but you will need an invitation from a Guizer for all the other 11 dancehalls. But fret not: most Vikings will exchange a favour for a dram or two. The party doesn’t stop till 8am. It’s a good job Wednesday’s a public holiday.

Things bode pretty ill for the ship when the torches are lit at 7pm

WeatHer WitH you Lerwick is the largest town in the Shetland Islands with a population of 7,500. The average January temperature is 3.1°C, but it can get much worse, as snowstorms on Up Helly Aa Day prove. That doesn’t bother the Vikings, though. The ceremony has never been cancelled for bad weather since its inception in 1873. How could it, when the event’s promo-posters declare, in bold type: “There will be no postponement for weather”?

The ‘Jarls’ are provided with new shields and axes every year

wOrDS: fLOrIAn ObkIrcHEr. pHOTOgrApHy: mAUrITIUS (5)

GettinG tHere You can get to Lerwick by ferry from Aberdeen or Kirkwall, or you can fly.

There are flights to Sumburgh Airport on the Shetlands’ southern tip, from London, Glasgow or Edinburgh. Then it’s a short bus or cab ride into town.

Lerwick

aCCommodation There are plenty of B&Bs in town, though hotel accommodation is scarcer. Try Kveldsro House in the town centre (from £105/R1,365 a night), or The Lerwick Hotel on Breiwick Bay (around £100/R1,300 a night).

HeJa, sHetlands

About a thousand hobby Vikings make their way through the streets

The Shetlands may be part of the British Isles, but their proximity to Norway ties them closely to another land. Vikings landed here in the ninth century and Oslo is a third less distant (just 660km) than London.

Dublin London

Up Helly Aa takes place in Lerwick (Scotland) on January 31. Find further info at www.uphellyaa.org

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THE WORLD’S BEST CHEFS

Have food, will travel

WHAT’S ON THE MENU AT HANGAR-7

NUNO MENDES Movement is the inspiration for this Portuguese, who trained at the California Culinary Academy in the US before finding fame in London

‘Viajante’ – Portuguese for ‘traveller’ – isn’t just the name of Nuno Mendes’s east London restaurant, for which his culinary creativity won a Michelin star in January last year; viajante is also Mendes’s motto for life. It’s obvious in his enthusiasm for challenging traditions and from his itchy-footedness in the kitchen: “I get nervous when I have to be still.”

Viajante also applies to Mendes’s past: he founded a record label when he was 16, went to Miami to study marine biology at 18 (“I was a huge Jacques Cousteau fan”) then switched his attention to gastronomy, which brought him into the kitchens of Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Ferran Adrià. He eventually settled in London, where he turned a run-down pub into a culinary hotspot, only then to withdraw to cook for guests in his private loft – now an exclusive supper club three nights a week.

His determined idiosyncrasy has impressed fellow super-chefs such as René Redzepi of Copenhagen’s Noma. Redzepi is currently the world’s most soughtafter culinary master, and it was he who urged the head chef at Salzburg’s Hangar-7 restaurant to take on Mendes as this month’s guest chef.

Brill with horseradish and redcurrants

MY PHILOSOPHY

Viajante Patriot Square London E2 9NF www.viajante.co.uk Viajante can be found serving up top international cuisine in east London’s Town Hall Hotel. It preserves the intimacy and charm of a supper club, not least because the kitchen is part of the dining area. Fancy Mendes’s cuisine without a reservation or the splash of cash? No problem. Head for the hotel’s Corner Room.

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Hangar-7’s guest chefs Every month, a world-renowned guest chef comes to the Ikarus Restaurant in Hangar-7, at Salzburg airport, and teams up with the permanent in-house kitchen staff to create two special menus. The guest chef for January is Portuguese Nuno Mendes, from the Michelin-starred Viajante restaurant in the Bethnal Green area of east London. You can find out more information about his menus and other forthcoming guest chefs at Ikarus at www.hangar-7.com.

Culinary Highflyers 2011, the Hangar-7 cookbook, is available now.

Order online at shop.hangar-7.com

PHOTOGRAPHY: RUTGER PAUW/RED BULL HANGAR-7

THE RESTAURANT

Like father, like son “I’ve worked with a lot of great chefs around the world, but my father was my most important teacher. He taught me how to taste food, how to enjoy food and most importantly, how to cook food. I was already cooking in the kitchen at home when I was five years old.”

Kitchen-sink autobiography “I categorise my cuisine as Iberian with a hint of Asian and South American, but only when I’m forced to. I prefer to think of it as a personal interpretation of my culinary experiences, so it has Portuguese, Japanese and British influences. And many others.”

Restlessness as motivation “I’m always on the lookout for something new. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than a challenge.”

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cook global let the world be your kitchen

Totally fermented national sausages – made out of fermented meats and served with mustard – are always a good excuse for a beer words: klaus kamolz. photography: fotostudio eisenhut & mayer

mititei Romania’s

Romanians stress that the national sausage of their Black Sea homeland has little in common with the famous Slavic Ćevapčići; naturally they consider their own mititei (Romanian for ‘small ones’) far superior.

In summer, these tasty minced rolls of fermented mixed meats (usually beef or pork) are cooked over hot coals and sold very cheaply on bustling street corners. They’re also regarded as a restaurant barometer: if the mititei are good, the rest of the menu’s probably pukka.

Opinions differ as to how exactly the meats used for mititei should be prepared. Many families have their own special recipes with secret herbs and spices, but the most important thing is the drawn-out process of fermenting the meats overnight using baking soda and soda water, which gives mititei their unique flavour.

Even more important is that mititei taste best served with white bread and lots of garlic and mustard. (Oh, and plenty of beer or schnapps to wash them down.)

recipe Serves 4 1kg of beef, pork or 500g of each (preferably the nape or neck) 1tsp marjoram 1tsp thyme 1tsp coriander 1tsp sweet paprika 1 spike star anis

1tsp pimento 5 cloves garlic, crushed Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste 1tsp baking soda 125ml soda water 1tbsp lemon juice 1 to 2tbsp suet Vegetable oil Curing salt (optional)

Put all the meats through the mincer twice. Mince roughly the first time, then more finely the second time. Place in a large bowl.

Pound the herbs together with the pimento in a mortar and pestle, then add to the bowl with the crushed garlic and season with salt and pepper. Gradually work in the baking soda, soda water, lemon juice and suet. Then tenderise the meat for about an hour: take a handful, knead thoroughly and smack it into the bowl. It should end up even in consistency, like mincemeat. Place in a sealed container and leave to sit in the fridge overnight. Remove from the fridge an hour before cooking, wet your hands and shape the mixture into index-finger-length sausages. Grill over charcoal or fry in a pan with a little vegetable oil (at this point if you season the mititei with curing salt, you’ll get a smoky aroma in the pan, too).

The sausages should be cooked the whole way through. Serve with white bread, good-quality mustard and beer or schnapps.

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GET THE GEAR ESSENTIAL PRO KIT

Great haul

STEFAN GLOWACZ The German climber is tackling the mountains of Patagonia this month. Here’s what he’s got with him on the expedition

1 Beal rope A climber’s umbilical cord: it can hold tonnes. I use a Beal single rope, the ever-dry type, with a 9.8mm diameter. It’s 70m long and weighs about 4kg.

1

2 Marmot Alpinist jacket/trousers Both jacket and trousers are fitted out with robust triple-layer Gore-Tex Pro Shell fabric. They’re breathable, waterproof and windproof.

Pretty much indestructible.

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3 Wild Country Ultralite climbing harness We wear the harness on the cliff-face, even when sleeping. This one has a zip lock and elastic leg loops, and weighs 340g.

4 Wild Country Friends support equipment Light and colour-coded, these clamps come in nine different sizes with variable bay widths. They let you find your footing, in and out of cracks, quickly and dependably.

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Stefan Glowacz hangs out with his equipment

WORDS: ULRICH CORAZZA. PHOTOGRAPHY: MANFRED BURGER

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5 Jetboil hanging boiler The hard, anodized aluminium container with an integrated burner base screws onto a can of fuel (a mix of isobutene and propane). You can boil half a litre of water for tea or freezedried meals – rice, noodles, stews – in two minutes.

6 Bonnie & Clyde Red Chili karabiner These light karabiners have two solid catches and a precision key lock. In difficult conditions I carry between 50 and 80 of them.

7 Petzl Myo Rxp headlamp I use headlamps with detachable battery packs, which I carry under my clothes.

My body heat significantly prolongs the battery life.

8 Black Diamond Cliff Cabana Double Portaledge We spend our nights in this: a 7kg aluminium frame with single-point rigging. It sleeps two – fully roped, of course.

There is also a flysheet that we can hang over the apparatus to provide protection against snow, rain and storms.

9 Red Chili Corona climbing shoes The rubber toe box makes this high-end shoe particularly good for difficult cracks.

10 & 11 Charlet Moser crampons and ice axes For ice-climbing stretches I need my old ice hammer, a light, ergonomic ice pick and the 12-pronged crampon with straps.

12 Lowa Vertical GT mountaineering boots Perfect for ice and snow, as well as for mixed climbing with crampons. They may be light, but they still provide the required stiffness.

13 Marmot haul bag For transporting equipment and provisions I use these robust 90-litre haul bags. They have a good harness system and ingenious suspension device for tightening in the cliff-face. …and inside the bag Marmot Thor expedition tent The thin nylon can withstand the worst storms.

Marmot Helium down sleeping bag A very low weight, very low volume, down-filled sleeping bag.

Exped down-filled sleeping pad It’s cavities are filled with highquality duck down to block out the cold, even when we’re lying directly on the ice in snow caves. www.glowacz.de

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WORK OUT TRAINING WITH THE PROS

Desert journey

Two-wheel specialist

The Spanish endurance rider goes into this month’s Dakar Rally as favourite and with one aim: to defend his title at the world’s toughest off-road race

Coma spends more than 19 hours a week on two wheels.

Here’s how he trains his body to cope with the strain

MARC COMA

Marc Coma won the Dakar Rally in 2006 when it was still held on African soil. Three years later, the Spaniard won again as the rally made its debut in South America. (The 2008 event was cancelled due to security concerns; the following year it took place in Argentina and Chile.) One thing remains constant, despite the change in continents: the Dakar is still the world’s toughest endurance motor race. This year, drivers and riders, of cars, trucks, motorcycles and quads, set off from Mar del Plata in Argentina, for a gruelling 14-day competition that will cover more than 9,000km across Argentina, Chile and, for the first time, Peru. Coma has been preparing for his title defence on his KTM 450 for months. “My coach worked out a different programme for each day so that there was always a new incentive to train,” he says. “At the same time, he monitors my progress and intensity very carefully.” Another piece of the puzzle is the three-time Dakar winner’s nutrition plan. Twice a day he eats foods rich in protein, such as fish or chicken, as well as lots of fruit and vegetables.

Coma: Dakar winner in 2006, ’09 and ’11

Six days a week 8.00am: wake-up call 8.45am: breakfast Monday Morning: 75 minutes of training on an easy off-road course Afternoon: Fitness training, 4 x 10 reps, 1 min rest between – bench presses, military presses, back training, core strengthening exercises Tuesday Morning: 3 hours of road biking, at a heart rate of 100-160bpm Wednesday Morning: 5-hour endurance session, incorporating 250km of road book [detailed course notes] navigation

Thursday Morning: 3 hours of road biking, at a heart rate of 100-160bpm Afternoon: Fitness training, 4 x 10 reps, 1 min rest between – bench presses, military presses, back training, core strengthening exercises Friday Morning: 2-hour endurance session Saturday Morning: 3 hours of road biking, maintaining a heart rate of 100-160bpm Afternoon: 2.5-hour trial biking session Sunday Rest day

Joy in hard work You don’t become a triple Dakar winner by being uncompetitive.

Coma is ever the fighter, both in training and race situations “I have been able to turn my hobby into my job; it’s where I draw my daily motivation and challenges from,” says Coma, 35. “I feel like a warrior looking for a duel every day. Any sportsman’s ambition can only be to win. It’s as simple as that. But you should never just think of the end result.” The secret of his success? “There isn’t one.

You’re not gifted anything on a plate. You’ve got to be willing to make sacrifices and work hard to achieve everything. Hour after hour after hour.” www.marccoma.com

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WORDS: ULRICH CORAZZA. PHOTOGRAPHY: ACTION IMAGES (2)

The last Dakar to Dakar was in 2007: since 2009, it has traversed the deserts of South America

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More than 1,000 revellers dance till dawn at Symbol

“I’ve got time machines”

Out nOw essential listening

GOnjASUfi With psychedelic mantras that sound like something from another planet, this Us spiritualist is the new alien of pop

Party all over the world

Seven wonders

DJ Toto spins the house tracks all night long

SYMBOL, BUDAPEST the club that’s not just a club, because it’s also an italian fusion restaurant, a gallery, a cocktail bar and so much more

you could come to symbol every night for a week and never do the same thing twice. it’s divided into seven distinct sections – for eating, drinking, dancing, peoplewatching – whatever your night-time preference. this magnificent building in budapest’s district iii was built in 1782. From the outside, little has changed. stately columns on the façade lend symbol the grace and splendour of days gone by. inside, those seven modern and very distinct interior spaces anchor the building firmly in the now. most striking is the garden under a splendid glass atrium. shady in summer and heated in winter, it’s open all year round – the only place like it in budapest. Just as the garden defies the seasons, symbol cannot be pigeonholed as just a nightclub. you can have an italian meal in the restaurant, or a snack in the 92

cafe, with its stunning blue glass décor; at night, it’s a buzzing bar, with hundreds of different cocktails on offer. one floor below is the dancefloor, kitted out with the latest sophisticated sound and light technology. after a hard day on the track, this is where Formula one drivers such as lewis hamilton and sébastien buemi come to unwind after the hungarian grand prix. resident dJ toto spins house hits (Welcome To St. Tropez by dJ antoine vs timati is a regulars’ favourite) or local bands play live. and after dancing your socks off for most of the night, you can recharge your batteries with a breakfast of champions: the kitchen serves pizzas – really good ones – until 5am.

Symbol Bécsi út 56, 1036 Budapest, Hungary +36 1 333 5656 www.symbolbudapest.hu

Gonjasufi: a spiritual rapper, singer, DJ and yoga teacher

Words: Florian obkircher. photography: timothy saccenti (1)

Best CluBs

Is Gonjasufi quite crackling static and a spiritual person? scratchy vocals over i’m all about energy, experimental rock man. our body is songs, mysterious temporary. that’s sounds, oriental why i always see melodies and MU.ZZ.LE: the recording convoluted hip-hop Cosmic hip-hop devices i’ve got beats. california’s meets space-rock as time machines. gonjasufi creates my ideas will live on long songs that sound as after i’m under the earth. if nasa had sent a Jimi Do you work with samples? hendrix record into space sometimes. i record drums and aliens had sent back and keyboards and then a remix. the result is the chop it up in the computer. sound of another planet, but on the other hand, there another time. of course, that are songs like Sniffing could also have to do with which was just a loop that the fact that gonjasufi lives i tweaked the shit out of. shut off from the rest of the You’re in the Brainfeeder world in the mojave desert. artists’ collective. If you the red bulletin: What were The Muppets, which is it about the desert that one would you be? inspires your music? i’d be like the dude who gonjasufi: it’s very quiet. came around with the When i was working in my scissors and cuts the strings. home in san diego, i used to i’d be saying, “F*** Jim worry about having people henson, you’re all free!” standing at my windows listening to what i was doing and chuckling when i was Gonjasufi’s new mini album, recording. here, if i have MU.ZZ.LE, is out on January 23 a problem with anybody on Warp Records. Get previews and tour dates at www.sufisays.com i can just bury them outside.

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TAKE FIVE THE ALBUMS THAT INFLUENCED THE STARS

“Funkadelic was the first album I actually danced to”

RZA His Wu-Tang beats revolutionised hip-hop. The Grammy Award-winning producer talks to The Red Bulletin about the five records that changed his world

WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES (1)

To the adolescence of early ’90s hip-hop, Robert Fitzgerald Diggs (stage name RZA) brought a maturity founded in the discipline and benevolence of the Shaolin monks he idolised. In 1993, the Staten Island crew released their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), its raucous, nimble lyricism and spare and menacing beats were the US east coast’s answer to west coast hip-hop’s dominance at the time. Those beats were fashioned by the RZA, who borrowed from a mix of soul, funk and kung-fu film clips, and crafted them in the basement

The Wu-Tang don in action: RZA takes turns on the mic, but he’s known more as a pioneer of production

recording studio he’d later use to produce hit records for the Wu’s solo acts, from Method Man to his cousin, the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

Though he took turns on the mic, his prowess was in guiding the solo careers – and crafting the beats – for the members of the nine-man rap collective. His production work on those albums helped spread hip-hop’s gospel, but the Grammy award-winner continued to increase his range.

As an actor, he’s had memorable parts in Coffee And Cigarettes (2003), American Gangster (2007) and Repo Men (2010).

He’s composed film soundtracks for Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch. He’s penned a book, The Tao Of Wu, on the Shaolin philosophy that guided his life and the Wu’s success. Now RZA is in the director’s chair, shooting a martial arts movie starring Russell Crowe. The 42-year-old still makes records, though – and these are some of the albums that continue to influence him.

Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy This showed the growth of an individual. It wasn’t just the opportunity to work with him (on the album), I had the chance to see how Kanye worked as an artist. Hip-hop has always been rogue, but he has a focus. I saw him perform the album at the Coachella Festival last year.

It was the perfect hip-hop concert. I always wanted to do that, but I could never get anybody to agree. I’ve always had to ask nine guys. It’s easier when you’re solo.

Funkadelic: One Nation Under A Groove I remember having a family reunion and One Nation Under A Groove was playing.

Back then, I was a shy kid, but that was the first album I actually danced to, grooved to, had fun to and felt free.

Everybody should take a listen to it and enjoy the musical ideas George Clinton had. It wasn’t hip-hop, but a forerunner.

Stevie Wonder: Original Musiquarium I My mother bought a lot of records, and she had one album that was really important. Musiquarium was full of great music: soul songs, ballads, funk – it had everything. That album helped me in my teenage years and inspired me, not just musically. To this day, the songs still resonate.

Malcolm McLaren: Buffalo Gals One night, I was 10 or 11 years old, and up later than I should’ve been with my friends. We were twisting through the radio and we heard somebody rapping and talking in cool slang.

The radio show was The World’s Famous Supreme Team, one of the few shows playing hip-hop at the time. Malcolm McLaren did Buffalo Gals with The World’s Famous Supreme Team radio DJs. That album was important because it was one of the first albums of world sound, of hip-hop mixed with different sounds and with synthesisers.

It was ahead of its time.

Sugarhill Gang That album, in 1979, was the first time we knew there could be an album for our generation. I never knew someone could make a whole album about hip-hop. On Rapper’s Delight, me, my brother and my cousin, Vince, would rap through the whole song. And when Ol’ Dirty Bastard got older, he would use some of the style on his own album. When he rapped, “Let’s take it back to ’79,” on the Wu-Tang track Triumph, he was talking about back then. Rapper’s Delight was no hooks, it was just rappers rapping through the whole song. The idea was, ‘You don’t need no hooks, just keep rhyming.’

RZA at the Red Bull Music Academy: www.redbullmusicacademy. com/people/rza

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World in Action

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Jan/Feb 2012

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GLOBAL EVENTS OF NOTE THIS MONTH 6 JANUARY 15, THE BEVERLY HILTON, LOS ANGELES, USA

Golden Globes

The awards year kicks off with the ceremony for the gongs bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Ricky Gervais returns as host, despite saying he would not three-peat after his barbs in 2011 were considered too near the knuckle (“Please welcome Ashton Kutcher’s dad!” he said, introducing Bruce Willis.) It is said that if you win at the Globes, then you have a great chance of doubling up at the Oscars in February. It proved true last year for, among others, Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), Natalie Portman (Black Swan) and Christian Bale (The Fighter).

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JANUARY 17-22, MONACO

JANUARY 16-29, MELBOURNE PARK, MELBOURNE

Monte Carlo Rally

the first Grand Slam tournament of 2 As the year celebrates its 100th birthday, the world’s top three in the men’s game appear to be having their cake and eating it. Between them, title holder Novak Djokovic, Rafa Nadal (winner here in 2009) and Roger Federer have won every Slam since Marat Safin won here in 2005, with the exception of the US Open in 2009, won by Juan Martín del Potro. Federer comes in on top championship form, thanks to a sixth Tour Finals title in London last November.

The first rally held on the French Riviera, in 1911, is seen as the mother of modern rallying. This year, the event is back on the World Rally Championship Calendar for the first time since 2008, and is the 2012 WRC opener.

Frenchman Sébastien Loeb won that rally four years ago, and will begin his attempt for a remarkable ninth successive world title at an event he has already won five times previously (another record for his pile). The ‘Night of the Long Knives’, the special stages run in the dark on the narrow, hairpin-bend ridden mountain passes at Col de Turni, is one of all motorsport’s highlights.

Australian Open

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JANUARY 18–22, BUSINESS DESIGN CENTRE, ISLINGTON

JANUARY 19-23, MIAMI, USA TO COZUMEL, MEXICO

The Weezer Cruise It’s a classic career move for any longrocking band, isn’t it? Twenty years after you formed, nine albums in, you commandeer a cruise ship and invite some of your favourite available bands to join you and a (hopefully) capacity passenger list of 2,642 for four nights of gigs, wine tasting and rock bingo at sea. Indie survivors Weezer have invited the likes of Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr to join them aboard the Carnival Destiny in the Gulf of Mexico. Once they return to shore, the American four-piece plan to finish the album they’ve been working on since 2010.

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London Art Fair

Sandwiched between the Frieze Art Fair, held in Hyde Park every October, and the original Affordable Art Fair every March in Battersea Park, the London Art Fair is part of the UK capital’s trio of increasingly large and significant art marts.

The London Art Fair’s USP is its modernity: either the work or the galleries participating have to be spankingly contemporary. Aside from the 100 galleries comprising the main show, this commitment is underlined by the Art Projects section, which showcases only brand-new artworks and exhibitors, and the Photo50 collection of images by contemporary photographers.

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2 Australian Open champ Novak Djokovic

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4 Andrew Salgado’s art, as seen in London

JANUARY 26, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

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D’Angelo

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“I can provide everything that you desire,” sang D’Angelo, on his 2000 track, Untitled (How Does It Feel). A dozen years on from that Grammy-winning hit, and with nothing to show in his discography in the interim, does he still have what the people want? A career stalled by problems with drugs and the law is getting a second act, with a forthcoming album and a short European tour giving a foretaste of the material on it, which begins this month in Scandinavia. The album is produced by ?uestlove, The Roots’ drummer and all-round good egg, who has likened it to a “black version of Smile” the long-lost, now-found Beach Boys treasure. No pressure, then...

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JANUARY 26-29, ASPEN, COLORADO, USA

Winter X Games XVI

What was once banished to the nether regions of unloved sports channels’ schedules is now a global TV hit, broadcast live in 175 countries. The Winter X Games’ rise to become the premier action sports competition on snow has been rapid, and this year’s 16th incarnation, in which more than 200 competitors will take part, has plenty to do to measure up to last year’s.

Among the highlights in 2011 were Kelly Clark’s gold-winning turn in the Snowboard Superpipe, which featured the first-ever 1080 landed by a lady, and Torstein Horgmo’s first-ever triple back somersault, by either sex, in the Snowboard Big Air.

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FEBRUARY 3,4, VALKENBURG, NETHERLANDS

Red Bull Crashed Ice

PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES (2), BEERS LAMBERT/LONDON ART FAIR, SEBASTIAN MARKO/RED BULL CRASHED ICE

No, no, after me, I insist: fierce competition in Red Bull Crashed Ice

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JANUARY 20-25, BATOKUNKU, THE GAMBIA

Ariwa Back To Africa

The mixing console is his instrument, reverb is his tool. When the Mad Professor gets behind the controller, a simple dub flavour becomes a feast for the ears. Massive Attack and The Orb are among the many acts who can vouch for the London producer’s remixing abilities. This January marks the 30th anniversary of his founding of the Ariwa record label, and he’s heading to the largest-ever dub and reggae festival held on the African continent, to celebrate in performance alongside the likes of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

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In festival spirit: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry

Round two of the third world championships of Icecross Downhill, a thrilling combination of the best of ice hockey, boardercross and downhill skiing. Last year’s series also stopped here in Holland, where Arttu Philainen of Finland came out on top, a victory he used as a springboard to the overall 2011 title. In Icecross Downhill, four men race down a temporary ice course, which is usually built in a town square or city-centre location. The competition is fierce, as is the support. A crowd of 25,000 turned up in Valkenburg last year; 40,000 were at a 2009 race in Lausanne, Switzerland. After Holland, the third and final 2012 races are in Aare, Sweden and Quebec City, Canada, respectively.

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FEBRUARY 5, INDIANAPOLIS, USA

Super Bowl XLVI

As any American or Roman can tell you, it’s almost time for the 46th American football championship game. Six months ago, with the NFL’s players still ‘locked out’ after a disagreement with team owners, the chance of kick-off in the Lucas Oil Stadium next month was very low indeed.

But all came good for the start of the 2011 season, which thus far has two stand-out teams: reigning Super Bowl champions the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers, who haven’t been at the big game since 1995. US TV networks also look forward to selling the world’s most lucrative ad slots, at half-time. Last year 30 seconds cost $3m.

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Save the Date January 2012

MAKING THE MOST OF THE HEIGHT OF SUMMER: THINGS TO DO, SEE AND SHOUT FOR IN SA THIS MONTH

JANUARY 22

Half is still a lot Since 2005, the Ironman 70.3 World Series, aka Half Ironman, has allowed athletes to attack 50 per cent of a full Ironman event with 100 per cent effort. That means a 1.9km swim, a 90km bike leg and a 21.1km half-marathon to finish. Since 2008, East London has hosted the South African leg of the World Series, and the race there is as popular with athletes (a record 3,000 participants will take part this year) as it is among spectators. Athletes pass through the start/finish at Orient Beach five times: plenty of opportunities to cheer favourites.

DJs and cheerleaders keep the buzz going from the start at 7am through to the last finishers, due in at 7pm. The winner is expected in around 11am. www.ironman703.co.za

SA’s Xterra legend Lieuwe Boonstra JANUARY 28

Heading south January is clearly triathlon month (see left), with the DueSouth Xterra series taking things off-road in the Magaliesberg mountains and valleys north-west of Joburg. The event starts with a 1.5km swim in the pristine Buffelspoort Dam, which is followed by 27km mountain bike leg that takes in winding single track, the dreaded thick sand, a rock garden, and some vicious climbs. If there’s anything left in the tank after that, the 12km trail run should take the athletes to their upper limit. As there’s nothing like watching people put themselves through hell in the name of sport, you’ll be pleased to know that the course is littered with great viewpoints. There is also a beginner’s race, the Xterra Lite, comprising a 400m swim, 17km mountain bike leg and 6km trail run.

JANUARY 27-29

Make your mark

2011 Ironman 70.3 South Africa winner Frederik van Lierde of Belgium

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If you’re thinking of getting some ink, this is the event to attend. Now in its fourth year, The Cape Town Tattoo Convention isn’t just the only such event in South Africa, but also has a growing rep as one of the best inkfests in the world. You can book a slot with one of the world’s best tattoo artists and walk away from the V&A Waterfront’s Pavilion Conference Centre with some highly prized ink on your person. Though obviously the sound of buzzing needles is a major part of proceedings,

the expo also has live shows featuring burlesque and acrobatic acts, a tattoo-themed mini-golf course, an art exhibition and some suitably raucous musical interludes. www.capetattooconvention.co.za

WORDS: STEVE SMITH. PHOTOGRAPHY: FINISHERPIX, FINISHERPIX, BRUCE GEILS/FLYING HORSE

www.duesouth.co.za/xterra

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Beyond the ordinary the Red BulletiN

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omeone enquiring after the state of your legs at the start of a mass bicycle race is not a particularly unusual occurrence. It is, though, somewhat disconcerting when that person just may be the most famous one-legged swimmer of all time. natalie Du Toit, the Paralympic superstar who crossed the boundary to become an olympian, pointed at my leg, just below my knee.

“Why is your tibialis anterior so well developed?” she asked. I looked down.

The muscle on the front of my lower leg was rather well developed. It wasn’t the first time it had been pointed out to me.

Sean Badenhorst, then the editor of Bicycling magazine, had commented on them after the Cape Argus Pick ’n’ Pay Cycle Tour one year. “Those are real cycling muscles,” he said. “Gosh,” I replied. A real cyclist. Who knew?

And now Du Toit was asking me about them. I didn’t know why they were like that. I had not the foggiest idea. It certainly wasn’t from hours and hours of training, or doing leg raises or squats.

They were just like that. So, being the vain bugger I am, I told her: “It’s because I’m a cyclist. It’s actually a cycling muscle.”

She did not have to point out that only a few feet above that cycling muscle was a paunch that was decidedly not that of a cyclist. It was that of a beer drinker, and one that had been carbo-loading the night before the race. Yet all that is changing. one day, as Dumi the barman poured me a pint, I took a call from an old friend who works in public relations. She was handling the account of Absa, who just happened to sponsor the Absa Cape Epic.

Did I, she asked, want to ride the most prestigious multi-stage mountain bike race in the world? Being three beers into the afternoon on my day off, I said yes. When she called back the next day and asked me if I was still interested, I replied: “Who is this and why are you bothering me?” Then I said yes again.

I will be part of the Absa mediacelebrity team for the race (I am firmly

Mind’s Eye

Training: Top Tibs Preparing for an epic adventure, Kevin McCallum discovers a muscle he never knew he had in the media camp, while Joel Stransky, who kicked a ball for 42-million people, is undoubtedly a celebrity). When we were introduced at the Absa Cape Epic banquet a few months ago, I listened as others answered the question, “Why are you riding the Cape Epic” by saying that they “wanted to challenge themselves further”.

When I was asked, I was honest: “I was a little bit drunk when they asked me.”

I have asked myself every day since why I’m riding the Epic. The training has consumed me. I am well into a 20-week, specific training programme, drawn up for me by Kim Gershow-Rose, the wellknown cycling coach. I made the mistake of giving her my BlackBerry Messenger pin, and now she gives me cyberspace shoves to keep up with my routine on a regular basis. Weekends are reserved for endurance training, which comes in the form of long rides; but true strength

is built up through the sheer torture of intervals. My life has become dictated by acronyms; six two-minute FlD with two-minutes RIB (Fast leg Drills and Rest In Between). All this to ensure that I do not become a DnF (Did not Finish).

We all have our reasons for riding the Cape Epic. During this year’s Rugby World Cup, a friend, Kim ludbrook, the award-winning photographer, told me he would be riding the Epic yet again. This time in memory of Anton Hammerl, the uK-based South African photographer, who was killed by pro-Gadaffi forces in libya this year. Kim had been to libya earlier in the year and spoke of the trauma counselling he had gone through when he got home. In Auckland, he went out and bought himself a single-speed bike and started riding to assignments. The cycling cleared his head, the pain of the effort reminding him of just how alive he was and that by not celebrating it he would not be doing the memory of Hammerl justice. Hammerl had been the most alive of photographers, the most dedicated of men it has been my pleasure to work with when we were together at the Saturday Star.

Kim and fellow photographer Dino lloyd will be riding to raise money for a university fund for Hammerl’s children.

I will be riding for The Star’s Seaside Fund, which raises money to send underprivileged children to the coast for their first, and sometimes only, holiday beside the sea. All three of us will be taking part in the Epic for people who cannot ride – for those without legs, without hope, without a clear future and without a father.

We’ll be riding because we can and because it is the path less travelled. We’ll be riding for all of these things, and for one, silly reason on the side – it builds a certain muscle on the front of your lower leg.

The muscle of a real cyclist, apparently.

Kevin McCallum is an award-winning sports journalist and acclaimed columnist for the Independent newspaper

The Red BulleTin South Africa, iSSn 2079-4282: The Red Bulletin is published by Red Bulletin GMBH editor-in-Chief Robert Sperl deputy editor-in-Chief Alexander Macheck General Managers Alexander Koppel, Rudolf Theierl executive editor Anthony Rowlinson Associate editor Paul Wilson Contributing editors Andreas Tzortzis, Stefan Wagner Chief Sub-editor Nancy James deputy Chief Sub-editor Joe Curran Production editor Marion Wildmann Chief Photo editor Fritz Schuster Creative Photo director Susie Forman deputy Photo editors Valerie Rosenburg, Catherine Shaw, Rudolf Übelhör Creative director Erik Turek Art director Kasimir Reimann design Patrick Anthofer, Martina de Carvalho-Hutter, Miles English, Ken Ulrich Pasche, Esther Straganz Staff Writers Ulrich Corazza,Werner Jessner, Ruth Morgan, Florian Obkircher,Arkadiusz Piatek,Andreas Rottenschlager Corporate Publishing Boro Petric (head), Christoph Rietner, Nadja Zele (chief-editors); Dominik Uhl (art director); Markus Kucera (photo director); Lisa Blazek (editor) head of Production Michael Bergmeister Production Wolfgang Stecher (mgr), Walter Omar Sádaba Repro Managers Clemens Ragotzky (head), Claudia Heis, Nenad Isailovic, Karsten Lehmann, Josef Mühlbacher, Thomas Posvanc editor, South Africa Steve Smith Finance Siegmar Hofstetter, Simone Mihalits Marketing & Country Management Barbara Kaiser (head), Stefan Ebner, Lukas Scharmbacher, Johanna Troger; Birgit A product of the Lohmann (design); Klaus Pleninger (sales); Peter Schiffer (subscriptions); Nicole Glaser (subscriptions and sales marketing). The Red Bulletin is published simultaneously in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. Website www.redbulletin.com. Head office: Red Bulletin GmbH, Am Brunnen 1, A-5330 Fuschl am See, FN 287869m, ATU63087028. UK office: 155-171 Tooley Street, London SE1 2JP, +44 (0)20 3117 2100. Austrian office: Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna, +43 (1) 90221 28800. Printed by CTP Printers, Duminy Street, Parow-East, Cape Town 8000. Advertising enquiries Anthony Fenton-Wells, +27 (0)82 464 6376, or email anthony@tfwcc.net Write to us: email letters@redbulletin.com

The nexT issue of The Red BulleTin is ouT on feBRuaRy 7 & 14

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FATE DOESN’T ASK. IT COuLD ALSO bE mE. Or yOu. David Coulthard,

13-fold Formula 1 GP Champion and Wings for Life ambassador.

SPINAL COrD INJury muST bECOmE CurAbLE. In funding the best research projects worldwide focusing on the cure of spinal cord injury, the Wings for Life Spinal Cord research Foundation guarantees top-level medical and scientific progress.

your contribution makes a difference. Donate on www.wingsforlife.com

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WHEN SCIENCE MEETS ART Dispatch II 速