The Red Bulletin UK 04/22

UK EDITION APRIL 2022, £3.50 SUBSCRIBE: getredbulletin.com

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

THE IMPORTANCE OF

SELF ESTEEM

Pop’s patriarchy-smashing new queen

Editor’s letter

PERSONAL ODYSSEYS “The journey is what gets you where you are,” says our cover star Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as one of the most exciting pop stars of the moment, Self Esteem (page 32). Her journey has redefined what it means to be a woman in a music industry too long governed by a male perspective. But, for Taylor, it’s also been a rite of passage towards self-acceptance and personal joy.

It’s an experience shared by many others featured in this issue. World Surf League champion Carissa Moore (page 56) inspires female surfers across the world, but also had to learn to love herself; British female basketball player Asma Elbadawi (page 28) needed the courage to tackle prejudice in order to chase her own sporting ambitions and help others, while rapper Kojey Radical (page 26) disguised lifelong anxiety behind his public image before finding inner fulfilment. And within our incredible story on the LAX firefighters (page 42) is a very human story about the terrible burden of responsibility.

And then there’s extreme athlete Jonas Deichmann (page 24), whose detour around the edge of the USA took him, well, into the hearts of a new-found Mexican fanbase. Enjoy the issue.

CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE

JIM KRANTZ

With a photography CV that includes cowboys, the US Special Forces and test pilots, the Chicago-based lensman was the ideal candidate to capture LAX’s firefighters.

“Especially interesting to me are the core similarities shared among individuals that operate at such a highly refined level and in the most challenging and dynamic of situations,” he says. Page 42

CHRISTINE YU

PHILIPP MUELLER (COVER)

The New York-based writer bore witness to an all-time surfing legend for her story on Carissa Moore. “I was honoured to help capture her bringing home the first Olympic surfing gold medal to Hawaii, where modern surfing was born,” says Yu. But it was Moore the woman who truly struck her: “Her success and influence on the sport is due to so much more than her athletic prowess.” Page 56

Standing tall: pop star Self Esteem is shot by photographer Philipp Mueller in London for this month’s cover story. Page 32

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THE RED BULLETIN

CONTENTS April 2022

42 Extreme jet wash: the ARFF team of Station 80 in training at their home, Los Angeles’ massive LAX Airport

8 Gallery: subway skating in

Cologne, Germany; clinging on and letting go in Switzerland; rooms to ride in Singapore

15 Songs in the key of life: folk hero

and activist Yusuf/Cat Stevens shares his feelgood playlist

16 Good vibrations: how Deaf Rave is

bringing the party to a community long excluded from the dancefloor 18 Heart on her sleeve: the visionary

designer whose creations clothe your body but bare your soul 21 The Paddle Paddle Surf Project:

keeping boards out of landfill and hard-up surfers on the waves

JIM KRANTZ

22 Struggling post-Armageddon?

This handy manual will help you build a brave new world

24 J onas Deichmann

The unstoppable endurance athlete who’s always thinking on his feet

26 Kojey Radical

The rapper talks identity, anxiety and the healing power of fatherhood

28 Asma Elbadawi

This British Sudanese activist and basketball ace is poetry in motion

32 S elf Esteem

Bold, blunt and uncompromising, Rebecca Lucy Taylor is the pop star the world needs right now

77 Coast rider: get on-board the

Dakar Rally of kitesurfing

83 The old playground game It has

grown up – welcome to chase tag 84 Running start: must-have shoes

for track, trail or tarmac 86 All caps: keep sun and sweat

at bay while on your daily 5K 87 Net gain: life’s a three-pointer for

basketball coach Lethal Shooter

90 Best of a bud bunch: wireless

headphones that last the distance 92 Power play: the awesome Steam

Deck is like a PC in your hand

42 L AX firefighters

93 Bossing it: the legacy of sports

56 C arissa Moore

94 Essential dates for your calendar

Burning truths from a heroic crew Not even self-doubt could knock this surfing champion off her perch

strategy sim Football Manager

98 Outdoors wisdom from Semi-Rad

66 L agos BMX Crew

A grassroots bike scene is born

THE RED BULLETIN

07

COLOGNE, GERMANY

Perfect platform This underground station in Cologne had been on photographer Jan Fassbender’s must-shoot list for some time. So, when rain disrupted his plans with skater Luca Schroeder, the solution was obvious: go deep. “The station is fairly new, and the tunnels linking to the main lines are still under construction,” says Fassbender, a semi-finalist in the ‘Innovation

by EyeEm’ category of Red Bull Illume. “So it only sees a train about every 20 minutes, and very few people. This makes it the ideal architectural backdrop to be skated.” Instagram: @jan.fassbender

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JAN FASSBENDER/RED BULL ILLUME

DAVYDD CHONG

SAAS-FEE, SWITZERLAND

Flying colours Dubbed ‘the Pearl of the Swiss Alps’, the village of Saas-Fee is a car-free idyll nestling amid awesome glaciers like the one pictured. But this ain’t a tourist brochure. Avert your eyes from nature’s beauty for a second and marvel instead at the artistry – and bravery – of German freeskier Teddy Berr. As photographer Willi Nothers explains, “This spot is not easy to hit. It has an icy, short inrun.

If you slide away, you fall into the depths of the glacier.” madebywill.de

DAVYDD CHONG WILLI NOTHERS/RED BULL ILLUME, MARCO MÜLLER/RED BULL ILLUME

BAVONA VALLEY, SWITZERLAND

Getting a grip Around 70km north-east of SaasFee, climber Kevin Heiniger faced perils of his own on the Sonlerto crag. “The footholds here are tiny, so you mostly rely on the friction of your shoes,” says Marco Müller, the man behind the lens. Heiniger nailed it in the end, of course – as did Müller, who bagged a semi-final place in Red Bull Illume’s ‘Emerging

by Black Diamond’ category. Job done. Instagram: @climbimarco

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Anyone else getting Squid Game vibes here? For Singaporean BMX rider Tay Seng Tee, the setting – hundreds of prefabricated rooms awaiting transfer to the building site – was not so deadly, but no less thrilling. “The wall of each unit had a pencilled scribble showing the address of where it would go,” explains Ebrahim Adam, whose photo was a finalist in the ‘Playground by WhiteWall’ category of Red Bull Illume. “We didn’t write it down, sadly – it would have been fun to show the future occupants the image we took.” ebrahimadam.com

EBRAHIM ADAM/RED BULL ILLUME

Play room

DAVYDD CHONG

SINGAPORE

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A R T I FICIAL D I S -

W22

photo by Theo Acworth

O R D E R

SL ASHSNOW.COM

YUSUF/CAT STEVENS

Soul music The folk music icon on four life-affirming songs that lift his spirits

GETTY IMAGES

MARCEL ANDERS

The formula for a good song is pretty straightforward: a catchy melody plus profound lyrics about peace, love and spirituality. At least, that’s how it seems to Yusuf/Cat Stevens – the current stage name of the musician who started out as Cat Stevens, then became Yusuf Islam in 1978 after converting to the Muslim faith. It’s an approach he applied with melodious skill on the ’70s folk anthems Wild World, Moonshadow and Morning Has Broken. After an absence of almost three decades, he returned to music in 2006 to continue his mission, using his songs as a means of enlightenment and creating a bridge between Western and Eastern cultures. Here, he picks four tracks that influenced his songwriting. catstevens.com

Booker T & the MGs

The Beatles

Stevie Wonder

Michael Jackson

Green Onions (1962)

There’s a Place (1963)

Saturn (1976)

Earth Song (1995)

“Growing up in the West End of London [he lived above the family restaurant, just a short walk from Oxford Street], there were clubs and everything, and the big thing then was R&B. Back then, R&B was the development of the blues, but it became more accessible, and there were some instrumentals that just drove me wild. This track was one of them. I would always dance to this – I love it.”

“It would be impossible not to mention the impact of The Beatles – but what songs represent The Beatles for me?

Well, one of them is about a place, which I think is a [theme that links] all the songs I love.

There’s a Place was written [primarily] by John Lennon, and I adore it because, for me, it depicts the destination we all want to end up in: that one place where everything is fine.”

“Stevie is one of my favourite artists, and he turned everything around when he came out of his shell. He did something musically that was incomparable. I love Saturn [from A Something’s Extra, a bonus EP included with his Songs in the Key of Life album]. It’s about how we’re destroying this world, and how some people are thinking of leaving it to find a better place, but there ain’t going to be one.”

“Now, I actually never heard this song when it was first released, because I’d left [the music industry] and I wasn’t really into it. I didn’t know what was going on at that time.

But when I finally got round to listening to what had been happening in music while I was away… I’ve got to say, Michael Jackson just did it. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought to myself.

‘What a brilliant tune.’”

THE RED BULLETIN

15

Meet the DJ who organises music events for the Deaf community and is now teaching them to master their own mixes

When entering a club, you don’t just hear the music, you feel it as the bass reverberates through your body. For Troi Lee, these vibrations are more than a sensation; they’re his portal into music – the Londoner is a Deaf DJ. He wears a vibration vest known as a Woojer, which converts sound into physical feedback, allowing him to feel the beat of music viscerally rather than hearing it. “Without this vest, it would be very 16

THE RED BULLETIN

NINA ZIETMAN

Feel the noise

difficult for Deaf people to become solid DJs,” Lee says.

The Hackney-born DJ founded Deaf Rave in 2003 after noticing a lack of places for the Deaf community to socialise, beyond monthly pub meet-ups.

“We party just like any other human being, but we’re almost invisible,” he says. “I used to go raving all the time, but my Deaf mates wouldn’t come. They said it was for ‘hearing people’.”

After DJing at house parties in Hackney, Lee founded Deaf Rave as somewhere for the Deaf community to perform and gather. The first event sold 900 tickets, and Deaf Rave has grown ever since. The bigger challenge for Lee has been finding other Deaf DJs to join him: “Not only in the UK, but on this planet. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This January, Lee launched Deaf DJ

TROI LEE

DEAF RAVE

workshops – the first of their kind in the UK – at community music space Grooveschool in Brixton. Promisingly for such a male-dominated industry as DJing, four women were among those who signed up to the beginners’ course.

As part of their set-up, Deaf DJs use a sound grid with colour-coded waveforms to visualise the bass and other frequencies. Timing, however, is the most important factor.

“Even if it looks like you’re in time, you need to feel it,” says Lee. This is where the Woojer vest comes in. It has six audio haptics, including two bass transducers in the back.

One participant is deafblind, making the vest is essential.

“We couldn’t teach these DJ workshops without this technology,” Lee says.

Workshops like this have a huge impact. According to a 2017 report by the Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health and Deaf health charity SignHealth, between 30 to 60 per cent of Deaf people in the UK are affected by mental health problems. “There’s really hardcore suffering in our community,” says Lee. “It’s my job to bring happiness and a good vibe through events. We need that experience of being together in person again.”

In 2019, Deaf Rave held its first festival in London’s Victoria Park. Visual performance is as important as the music at these events; signsong and signrap artists perform alongside fire dancers and comedians.

Everything is Deaf-led, from the performers to the ticket sellers.

Lee hopes that outdoor events can resume in 2022, with the new female Deaf DJs showcasing their talent on the big stage. “I’m really passionate about breaking down barriers for the Deaf community. Through the DJ workshops, we’ll get a whole new generation of Deaf people coming through. It’s the beginning of a new chapter.” deafrave.com

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ANOUK WIPPRECHT

Social fabric This designer’s ‘talking’ outfits make the ultimate fashion statement – they reveal your emotions and innermost secrets

Anouk Wipprecht has a dress for any occasion. However, for the Dutch-born, US-based fashion designer, the clothing she makes is more than an expression of how the wearer feels on any particular day; it can physically react to it.

Take her ‘Proximity Dress’ – should anyone come too close, its skirt will subtly extend to create personal distance.

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The field in which Wipprecht works is known as FashionTech – an industry combining highend design with 3D printing, engineering and robotics to make clothing that responds to both our surroundings and our inner self.

“I wanted to create garments that can change and react to us during the day,” says the fashion label owner, now 36, who began designing at the age of 14 and worked on smart-fabric concepts during her studies at Sweden’s Malmö University.

“You might be super-happy in the morning and put on a happy dress. But what if you’re tired in the afternoon?

You don’t want to wear that piece any more.”

Feeling a bit spikier than a mere Proximity Dress can satisfy? Try the Spider Dress.

Built around an exoskeletal bodice, it features an array of proximity sensors that, when triggered, shoot out fearsome-looking mechanical spider’s legs, scaring off any undesirable mouth-breathers.

While both of those dresses explore the nature of public and personal space, other outfits in Wipprecht’s collection facilitate the expression of hidden thoughts and feelings. The Pangolin Dress uses 1,024 EEG sensors to measure the electrical activity of the wearer’s brain and translates this through shape and colour, allowing others to visualise their THE RED BULLETIN

LOU BOYD JEFF CACOSSA, CHRISTINA BAKUCHAVA, YANNI DE MELO

Clockwise from top left: Anouk Wipprecht; her Smoke Dress creates a veil of smoke as camouflage; the Pangolin Dress changes shape and colour to reflect the wearer’s emotions; a digital rendering of the ‘skeleton’ of the HeartBeatDress; Wipprecht’s ‘unicorn horn’ has a camera that monitors the brain activity of children with ADHD to aid their learning THE RED BULLETIN

emotions, while the HeartBeatDress tracks your pulse to literally show your heartbeat on the outside of your body. “As humans, we communicate in many ways – verbally, but also nonverbally,” says Wipprecht.

“There’s so much we can explore in the space of nonverbal communication. [My work] is like engineering, but it is also slightly philosophical.

It both creates emotion and expresses it.”

What’s more, Wipprecht believes her dresses can provide opportunity for difficult dialogues. “People tell me the Proximity Dress doesn’t actually create a real boundary,” she says, “but it’s not really meant to do that.

When the sensors detect the other person is close, it allows the wearer to confidently get into a dialogue and say that ‘the system’ recommends a person nearby should move.”

Wipprecht is hopeful that her technological couture will open the door for more varied interaction, but whether people are ready to expose themselves so explicitly is another matter. “We showed the HeartBeatDress at Milan Fashion Week, and what I didn’t realise was that while models have a bad-ass poker face, inside they’re all nerves,” she laughs. “They came out looking cool, but you could see from the dress that their hearts were pounding.” anoukwipprecht.nl 19

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LOU BOYD MATHILDE MÉTAIRIE

You might assume surfing is a fairly eco-conscious sport, what with its focus on connecting with nature. But on a trip to Indonesia in 2018, surfer and journalist Mathieu Maugret was confronted with a very different reality – one that required an inspired solution.

The Frenchman was visiting the island of Sumbawa to work, write, and ride the waves, when he noticed all the broken boards dumped near popular surf spots.

He made friends with a local surfer who was in the water every day, and he saw that the man was riding a damaged board.

“There was no local industry to buy secondhand boards,” recalls Maugret, 31. “Since I was travelling elsewhere for work, initially I thought I could bring him back a board. But that’s when I had the idea: why get a new board and not mend the ones that have been discarded?”

This simple thought grew into a grander vision: the Paddle Paddle Surf Project, an initiative that rescues broken boards from landfill, repairs them, then gives them a second life with those in need.

Many surfboards are made from recycling-resistant materials such as expanded polystyrene, which can take up to 500 years to decompose, and most of the 400,000-plus boards manufactured globally each year will eventually go into landfill or end up dumped in the sea. Maugret’s first board repair soon became several, and by the time he travelled to the neighbouring island of Lombok at the end of the month, he’d repaired 12 boards. Working with a local contact, he gave them away to children living in the Nambung Beach area.

Since then, the project has transformed into a global endeavour. With the help of friends and volunteers at surf spots in various countries, Maugret collects whatever old boards people can spare, and spends months taking out the dings, making them watertight, THE RED BULLETIN

PADDLE PADDLE SURF PROJECT

and re-beautifying them.

“I started collecting samples everywhere and it grew really quick,” he explains. “Last summer, a group of us rented a house on the French coast and took all the boards we’d collected. We had 128 in the garden to repair.”

In association with partners across the world – from allfemale surf school Sea Sisters Sri Lanka to Surf Ghana, a collective aiming to open a surf school in Busua, Ghana – the Paddle Paddle Surf Project provides free boards and equipment as well as environmental education, while promoting local art and culture on its channels.

Maugret is keen to raise money through local events rather than ask for donations.

“I’ve tried to approach this

Good tidings

How a surf trip became a mission to rescue old boards and, in turn, the world’s oceans not as a classic NGO, but more as a global project in ecology, [centred] around art and surfing,” he says. “We don’t have someone in charge; rather, we’re a collective organising something that looks like our idea of the future of sustainable non-profit organisations.”

Putting fewer boards into landfill and allowing more people to benefit from the positive power of the ocean, the Paddle Paddle Surf Project is helping surfing win back its environmental credentials. paddlepaddlesurfproject.com 21

Tome traveller Some books increase in value over time.

This one could prove priceless if the future takes a turn for the worse

If you could time-travel back to the Middle Ages, what modern invention would you take with you? A telephone? A car?

Maybe penicillin? This was a fun question Russian artist and entrepreneur Vsevolod Batischev pondered as a child.

Fast-forward to March 2020 and Batischev was travelling through Japan with his pregnant wife as the world went into lockdown. The couple found themselves stuck on Naoshima, 22

one of the uninhabited ‘art islands’ on Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, populated only by installations and museums.

“It was creepy walking around with all these art objects and no people,” says Batischev. He harked back to his childhood thought experiment. “This time, we imagined ourselves in a post-apocalyptic future.

We soon realised that we’d be useless, because we don’t know how to make anything with our hands.”

This spurred Batischev to consider a way he could help our collective understanding of human invention. Working with his friend and fellow entrepreneur Timur Kadyrov, he decided to create a manual for anyone who might need to restore human society from scratch. The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding

THE RED BULLETIN

NINA ZIETMAN

THE BOOK

a Civilization is a 440-page encyclopedia containing detailed information on humanity’s most important inventions – from the workings of a steam engine to making gunpowder (clue: it requires hay and urine) – while also offering more holistic advice, such as how to set a dining table or practise yoga. “We didn’t include historical information, didn’t use names; we haven’t even said that it’s for humans,” says Batischev.

“It’s aimed at anyone in any time period or universe.”

Another important consideration was how to illustrate these crucial instructions in a way that would be both useful and entertaining. Using paint and ink, the result is a combination of medieval-style diagrams and technical schematics, showing everything from basic farming and first aid, to how to make glue or an electrical generator.

Batischev’s favourite entry? The mushroom.

“The illustration is beautiful,” he says. ‘It shows how mushrooms can be used for medicine, clothing and food, and then it’s transformed into a psychedelic with no explanation at all.” There are even rules on ball games and chess, to amuse the children of the post-apocalypse.

“Nowadays, people feel our world is very fragile. With everything that is happening – COVID, climate change etc – maybe we will really need this book,” says Batischev, whose daughter will turn two this year. “I often imagine her reading this book. I want her to feel inspired, to breathe in ideas about humanity in a new way. But also I just want everyone to experience that childish feeling of discovering something new.”

The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization is set for release this summer; civilizationbook.com

Sticky situations. Not usually something high on the wish list and not usually something you want to find yourself in, with just one exception that is.

When it comes to MTB shoes, a sticky situation is precisely what you’re after, it’s what you dream of, it’s the goal, the very aim of the game.

A non-sticky situation is at best a pedal slip, at worst it’s painfully gouging a chunk of flesh out of your calf or losing a race. Not good, not what you wanted at all.

Step forward, pun intended, the all-new Endura MTB Footwear Collection.

Crammed to the gills with technology and innovation to make your pedal stroke smoother, stiffer and more comfortable, with better power transfer and crucially a super durable sole made of glue… Ok, it’s not made of glue, but it’s as sticky as hell… which is precisely why we named it Stickyfoot™ Stick or Twist?

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Jonas Deichmann

Continental shift What to do when your plan to cross the world’s fourth biggest country is blocked? For this endurance athlete, the answer was simple: run around the outside Words ALEXANDRA ZAGALSKY

Photography PHELINE HANKE

Accompanied by hundreds of feet matching his pace, flanked by weapon-toting police officers, and tailed by a squad of armoured cars, Jonas Deichmann’s solo run through Mexico City in September last year left the German endurance athlete marvelling at how fate sometimes follows strange tracks.

Weeks earlier, Deichmann’s peripatetic existence was on hold, and his plan to circumnavigate the globe in a wildly ambitious triathlon covering 40,000km – the equivalent of almost 180 Ironmans – brought to a crashing halt by the pandemic.

To complete an epic journey that had already seen him cycle across the Alps, swim 450km across the Adriatic Sea, and ride across Siberia, Deichmann had planned to traverse the US, running from New York to San Francisco. But with the health crisis in full effect, he was denied a visa. Dream over. Or so it seemed.

But the 34-year-old from Stuttgart is no stranger to tricky ventures. Here is a man who had already set a trio of records as the fastest cyclist to travel alone and unsupported across Eurasia, the Americas, and from Cape North in Norway to Cape Town, South Africa. Determined to finish what he’d started, Deichmann’s attention turned to Mexico, mapping out a 5,000km run from Tijuana to Cancún that would take him through some of the country’s most dangerous zones, including the states of Zacatecas and Chiapas.

He needn’t have worried: within 72 hours of arriving in Baja California – having covered a combined total of 22,510km – Deichmann was a TV

24

and social-media sensation and had captured the hearts of the Mexican people, who dubbed him ‘the German Forrest Gump’. the red bulletin: You’ve become a household name in Mexico.

How did word get around about your cross-continent triathlon? jonas deichmann: When I started running in Tijuana, a few local athletes joined me along the coastal road towards the resort town of Rosarito. Less than a week later, about 300km into my journey, cars started to honk and people began to ask for selfies with me. My story had been picked up by a local radio station, and from there things snowballed. By the time I reached Santa Rosalía, overlooking the Gulf of California, I had a police escort.

Wherever I went, I was cheered along. It got to the point where I had a few hundred people running with me, with up to six armed vehicles looking after me in big cities like in Mexico City and León. If they weren’t stopping traffic for me, the police were running alongside with their machine guns strapped to their bodies. In Chiapas, where there’s a lot of drug-related violence, I was grateful for the two armed guards who stayed outside my hotel room.

Running a marathon a day sounds relentless. How did you keep up the momentum?

I don’t think about the fact that I have to complete a marathon a day.

I run one kilometre at a time. If I can do one, I can do another. That way, it never seems overwhelming. The biggest difference to the trip I’d planned across North America was

that I had to plan each run the day before, understanding where I could stop for food – especially in the desert – and figuring out where to sleep. I had a few encounters with rattlesnakes, but the wildlife wasn’t the problem; some regions have a reputation for violence and should simply be avoided at night.

Did you encounter any trouble?

No problems, just surprises. I was worried about entering Sinaloa in northwest Mexico, which is heavily patrolled by cartel gunmen. On a small mountain road, two guys with guns suddenly appeared on motorbikes; they’d had word from some kids with walkie talkies that I was on my way. To my amazement, the men immediately put me at ease, telling me they’d been waiting for me and that I was in safe hands.

They’d been following me on Instagram and even took a selfie with me. Things did get a little more serious when they warned me not to fly my drone over the hills across their plantations, or else they’d have to shoot it down. I thought they might be kidding, but I soon realised they were very serious.

What was the most physically challenging part of the run?

The five weeks through the Baja California desert, where the heat soared to more than 40°C. For almost 300km, there wasn’t a single shop or restaurant. One day, I posted on social media that I was hungry. I didn’t ask for food, but an hour later a pizza arrived, biked by someone from a nearby town. Two hours later, someone met me with enchiladas and burritos. The Mexican people were so incredibly supportive.

And your most enduring memory?

Also the Baja California desert. It may be merciless during the day, but at night, when you pitch your tent and settle down to watch the sunset, you’re transported. It’s simply one of the most beautiful and peaceful places on the planet. jonasdeichmann.com

THE RED BULLETIN

“The Mexican police ran alongside me with guns strapped to their bodies”

THE RED BULLETIN

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Kojey Radical

The pursuit of happiness How the east London poet and rapper finally made peace with his inner demons and produced his most profound work to date Words WILL LAVIN

Photography DANNY KASIRYE

Kwadwo Adu Genfi Amponsah has been searching for the light at the end of the tunnel. The spoken-word poet, rapper and mixed-media artist, better known as Kojey Radical – he named himself after the protagonist of a comic book he created in secondary school – is known on the music scene as much for his sunny disposition as for his brand of socially conscious rap. But beneath the charismatic exterior, Amponsah has spent his life privately battling trauma and anxiety.

“People don’t often speak about the PTSD of being a teenager, having to go to funerals and hearing that people you know have been shot or stabbed,” he says. “I experienced a lot of things growing up that made me take a hard look at mortality quite early on.”

Born in east London in 1993, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, Amponsah dropped his first musical project, Dear Daisy: Opium, in 2014, not long after graduating from the London College of Fashion with a degree in Fashion Illustration.

Three more EPs followed – 23Winters (2016), In God’s Body (2017) and Cashmere Tears (2019) – as did three MOBO nominations and widespread acclaim for his soul-searching music, which deftly explores themes of race, class and social justice. But this success did little to quell his anxieties.

Amponsah’s art contradicted what

was coming out of the UK grime scene at the time, and he navigated those years questioning his identity and his future in the industry.

Now, at 29, following the birth of his son in 2020, Amponsah has reached a place of peace and contentment – a state of mind reflected in his long-awaited debut album, Reason to Smile. He’s made it through the tunnel, but most crucially, he’s come to terms with the journey it took to get there. the red bulletin: How did your experiences growing up affect you? kojey radical: They instilled me with a blind faith, because who knows how long [any of us] have on this planet anyway. My idea of mortality became, “When it’s your time, it’s your time.” I might as well do what I want and think what I want. I might as well go where I want to go, because if something’s going to happen to me, it’s going to happen. That’s how I’ve always rationalised it.

Did your success in music change that outlook?

When my career began to take off, that’s when I was at my lowest point, personally. I started getting money, signed my deal, and I was flying here, there and everywhere.

But I wasn’t OK. I’d come back and suddenly feel less at home than I did in a random hotel in the middle of Bulgaria.

outdated. It’s a fact that the industry and radio will support Black music as long as it promotes sex, violence and drugs. Everything else kind of has to work its way through.

How do you overcome that?

I realised what I was going through was depression and [bad] mental health. From that, I realised [there were ways] I could combat it and help myself. I remember one day thinking about how a lot of my projects end on a low point – they always end with the protagonist being in this dark space. But then I thought about how there’s a celebration in that realisation.

Is that the message behind Reason to Smile?

Absolutely. I wanted to acknowledge all the people who I’ve seen go through hardships and make it out, whether that’s my mum or the mother of my son. When my mum looks at her grandchildren, that’s her reason to smile – surviving all those years, working as hard as she could so that her children could be comfortable enough to have their own children.

One of your reasons to smile is fatherhood. What has that taught you?

Patience. In the beginning, it was difficult for me. I don’t think men have a natural maternal instinct. But slowly and surely you start to really understand that all your experiences are important, because they’re going to help you shape your child’s experiences.

I’ve definitely grown into the role.

Kojey Radical’s debut album, Reason to Smile, is out now on Atlantic Records; kojeyradical.online

Do you still feel that anxiety? ’Course! I feel like everything I was celebrated for in the beginning is slowly moving towards feeling 26

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“I wanted to acknowledge all those I’ve seen go through hardships”

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Asma Elbadawi

Poet, visual artist, social activist, basketball player… this “lass from Yorkshire” is all these things and more.

Pigeonhole her at your peril Words RACHAEL SIGEE

Photography SADIA MIR

At school, Asma Elbadawi’s work was always returned to her covered in red pen marks. “I was constantly told that my spelling wasn’t good, and I struggled with academic writing,” she recalls. Then Elbadawi discovered poetry and, as someone with dyslexia, it opened up a new world of self-expression. “Dyslexia is one of those things that allows you to think completely outside the box,” she explains. “You make connections you normally might not make.”

Perhaps it’s this ability to see the world differently that led Elbadawi to become not only a poet, but also a basketball player and visual artist; she’s currently in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands, while her debut poetry collection, Belongings, explores her dual heritage as a British Sudanese woman. But she’s best known for her activism in sport – in 2017, she successfully campaigned to overturn a ban on female professional basketball players wearing the hijab on court. “I’m a lass from Yorkshire who campaigned for something I felt strongly about, and we were all doing it together,” says Elbadawi, who was born in Sudan and raised in Bradford. “It showed me the power of the collective and made me realise I should never ever feel my voice is not powerful enough.”

You might think there was no more room in her life for further commitments, but Elbadawi celebrates the breadth and diversity of her interests. “As a child, I loved sport, art, poetry, and I was told that

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there was no future in that. But there was no other path for me except this.” As she says in her poem Banshee, “Being anything but me would be a tragedy…” the red bulletin: How does one balance basketball and poetry? asma elbadawi: It’s not that easy. My poetry forces me to be vulnerable and to open up to others, whereas sport requires you to be your toughest self. Like, you can push and shove me, but I’m still gonna make the shot. Poetry has helped me become a better basketball player.

What skills have you learned from each of those worlds?

In sport, I’m the kind of person who wants to be perfect. With poetry, when I was first performing I’d make mistakes on stage and no one cared.

It made me realise that it’s OK to make a mistake. They’re both sides of me that I need, and I can’t imagine life without them. I’m a sensitive person, and if I don’t release that in my poetry, it affects other parts of my life. But I’m also goal-oriented, so being able to challenge myself physically and mentally allows me to be focused. I’ve made them work as best as I can in a world that hasn’t fully created an environment where women can be athletes.

How do you respond to those who say that athletes shouldn’t voice their opinions?

I have this conversation with myself a lot. My first encounter with racism in sport felt like I was being punished for speaking out. For years, I thought athletes should just play and not get involved with politics or humanitarian issues; that they should stay neutral for their own safety. Then I realised the power of having a platform.

So many people who have platforms in this world are saying negative things, so if you’re an athlete and do have a platform, you have a responsibility to stand up for people with less of a voice. Athletes should have personality, an opinion – they should speak out when they see that something isn’t right.

Is it important to challenge others’ expectations?

I think that when we judge others, we do so through [the prism of] our own experiences or those of our communities. We can stop people from achieving their highest potential just because of our own perception of their limits. Don’t let other people define who you are and who you can be in this world.

Instagram: @asmaelbadawi

SADIA MIR/REDEFINING CONCEPTS

Faith, hoops and charity

I wasn’t encouraged by my PE teachers to play netball – which I was really into – for local or national teams. And these are the pathways that get you to where you can represent your country. That’s one major barrier. The second is that women don’t get paid the same as men, even at the elite level.

I know so many athletes who are part-time teachers or have bank jobs or whatever, just so they can continue playing sport.

What barriers do hijab-wearing women face in sport?

The pathways to being an elite athlete are very unknown to women from my community. Part of it is that we’re not visible – people assume our families won’t allow us to take those professions. When I was growing up, THE RED BULLETIN

“Poetry has helped make me a better basketball player”

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“BUILT LIKE A TANK” - Carryology

HIGH PERFORMANCE OUTERWEAR. Designed, developed and tested by former UK Special Forces. www.thrudark.com

Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem, wears a waistcoat by HUGO BOSS; shirt and tie, vintage

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE Words LOU BOYD Photography PHILIPP MUELLER

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Hat by THORA; sparkly green lounge suit by SLEEPER

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Self Esteem

REBECCA LUCY TAYLOR is the new voice of patriarchy-smashing, revolutionary pop music. Here, she tells us how she transformed from earnest indie girl to powerful pop star, and why she believes it’s better to be liked by the few for the person you really are rather than widely adored as someone you’re not

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he opening track of the 2021 album Prioritise Pleasure features a voice note of a group of women discussing their safety in public places. “I always walk home holding my keys in my hand,” one voice says. “It sounds so stupid,” replies another, “but something that me and my friends actually do if we’re approached by a group of men, we will bark like dogs. There’s nothing that terrifies a man more than a woman that appears completely deranged.” The music swells and we hear a female voice bark and howl, purposefully and deliberately deranged. Then the first hook-laden pop beat kicks in and the album bursts into life.

Welcome to the world of Self Esteem, the nom de guerre of 35-year-old solo artist Rebecca Lucy Taylor. Wearing her insecurities as her stage name, Taylor writes songs that rip up the patriarchal narrative and firmly centre all aspects of the female experience – from a fear of walking home alone at night, to shame around whether to have children, to being present in your own body – while simultaneously creating sexy, catchy pop music to dance to. Her new album, released in October last year, was received with an almost frenzied outpouring of appreciation online as people connected with her no-nonsense takes on gender performance, mental health, male violence, sexual

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identity, and more. “This is the pop star I have been waiting for my whole fucking life,” 41-year-old author and columnist Bryony Gordon posted online after hearing the album. “Listening to Self Esteem makes me feel like I could run through a wall,” another woman posted on Twitter. After the fans’ approval came the critics’ endorsement – writers from Rolling Stone and The New York Times alike gave rave reviews as the record crept up the charts. Then followed the awards and accolades: Taylor picked up Artist of the Year 2021 from BBC Introducing; Album of the Year from The Sunday Times; Best Song of 2021 from The Guardian; Attitude magazine’s 2021 Music Award, and, most recently, a 2022 BRIT Awards nomination for Best New Artist.

“Apparently I’m a thing now,” Taylor laughs.

“I mean, I’ve always known I’m a thing, but it’s nice for people to say it.” She’s chatting to The Red Bulletin in the middle of her UK tour, a bursting calendar of gigs. “Because of the pandemic, it was like, ‘Will we ever get to tour again?’ So I’m trying not to be too whingy about it. It is a lot, though.” Tickets to the shows are like gold dust, with fans begging for resales online and even privately messaging Taylor for help getting in. “I really have no boundaries, and as a people-pleasing Libran I’m always like, ‘Oh God! Can I help?’” she says, laughing again. “If people message me and they’re sad enough, I’m like, ‘I’ll put

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Self Esteem

“I never wanted to be dinner-party background music” you on the guest list!’ So now I have a guest list just full of people I don’t bloody know!”

When she launched her solo career in 2017, Taylor had no intention of setting any social conversations – she just wanted to make a sexy pop record. Her debut solo album, 2019’s Compliments Please, quickly revealed she was no cookie-cutter pop star, however. The first single, Your Wife, displayed her impressive lyrical chops, while the follow-up, Girl Crush, succeeded in expressing an authentic queer voice – Taylor came out publicly as bisexual in 2013 – in mainstream music, where pop heavyweights such as Katy Perry and Rita Ora had failed before her. “I was massively into the album Anti by Rihanna, so I was just like, ‘Let’s rip that off,’” she jokes. “Then, at some point, I guess I started realising my own capabilities and my music began growing into something else.”

The standout track on the new album, I Do This All The Time, is a mix of deadpan spoken-word verse – akin to Lou Reed or The Streets’ Mike Skinner – and uplifting, choir-filled choruses. “It’s the bravest record I’ve ever done and was a real game-changer for me,” Taylor says. “I never wanted to be dinnerparty background music. That’s just not what I’m interested in. Throw in the fact that I love heavy beat and heavy bass, I love strings, I love choir, and I love big, cinematic sounds. Put that all together and you end up with… this mess,” she cackles.

A choral element is present in all of Taylor’s compositions; a wall of female voices that hold up the backing track of everything she sings. “I was a choir nerd at school and sonically that’s my favourite texture,” she explains. “I think it’s cool that you get this soundscape of women.” The voices on the new album are all Taylor’s personal friends and colleagues. “I was going to pay a session choir, but instead it’s every single woman who’s important to me, and I think there’s something special about that,” she says. “Once upon a time I would have felt like a right dickhead saying this, but I think that the energy – the stuff you can’t hear, the feeling and the intensity – you ultimately do hear that in the music.”

Energy and intensity are in abundance on Prioritise Pleasure. From the opening track, I’m Fine – which deals with Taylor’s own experience of 36

Self Esteem, photographed in January this year.

“Sometimes, when I’m on camera, I wish I’d done this 10 years earlier”

Self Esteem

“I realise now that if you’re living a lie, you do go mad, and I was” sexual assault – the intention is clear. “Do you understand the pain you cause when you see a body just for sport?” she sings. “Tried to let you down so gently, when I had the right to tell you simply: No.” Then there’s the anger-fuelled How Can I Help You?, in which she mocks her previous sexual compliance – “Never grow old, I’ll always be wet, always be up for it” – and the tongue-in-cheek Moody, a reclamation of the insult often thrown at women. The tracks have resonated with people in a way that she could not have predicted. “It’s interesting how much people have connected with it, because I’m like, ‘Oh wait, shit, we’re all fucked!’” she says. “For me, as a teen and in my twenties, it was just so fucking hard. I couldn’t get my head around what was so wrong with me. If I’ve managed to put that together in a vaguely eloquent way, enough for another girl like me, hating her life, to think, ‘Maybe I might be alright; maybe I should try and stick with it,’ then that is really important to me.”

It seems that there are more than a few of those girls out there, many of whom reach out to Taylor.

“It’s so nice when someone takes the time to message and say that my music has helped them,” she says, “I actually spoke to a guy recently who has daughters in their teens and twenties, and he got super-emotional about how glad he is that I’m doing what I’m doing; that I’ve created this for them.”

Earnest for a moment, she says, “It’s kind of really powerful. I can’t think about it too much because I start getting upset.” She sniggers. “Also, I love older men crying.”

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elf Esteem isn’t Taylor’s first foray into the music industry: for more than a decade, she was known as one half of the soul-infused indie-rock duo Slow Club, formed in Sheffield in 2006 with guitarist Charles Watson. The band enjoyed success, releasing five acclaimed albums and picking up a loyal fanbase. Behind the scenes, however, all was not well with the partnership and Taylor called time in 2017. “I’d been in the band since I was 17 and it was increasingly obvious that I’d become somebody different, a sort of monster

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of confidence,” she says. “I felt like I was being too much for every single room I was in and that somehow made me a burden on those around me.”

Taylor felt at odds with the role of ‘pretty girl in a band’; someone who’s expected to conform to the male-dominated industry’s requirements. “Nothing terrible happened,” she says. “There’s no villain there. It was gradual. I had this constant feeling that something wasn’t right, and I wasn’t happy.” Her experiences in the band partly inspired I Do This All The Time, her breakthrough single as Self Esteem, which draws from comments made by a tour manager she worked with. “All you need to do, darlin’, is fit in that little dress of yours,” the song states, deadpan. “If you weren’t doing this, you’d be working in McDonald’s.” It continues, “You’re a good girl, a good sturdy girl.”

The song speaks volumes about the misogynistic and closed-minded industry Taylor had to navigate, but she insists that it wasn’t others’ personal deficiencies that pushed her to pursue something new, but her own abundance. “I was in a place where it just felt like my ambition and success was a bad thing,” she explains. “For our third album, we put loads of strings and brass in our production.

We were on a label and everything got a bit more exciting. We did a bit of telly and I really thrived in it, but the rest of the band hated it.” She pauses, thinking through her next sentence. “It was as though the things I wanted were kind of gross, and that was melting my brain. We’d go on the telly and I’d really enjoy it and be good on it, and that felt like a real negative in the band.” Another moment’s pause. “That seems so ludicrous now. It’s no wonder I was fucking miserable. But I really did feel like, ‘Maybe I am a dickhead, and maybe I’m not a real musician because I like doing [Channel 4’s weekend chat/cookery show] Sunday Brunch.’”

As Self Esteem, Taylor has freed her unabashed pop ambitions and revealed that, far from gross, they’re exactly what the music industry needed, even if it didn’t ask for them. Her new music is the opposite of gentle indie songwriting; it’s big, dramatic, thundering pop that pivots away from the heteronormative and makes you sit up and listen.

“I realise now that if you’re living a lie, you do go mad, and I was,” she says of her time in Slow Club.

“Sometimes, when I’m on camera, I wish I’d done this 10 years earlier. I mean, my skin would have been a lot better! But I remind myself this career isn’t just for people under 25; in fact, it’s vital that it’s not. The journey is what gets you where you are.”

Now in her mid-thirties, Taylor is – preposterously – one of the oldest artists to ever be nominated for the Best New Artist gong at the BRIT Awards.

“Whatever happens, being a 35-year-old woman nominated for a BRIT Award is a really proud THE RED BULLETIN

Bodysuit by FLORENTINA LEITNER; coat by LANDEROS; earrings by LAGE THE RED BULLETIN

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Blazer by RAY CHU; rings by LAGE; shirt, vintage

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Self Esteem

“Watching Drag Race did something to my brain… It revealed how ludicrous femininity is” moment for me,” she said on Twitter after receiving the nomination. “In an industry obsessed with the youth of women, I’m galvanised as fuck by this...”

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Stylist: TAFF WILLIAMSON Hair and make-up: GABRIELLA FLOYD, using Fenty skincare, Charlotte Tilbury cosmetics and Windle London haircare.

Thanks to Deerhurst Road Shoot Location, London SW16 THE RED BULLETIN

er journey of transformation was set in motion a decade ago, sparked by a trio of unlikely muses: a break-up, a breakdown, and US reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. “I had a really fucking dreadful, classic abusive boyfriend in 2012 and then basically spent all of 2013 haemorrhaging weight and watching Drag Race,” Taylor says with a dark laugh. After a year of living back with her parents in the North and battling with her mental health, she was able to re-examine many of her life choices and opinions. “It was a very weird time in my life where I’d obviously lost my mind and who I was,” she says. “I was dealing with loads of conflicting shit, both with my band and with my relationships, and nothing was really helping. Then I started watching Drag Race, a show where you literally win if you’re the best and you know it. You win if you’re a show-off.”

With its campy catchphrases and bright colours, the show hit a nerve. “My whole life, including that abusive boyfriend, was like, ‘Shut up, be quiet, behave,’ you know?” Taylor explains. “In both my professional and my personal life, it had become a negative for me to try to be as brilliant as possible.

Drag Race was the opposite message and watching it started doing something to my brain.” The representation and dissection of femininity on the show also awoke something in Taylor. “I’ve got the most ridiculous woman body – I’ve got big tits, the biggest arse – and I’ve experienced the greatest shame about it my whole life,” she says, “but in Drag Race, that’s glorified. Being a great big woman is the point of the whole show. It helped me finally think, ‘What if I embraced these parts of me I’m ashamed of? What if I own them more?’”

Look at Taylor’s stage persona almost 10 years on and you can still clearly see Drag Race’s impact. Her shows are an exercise in performative gender where she will dress up as a satin-pink pop siren one night, in a comically over-the-top leopard-print outfit the

next, then in an androgynous boxy black suit the night after. “Drag Race revealed how ludicrous femininity is – this thing we’ve been fed to believe we should want to be,” she laughs. “It’s so hardcore taking the piss out of the normativity of femininity and what’s expected of you; it helped me start to take the piss out of it, too.”

So, does she feel at peace with her body now, existing in an industry that still expects its women to be five foot three and a size eight? “I still struggle, but sometimes I’m like, ‘Let’s go there,’ and I use the things I’ve got shame about to my advantage and to get my message across. The video to the song How Can I Help You? is just my boobs bouncing while I’m playing the drums. I knew that would get clicks, but the song itself is a whole feminist fucking sermon.”

The video has 66,000 views on YouTube at the time of this magazine going to print. “I know the pervs are there – let’s bring the pervs along!” she says.

“They can sit and listen to me for a minute. I know what I’m doing.”

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t’s no coincidence that Taylor’s message of empowerment, liberation and female anger hit a nerve in 2021. This was a year of multiple highprofile cases of violence against women – including the murders of 33-year-old Sarah Everard and 28-year-old Sabina Nessa by strangers in the street – and a sudden spate of women’s drinks being spiked by injection in clubs and bars. It’s no surprise that people were ready for a musician who is brutally honest and unwavering in her views and demands on women’s rights and the state of society.

“When I wrote my first album, I thought the problem was that I was in a band and it was making me unhappy,” says Taylor. “Then, throughout my journey, I realised it’s being a woman in society as a whole. It’s my safety, and my fear and anxiety, and how angry I am in general. That’s the problem.”

When Taylor steps on stage during her Prioritise Pleasure tour, that voice note of the group of women plays over the speakers, but it’s no longer followed by just one woman’s barks and howls – every one of the hundreds of women in the crowd join in.

“The Self Esteem crowds are with me,” Taylor says.

“There was always a disconnect with Slow Club – not just between me and everyone else in the band, but also with me and the crowd. That’s no one’s fault; it was just me trying to fit in somewhere that I we never going to fit in.” She pauses. “But now it feels like I’ve found my people. These crowds are as big and depressed and insane as me. We’re all being too much together. It’s created a beautiful feedback loop of love. It’s life-changing.”

See Self Esteem live this summer at TRNSMT festival in Glasgow, Tramlines in Sheffield and All Points East in London; selfesteem.love 41

HEAT OF THE MOMENT With cutting-edge equipment, relentless training and an intense family bond, the elite firefighting team at Los Angeles International Airport – one of the world’s busiest – is ready to act if the unthinkable happens Words SCOTT JOHNSON Photography JIM KRANTZ

The ARFF squad trains obsessively for the disaster they hope never strikes at LAX. But if it does, they’ll be ready

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LAX firefighters

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ours before dawn broke on August 19, 2020, Michael Flores sat in the front seat of a fire truck and watched a Boeing 767 make a low pass 100m above Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

At around 2.30am, the plane’s captain had informed air traffic control at LAX that his left wheel gear was malfunctioning and he might need to make an emergency landing. Hoping the firefighters on duty that night might be able to see from the ground what he, in the cockpit, could not, the captain decided to bring the plane in for a low-altitude fly-by. From his vantage point on the tarmac, Flores strained his eyes, trying to detect the wheel well – but he couldn’t see a thing. “Uh-oh,” said the firefighter sitting next to Flores. “This isn’t good.”

The Boeing 767, part of the FedEx cargo fleet, was en route from Newark, New Jersey. With all the freight on board, it was pushing 340 tonnes. And it was still dark outside. If things went wrong, a plane that size could become an inferno on one of the world’s busiest runways.

To make matters worse, the aircraft was running low on fuel and had to land. Flores, a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), was at that point a relatively new member of the Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) unit – an elite squad of firefighters based at LAX whose core mission is to protect planes and their passengers and cargo from catastrophic fires.

Many years earlier, Flores recalled, a JetBlue flight from Burbank to New York had been forced to make an emergency landing at LAX with its front-wheel gear stuck at a 90° angle to the runway; by the time the plane stopped, the front wheels had burned off and the landing gear was little more than a smouldering metal stump. In that case, the landing gear held long enough to bring the plane to a safe halt. But now, Flores wondered, what if there was no landing gear at all? A grim picture began to take shape in his mind, and he watched with growing alarm as the 767 made its final approach towards the 3,940m-long runway 25R, one of the longest in the US. As the plane touched down, the left engine slammed onto the tarmac. A trail of brilliant sparks lit up the darkness as the aircraft began to screech down the runway.

Flores and the ARFF team at Station 80 sprang into action. Six huge firefighting vehicles – $1 million limegreen behemoths known as Panthers, custom-built for 44

LAX by the Austrian firm Rosenbauer – raced onto the runway. More than a dozen firefighters swarmed the plane. One team moved towards the cockpit with a set of movable stairs to extract the captain, who was unhurt.

But on the other side of the cockpit, the first officer had already opened his window and tossed a knotted nylon rope to the ground. Yelling “Are we on fire?” he tried to lower himself to safety. Suddenly, his bare hands slipped off the rope and he tumbled to the cement, injuring his leg.

In the end, the FedEx plane didn’t catch fire – but it could have. It was exactly the kind of nightmare scenario that Flores and the other members of the ARFF squad train for day after day: a calamitous wreck that could kill hundreds of people and cause billions of dollars in damage.

Whereas other firefighting units in the vicinity – there are two other stations close by – deal with medical emergencies and fires inside the airport’s eight terminals, the members of Station 80 have just one core job: to help protect the 700,000 or so planes that pass through LAX each year. Fuel spills, smoke in a cockpit, an unexpected odour – seemingly small mechanical issues could, in seconds, become life-threatening conflagrations. In a normal year, around 1,900 planes take off and land at LAX each day – more than one departure or arrival per minute. Many are large commercial jets; some, like the two-level Airbus 380, can hold several hundred people and around 350,000 litres of highly flammable jet fuel.

With such an immense array of potential threats, this elite crew is prohibited from leaving the airport perimeter.

Instead, they patrol it relentlessly, ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. “It’s a whole ecosystem,” says Captain Leonard Sedillos, a veteran firefighter whose mellow disposition belies a fierce commitment to his team.

One of several fire captains who oversee Station 80’s operations at LAX, Sedillos watches over his teammates with the devotion of a mother hen. “Your whole career could be judged on just one incident,” he says.

Incidents don’t happen often, but when they do the response requires a precise combination of teamwork, equipment and experience. Armed with the most upto-date training protocols and the best equipment, the team can harness decades of experience in the most demanding environments in order to prevent the kind of mass-casualty disaster that could scar a city or a country for generations. Working largely out of sight, and with a focus on prevention as well as response, the LAX ARFF squad are the tip of the spear in the daily fight to keep America’s airline passengers and cargo safe. These

One incident at LAX can throw the entire country’s air traffic control patterns into disarray for days THE RED BULLETIN

The $1 million limegreen Panthers were custom-built for LAX by the Austrian firm Rosenbauer

The cockpit of a Panther is filled with extensive tech for comms and firefighting

LAX firefighters

Typically, crews only have about 90 seconds before a fire burns through all the air on a plane

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LAX firefighters

The team works 48-hour shifts, spending a third of their lives together at the station

The ARFF team (above) sprays a enormous wall of flame enveloping an empty plane shell (left) during training. In the event of a real fire, they might use polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as ‘forever foam’, which are a chemical fire suppressant THE RED BULLETIN

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LAX firefighters

Station 80 has one core job: to help protect the 700,000 planes that pass through LAX each year firefighters spend their lives training for the thing they hope never happens. But if it does, they are ready.

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RFF units have been around since 1937, when a US Army Corps of Engineers team first demonstrated the revolutionary firefighting capabilities of a high-pressure fog device. Later, in 1953, the Coast Guard ordered the first ARFF vehicle for use in the US. Since then, ARFF teams have been deployed around the globe. These units require months of specialised training in aeroplane layout and technology, night driving, fuel dynamics, and special aeroplane firefighting protocols.

A major incident involving an airplane is, thankfully, a relatively rare occurrence these days, happening only once every 20 years or so. But every day at LAX presents a new set of challenges, and so, much like soldiers, the team trains for the very worst. Collectively, these seasoned veterans have a few centuries’ worth of experience between them, having worked in city and metro crews across the greater LA region. But inside the roughly 12sq-km of LAX, all this experience is channelled into a narrow and intense beam. “It’s a whole different strategy in here,” says Flores, who joined ARFF in 2016, after 20 years in the city. “Coming here from the outside, it’s basically like you’re starting a new career.”

LAX, which served an incredible 88 million passengers in 2019, is a little like an island within Los Angeles – a city within a city. The airport runs on a tight schedule; there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place. The symmetry of runways, service roads and taxiways reflects this delicate dance. The weight of a passenger-less, fuelless Boeing 747 is around 187 tonnes; fully loaded, it’s close to double that, and once these giants are moving they won’t stop, even on a 60m-wide runway. A never-ending stream of cars, people, buses and fire trucks weave in front and behind the planes, taking care to stay out of their way.

When night falls, LAX turns into a miasma of inky blackness; the only lights visible are those on the ends of a plane’s wings and occasionally in the nose gear. Fog turns the airport into a nearly impenetrable murk. Flores can remember nights when the only way he knew a plane was close was because he could hear the roar of the engines.

For this reason, the firefighters have a rule book for driving around the airport. Special badges demarcate where people can and can’t go. Especially crucial when you consider the Panthers can hurtle along at speeds of up to 120kph, but being top-heavy and laden with bulky machinery, it’s also possible to topple one just by turning it too sharply at 25kph. Crashing one of these giants in this traffic network could cause something far worse than a tailback.

A single incident here at LAX can break like a wave, throwing the entire country’s air traffic control patterns 50

into disarray for days. “If we have an incident and they have to close the runway for a little bit, it changes the system in the whole country,” says Flores. All of which gives the dance of the tarmac a heightened elegance.

And yet, despite the tension inherent to this ceaseless balancing act – or perhaps because of it – the airport is by and large an oasis of relative calm, free of the thrum of human chaos. This is one of the reasons, in addition to Station 80’s lime-coloured Rosenbauer Panthers, that these veterans refer to LAX as ‘the green world’.

They call the tumult outside the airport ‘the red world’ – all car crashes, police chases and homeless encampments.

“It’s fucking horrible in the red world,” says Flores’ colleague, firefighter Billy Barnes, a self-described “airplane nerd” who clocked 21 years fighting blazes on the streets of LA before transferring to LAX in 2021. “All my buddies out there want to be in here,” he says. Born in Queens, New York, Barnes moved to LA as a boy, graduated from high school, and then joined the Air Force, serving in Operation Desert Shield. After watching the regular beat of mayhem on the nightly news, he realised he wanted the action that city firefighters were seeing.

Barnes’ first assignment took him to LAFD’s Station 94, in the so-called ‘Jungle’, where he began to rack up stories. Like the time the survivor of a car collision came limping toward him with his foot dangling by a few tendons beneath a protruding bone; or the three-year-old girl who died in his arms, her warm blood soaking his gloves. Barnes laces his grim recollections with dark humour – a common coping method among firefighters.

Having landed at Station 80 last year, Barnes plans to spend the rest of his professional life here. An African American who looks at least 10 years younger than his real age, he’s the station’s in-house amateur documentarian and historian. Barnes spends his downtime on various firefighting-related activities: building mock-up planes and runways for use in tutorials about safety and best practices; framing black-and-white photos of old fires and the people who fought them; or quietly erecting memorials to the worst aircraft crashes of the past, like the collection of photos that adorns the corner of the conference room, alongside a newspaper clipping that’s now 31 years old – “Pilots Dead, Many Missing in Fiery Los Angeles Crash.”

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ony Guzman was a rookie firefighter back then, with only three months under his belt. It was a February night in 1991, around dinnertime, when the call came in: a major incident was underway at LAX. By the time his crew – stationed just outside the airport at the time – arrived, a giant plume of black smoke was curling skyward from the tarmac. Two other crews were already laying down fire-suppressing foam on the inferno that was consuming US Airways Flight 1493, a Boeing 737-300 carrying 89 people.

Already suited up, Guzman was one of the first firefighters to breach the plane. He entered through a door just behind the cockpit and was surprised to discover a giant hole in the roof that had created a kind of tunnel through which hot gases and heat were escaping, leaving the rest of the plane’s cavity relatively clear. The fire was still blazing, however, and Guzman THE RED BULLETIN

Los Angeles International Airport, which was annually serving 88 million passengers just before the pandemic hit, is like a city within a city

watched the flames move forward through the cabin towards the first-class area and the cockpit, where he was standing. He saw bodies burned beyond recognition “like mannequins”, the victims still seated, killed by smoke inhalation. Everyone else had either escaped or died – except for the pilot, who, though still alive and moaning, was close to death, crushed by the force of impact. For 10 minutes, Guzman and his colleagues sawed through the plane’s thick metal, trying to extract him. But despite their efforts the pilot could not be saved.

Only then did Guzman’s radio crackle to life with more disturbing news: there had been another aircraft involved in the crash. Guzman and the other firefighters began digging through the wreckage, looking for signs of a second plane. Soon they found a small wheel and a propeller that clearly didn’t belong.

As they would soon learn, the US Airways flight had rear-ended a smaller SkyWest Airlines commuter plane carrying 12 people and taxiing for take-off. An air traffic controller had unwittingly cleared the smaller plane for take-off on the same runway that the larger plane was using to land. Together, the two aircraft had collided with a small structure and caught fire. During the crash, the bigger plane crushed the smaller one, killing all 12 on board. All told, 35 souls perished that day – the single worst accident in LAX’s history.

Thirty-one years have passed since the 1991 crash, but the spectre of the tragedy still looms. The work of preventing a repeat is a kind of quiet war; the enemy is the ever-present possibility of human error. Flores spends THE RED BULLETIN

hours logging and detailing intricate lists of equipment and inventory, ensuring his colleagues have the tools they’ll need when disaster strikes.

Quiet and unassuming, Flores is a stocky, dark-haired native of East LA’s El Sereno neighbourhood. He grew up just down the street from a fire station. In those days, engines were huge and noisy, and you could hear them “rumbling, rumbling” in the distance, he says. Today, they hum along like killer whales, silent and huge. When Flores was 17, he participated in a student mentorship programme at LAFD, working at the maintenance facility where tools and machinery were repaired. He began learning how to put up ladders and do hose-lays. Flores’ father was a diesel mechanic and ran his own business, and Flores felt comfortable around the oily machines and big engines of the trucks. His first real fire was a residential blaze near downtown LA. More than the fire itself, he remembers the ‘overhaul’ – the cleaning up and taking stock of what remained. It left a vivid impression – “like a snapshot” – of loss. “It could have been my parents’ house,” Flores says. “You’re basically salvaging what’s left and covering stuff up.”

For understandable reasons, the firefighters often skirt around the issue, but the subject of trauma intrudes.

Barnes, for instance, recalls the Asiana Airlines crash at San Francisco International Airport on July 6, 2013, which killed three and injured 187 after the plane’s tail struck a seawall and the plane broke in two. Word got around that the firefighters on duty that day had somehow overlooked a survivor on the tarmac. A fire 51

The ethos at Station 80 remains the same: duty, honour, community

LAX firefighters

The ARFF team at LAX trains with live fire so that it can respond to a real disaster with calculated efficiency.

Fire teams from as far afield as Nigeria, Canada and Germany travel here to train, too, and benefit from Station 80’s many years of experience and expertise THE RED BULLETIN

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As well as their constant physical training, the team must stay upto-date on the complexities of modern aircraft

LAX firefighters

At night, LAX becomes a miasma of inky blackness; the only lights visible are those on plane wingtips truck driver, believing the victim was already dead, ran her over. An autopsy later determined she had still been alive at the time.

“When you hear about one of us finally taking their life or going into a bad depression, those are guys who knew the decision they made wasn’t the best,” says Barnes.

“That could well happen here, but it won’t, because of a lesson learned.” Still, if you add in a collision with another plane, a strong onshore wind, and a secondary vehicle, suddenly the nightmare scenario that keeps Captain Sedillos awake at night begins to take menacing shape.

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he only defence is training. One hot, cloudless day in November 2021, several members of the Station 80 ARFF team make their way 120km east to the fire station at San Bernardino International Airport for a mandatory ‘live fire burn’. A haze covers the nearby San Bernardino Mountains. Fire teams from countries around the world – Nigeria, Canada and Germany, to name just a few – often come here to train.

On a vast stretch of tarmac sit row upon row of decommissioned planes waiting to be dismantled for spare parts. Behind a single-story office building is the stage for the day’s training: two empty plane shells wrapped in black panelling – mock-ups of the real thing.

The larger of the two sits within a giant, circular, stonefilled pit equipped with 78 gas pipes. The firepit is connected via the underground pipes to a 140,000-litre liquid propane tank.

On cue, the pit bursts into flame as the day’s test engineers set it alight. Around the plane’s shell, a 6m wall of flame turns the air into a furnace, consuming the plane inside. Firefighters wearing fireproof suits and breathing apparatus form a column six men deep and grasp a large hose connected to a Panther. They advance steadily on the blaze, dousing it with huge arcs of water. In the event of a real fire, they might use polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), sometimes called ‘forever foam’ – a chemical fire suppressant that consumes vapour, the lifeblood of fires.

In rare cases, they’ll deploy an expensive and highly toxic compound called Halotron, which is particularly useful for putting out cockpit fires without damaging sensitive electrical equipment like a plane’s auxiliary power unit.

Each one of the six Panthers carries 14,000 litres of water and 4,500 more litres of PFAS. Perched on top of each truck like a scorpion’s stinger is a 18m-long extendable turret that can puncture a plane’s exterior, opening a cavity that allows the firefighters to insert water or foam.

In addition to constant physical training, the LAX firefighters must continually study the complexities of aircraft. Airbuses are different from Boeings, commercial transporters from private jets. How many exit rows? How

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many seats and aisles? How accessible is the cockpit?

Planes used to be made of aluminium; now they’re made of composites, the behaviour of which in a serious crash or fire remains a disconcerting unknown.

Every bit of knowledge can translate into faster action and, as Guzman tells his younger teammates over and over again, seconds make all the difference. Typically, crews have around 90 seconds before a fire burns through all the air on a plane. If the team is not ready for everything at any moment, people might die – the old, the infirm and the disabled first. And sometimes firefighters.

Among the leaders of the group participating in the burn in San Bernardino is Captain Sedillos. Raised in a family of firefighters, Sedillos knew for a long time that he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. Back in his dad’s era, firefighters didn’t have the sophisticated equipment they do now, like the three-layered suits with their names stitched in fluorescent type on the back, and headscarves made of fire-retardant fabric. In the old days, you could tell a firefighter because often their ears were half-melted from excessive exposure to heat. They didn’t have breathing apparatuses or fireproof suits.

They wore regular boots rather than the steel-toed kind that are issued to contemporary firefighters.

But despite all these improvements in equipment, the ethos remains the same: duty, honour, community.

Sedillos spent his childhood around his father’s station, where colleagues were family, sharing tragedies and successes alike. These days, Sedillos often finds himself pulling all-nighters in both the ‘red’ and ‘green’ worlds.

With his twin daughters in college, Sedillos’ overtime is helping pay for their education.

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ack at LAX two weeks later, the mood of the crew is calm but ready. The times have changed, but the team Sedillos manages now remains a family. They work in shifts of 48 hours, which means that at the end of the day they’re spending a third of their lives with each other inside the station. Flores, who played football in high school, finds comfort in the camaraderie. Barnes cracks jokes, his laughter lighting up the room, but like most everybody else here, he has saved lives, revived the dead, and cut survivors and dead alike from burning wreckage. “I wanted some and I got plenty,” says Barnes.

“I’m staying here until the day I retire.” Outside, the planes come and go, the hum of jet engines fading into a pleasant background din.

“When somebody is calling us, it’s usually not just because they want to call us to say, ‘Hey, come on over and visit,’” Flores says. “It’s because they have an issue, and you get there to help them with whatever problem they may have. It’s a good feeling.”

Guzman, one of the oldest members of the team, is ready for what might come. When he talks to the younger members of the ARFF team, he often tells them that things won’t always work out the way they hope. He finds himself thinking back to that February day in 1991.

“I know how important time is,” Guzman says. “Every second really does count. Lives depend on it.”

It’s a sentiment all these firefighters share. And it’s an obsession that makes LAX safe for another day.

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How CARISSA MOORE silenced her fiercest critic – herself – and rode the wave to Olympic and world championship glory Words CHRISTINE YU

JEREMIAH KLEIN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

TUNNEL VISION

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Moore has plenty to smile about after a phenomenal 2021 – in July, she won the first-ever Olympic gold medal in women’s surfing; then, just two months later, she nailed down her fifth world championship

Carissa Moore

“Carissa isn’t just the world champion; she’s the people’s champion” Olympic surfer Caroline Marks, 19

STEVEN LIPPMAN

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ll Carissa Moore could do was wait. The Hawaiian is accustomed to waiting during events – for the swell, for the contest to be called on, to surf her heat, for scores to drop – but this was different. It was September 15, 2021, the day of the Rip Curl WSL Finals – the winner-takes-all event that would crown the world champion – and Moore was defending her title.

Previous championships had been determined based on the total points a surfer accumulated during the season. But sometimes this had resulted in anticlimactic end-of-season competitions where the title had already been decided. To spice things up for 2021, the World Surf League instituted a new format where the five surfers finishing at the top of the leaderboard battle it out, elimination-bracket style, with the champion decided on the water on the final day.

As the number one seed, Moore received a free pass to the Title Match, a best-of-three-heats competition.

It was an enviable position: she only had to surf against one competitor. So Moore waited. She caught some warm-up waves, then chilled at home. About an hour and a half before her heat, Moore headed to the contest site at Lower Trestles in California’s San Clemente, donned her red Beats headphones, and listened to Krack, a 2004 song by Belgian electronic duo Soulwax – a recommendation from her coach, Mitchel Cary Ross.

And as the afternoon rolled around, she learned who

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she’d be facing off against: Brazilian-born, Hawaiianraised Tatiana Weston-Webb.

Initially, the first heat looked like it would go down in typical Carissa Moore fashion. She caught a wave right off the buzzer and gradually ratcheted up her scores: 3.00, 5.73, 8.33. It was like she was winding up for a knockout punch. Except it never happened. Moore seemed uncharacteristically out of rhythm, falling off the wave on her turns. In a normal contest, she would have had a couple of heats to work out the kinks, but here she had to paddle out cold into one of the most important match-ups of her career. Meanwhile, WestonWebb was warmed up, having surfed against Australian Sally Fitzgibbons in the previous round.

The Brazilian-American’s backhand – surfing while facing away from the wave – was relentless, gaining momentum with each ride, until she was in the lead.

With less than 30 seconds left, both surfers vied for a wave, but Weston-Webb held priority, giving her first dibs, and she nabbed another solid score. With only nine seconds left, Moore was still hunting for something, anything to surf, but nothing materialised. “Did that just happen? Did that really just happen?” she asked herself when the buzzer rang.

As she came in from the water, Moore realised the title could slip through her fingers. Her nerves got to her. She could tell by the way she rode her waves, and in her decision-making. Now she had 35 minutes to 59

“Shooting for a contest win is one thing, but being able to do it in a unique fashion is even more special”

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oore has long been in the conversation regarding the greatest surfer of all time, and 2021 put a huge exclamation mark on that claim. She won the first digital Vans Triple Crown of Surfing. She placed no lower than third at any event on the Championship Tour and held onto the coveted yellow jersey the entire season. She landed one of the biggest aerials in competition – a massive air reverse in the quarter-finals of the Rip Curl Newcastle Cup in Australia – surprising even herself. In Tokyo, she won the first-ever Olympic gold medal for surfing. She claimed her fifth world title. Jessi Miley-Dyer, a former pro surfer and now

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rein in her emotions before surfing two must-win heats.

But her thoughts spiralled. Was she capable of winning?

What if she failed?

These questions left an opening for a pesky voice to creep in – a voice she calls ‘Old Riss’. Old Riss is selfflagellating and spins tales designed to drag Moore to dark depths like an unrelenting wave. In recent years, she has worked hard to quieten Old Riss – to acknowledge her presence, yes, but also to learn how to talk to herself with kindness. Yet Old Riss was back in full force in the locker room at Lowers.

Moore felt pushed up against the wall. “It was like, hey, you can either continue this negative self-doubt, downward spiral and just give up now,” she says. “Or you can dig deep and give it your best shot and fight.” She had a talk with Old Riss, firmly saying, “Not today,” then leaned on her preparation, remembering her sessions at Lowers over the years and her training with her dad, Chris Moore, back home on Oahu. A quick call to her sports psychologist helped ground her. She pulled strength from her team: her coach, her dad, her husband Luke Untermann. “My husband looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘Babe, if anyone can do this, you can,’” Moore recalls. It was more than a pep talk. Her team’s unconditional love and belief buoyed her and reminded her why she loves surfing – as a way to express herself, not for the trophies. It was like they were already chairing her down the beach, the traditional celebration when an athlete wins an event. She was already the champ, regardless of what happened next.

With the residue of the first heat washed off her jersey, she waded into the water with a clean slate. Her renewed confidence was evident from her first wave of the second heat. She carved up a glassy Lowers wall with her trademark powerful, sweeping turns. She won the next two heats in convincing fashion.

Moore had confounded Old Riss and triumphed. She was the world number one again, having won back-toback championships for the first time in her career.

Moore competes in the Maui Pro at the Banzai Pipeline – known to surfers as just Pipeline – off the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, in December 2020

GETTY IMAGES, RYAN MILLER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Clockwise from above: Moore celebrates a historic gold-medal victory with Team USA at last July’s Tokyo Olympics; holding the spoils from her world championship win in San Clemente in September; carving with characteristic power at the Corona Open Mexico in Huatulco in August

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Carissa Moore

Moore rewrote the script on what’s possible for women in surfing, and gave others the power to believe WSL’s head of competition, says Moore’s year is “probably the most successful year anyone’s ever had in the sport”.

And she’s only 29.

Some might say Moore’s rise to the top was a foregone conclusion; people expected great things of her long before she had even competed professionally. But it’s more than just her accomplishments that set her apart.

It’s the way Moore surfs – freely, from the heart – that makes her one of the best and most progressive surfers of her generation and beyond.

In the lead-up to the WSL Finals, Moore was home on Oahu, doing what she’s done countless times: surfing under the watchful eye of her dad. They ran practice sessions – 30 minutes in the water, rest for five minutes, repeat – designed to simulate the new contest format.

Moore was born in Honolulu, and it was her dad who introduced her to surfing in the turquoise waters off Waikiki Beach when she was five. He’s been her coach ever since. Like any proud parent, he shot videos of little Carissa surfing and posted them on a blog. He wholeheartedly believed she could accomplish anything she set her mind to. “He’s always pushed me to strive for more than I thought I could,” she says. That unfettered confidence gave her the freedom to experiment. MileyDyer remembers watching those clips when she was still competing on tour. It was the first time she’d really seen a girl – not even out of middle school – do manoeuvres like aerials, fin throws and massive carving turns. “We all kind of went, ‘Who is this?’” Miley-Dyer recalls.

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t’s no surprise people predicted Moore would change the trajectory of the sport when she burst on to the competitive surf scene aged 12. As an amateur, she racked up 11 National Scholastic Surfing Association (NSSA) titles. When Moore finally arrived on tour in 2010 as a teenager, everyone expected her to be crowned world champion right out of the gate. While she didn’t win a title in her rookie year – that would have to wait until her second year on tour – she did stress-test the boundaries of high-performance surfing. “Shooting for a contest win is one thing, but being able to do it in a unique fashion is even more special,” Moore says.

Her style would come to define power surfing. She rides waves with an impeccable flow punctuated by staccato power punches at the lip, whip-quick snaps back into the pocket – the wave’s energy centre – before unleashing another swooping line across the face. She’s pushed the progression of technical tricks in women’s competitions, too.

“No one had been doing them,” Miley-Dyer says. “There was no kind of rubric for how these things were scored.”

Moore is quick to point out that she’s not solely responsible for the sport’s development. Prior women on

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tour had set a benchmark for her performance goals – where she needed to go and surpass. Plus, the current crop of athletes – such as Stephanie Gilmore, Tyler Wright, Lakey Peterson and Caroline Marks – are no slouches. “There’s been this healthy push among all of my peers that has really helped us keep raising the bar,” Moore says. “We can show the girls what is possible, but that you can go past it.”

“Carissa is someone I have so much respect for,” says Marks, who also represented the US at the Olympics.

But first the 19-year-old had to wrap her head around the fact that she was now surfing alongside one of her idols. In 2019, Marks notched up her first pro win against Moore, a moment she describes as “crazy”. But if she’s honest, Marks didn’t want to compete against anyone else in that situation, because “she makes me a better surfer”.

While Moore’s technical prowess had an immediate impact on her peers, her biggest influence has been more subtle. She rewrote the script on what’s possible for women in the sport, and in the rising generation of women surfers she instilled the power to believe.

Izzi Gomez first believed she could win a world title after watching Moore. Gomez, 21, now a five-time stand-up paddle-surfing world champion, started to take surfing seriously at the age of 12. She didn’t have a coach, but she had Moore. Gomez studied footage of the badass girl ripping and surfing like a guy, which Gomez says is “how you want to surf to be the best”.

When Nike released the film Leave a Message in 2011, it was radical for showing women’s surfing as, well, surfing, rather than being padded out with artsy lifestyle shots. “I would always fast-forward to her part because she was pulling into huge barrels, doing airs, blowing her fins out,” Gomez says. “Just the coolest moves. At the time, no other girls were doing that.”

Miley-Dyer saw that impact, too. “The fact that [Moore] was consistently doing [these manoeuvres] and, importantly, that she did them when she was young, makes it tangible for a lot of young kids,” she says.

Nailing gnarly aerials and surfing waves like the Banzai Pipeline – aka Pipeline, off Oahu’s North Shore – wasn’t just something to aspire to, it was something they could now do, and today there’s a crew of unbelievably talented teenage female surfers – including Caitlin Simmers, Erin Brooks, Bettylou Sakura Johnson and Vaihiti Mahana – who are sending it. “They’ve grown up only watching that in the competitive arena,” Miley-Dyer says. “It’s totally normal for them that women would be doing airs, and that they should be doing the airs. It’s that flow-on effect from someone like Carissa.”

Yet, while she’s checked off every major professional accomplishment, Moore still has goals. Like improving her backside barrel-riding technique; getting better at waves of consequence like Teahupo’o; flying above the lip more; making her surfing look even more seamless, graceful and radical at the same time, and doing it all within a 30-minute heat format. “It’s different when you’re just surfing all day long,” she says. “When you have to do it under pressure, and in a time frame, it’s a really fun challenge.”

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Moore at the 2020 Maui Pro. After triumphing against Brazil’s Tatiana Weston-Webb in the semis, she finished runner-up to that year’s champion, Australian surfer Tyler Wright

Carissa Moore

It’s the way Moore surfs – freely, from the heart – that makes her one of the best surfers of her generation

TREVOR MORAN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

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efore leaving for the Tokyo Olympics, Moore was invited to a screening of Waterman, a documentary about Duke Kahanamoku – five-time Olympic medallist in swimming and the godfather of modern surfing. Kahanamoku’s dream was to see surfing in the Olympics, something he pushed for right from the 1912 Games in Stockholm, Sweden.

Moore says that when growing up she passed his statue almost every day on her way to surf Waikiki. But she admits that before seeing the film she didn’t know much about Kahanamoku’s legacy – not only his Olympic achievements but the kind of person he was, and how he used surfing to spread love and aloha. She describes the scene of his funeral in 1968, where there wasn’t enough standing room on the beach for all those he’d touched during his life. “Being able to see that film before I left gave me a sense of pride as a Hawaiian, as a surfer, going to the Olympics and seeing his dream come true,” she says. “I’m so proud to be a small part of the story.”

You could say Moore isn’t just part of Kahanamoku’s legacy; she’s carrying it on. When asked to describe Moore, the same answer is often repeated: she’s a good human. “She’s not just a world champion,” Marks says.

“She’s the people’s champion.” Moore has often said that surfing is an extension of herself and a way to connect with others. “I want people to remember my surfing because it made them feel something,” she says, and that it leads people to be more understanding and empathetic, too. It’s the North Star that keeps her centred amid the chaos of travelling the globe, the heavy expectations, and the inevitable target on her back.

“Throughout her career, she has consistently found sources of motivation that are personally important as well as uplifting for the sport,” says Miley-Dyer. After Moore’s first pro win in New Zealand, she donated her prize money to a local boardriders’ club. More recently, she gave a speech to the community of Makinohara, Japan – in their native tongue – to thank them for hosting Team USA’s pre-Olympics training camp.

In 2018, Moore launched Moore Aloha, a non-profit that encourages young female surfers to be strong, confident and compassionate individuals. Moore had a hard time balancing life as a professional athlete with that of a teenager who, like other adolescents, grappled with her changing body and the search for her identity.

“I’ve put so much pressure on myself my whole life to get a certain result,” she says. “It was like, ‘Who am I if I’m not winning contests?’” But unlike most adolescents, Moore’s struggles played out under the harsh light of public opinion. People relentlessly picked apart her appearance, compounding the feeling that, despite her successes, she wasn’t enough.

Moore has spoken openly about her binge eating and the body-shaming she experienced as a young athlete, as well as the professional burn-out that followed her third world title in 2015. The Moore Aloha non-profit is another way to remind people (including herself) to believe in themselves. “It’s really cool to hear Carissa speak on that from her personal experience,” Gomez says. “She’s showing I can still be beautiful and an amazing human and an amazing athlete.” Moore admits her motivation is selfish, too – she feels good when she sees girls smile, walk away with a new friend and feel empowered after riding a surfboard for the first time.

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here’s a photo of Moore standing in front of a low barrier with the word ‘Tokyo’ painted on it. She’s looking out towards the ocean. The clouds show glints of the fading sun. A red, white and blue towel is wrapped around her waist, and her hands rest on her hips. Moore’s shoulders hang low, betraying a sense of calm, a quiet confidence that no matter what the universe rolls her way, she knows she’s living by her own standards of success and happiness. And the universe had tricks up her sleeve at the Olympics. For one, Moore wished she had known that each heat would involve sprinting down the beach and then paddling out into the surf. Then she would have trained for it, she jokes. And due to COVID-19 restrictions, her trusted team couldn’t travel with her; she’d only have Team USA by her side.

The biggest wild card was the surf itself. Conditions during the initial rounds were lacklustre, but then they came to life with Typhoon Nepartak. Organisers scrambled to change the schedule and run the quarter finals, semi-finals and medal rounds in one day. After a long day, Moore advanced to the gold-medal match – the last heat of the day, against South Africa’s Bianca Buitendag. She had a moment of doubt beforehand.

Naturally, she called home and was reminded she already knew what to do. She was ready.

With foamy, choppy surf, this wasn’t going to be a shoot-out of technical skill; it would be a tactical game of wave selection and getting points on the board. At times it felt more like a battle against the ocean, both athletes repeatedly washed over by the whitewater and paddling endlessly against the current. Eventually it was Moore who found her rhythm. She capitalised on the handful of clean wave faces, the ones with the most scoring potential, and went to work.

In the fading daylight, announcers started counting down the clock. Moore, still paddling back to the line-up, was unaware. She looked back toward the beach and sat up on her board, a look of confusion on her face before a flash of realisation. She covered her face with her hands before flashing a brilliant smile and raising her arms in celebration. Team USA embraced her and chaired her up the beach.

Moore had achieved a dream that she hadn’t even foreseen a few years earlier. But still the job was not quite complete. On her return to Hawaii, the newly crowned Olympic champion made a special pilgrimage to the statue of Kahanamoku to share her leis with a fellow legend of surfing.

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Words ANDREAS WOLLINGER Photography TYRONE BRADLEY

Scrappy fun Lagos BMXer Sharad Fatai nails a spectacular leap. The setting – a scrapyard in Nigeria’s largest city – is hardly the ideal playground for showing off your bike skills, but the local riders have grown accustomed to improvising.

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Lagos BMX Crew

Working order Matthew Temitope – aka Starboy, one of the founding fathers of the Nigerian BMX scene – pays the local bike shop a visit for a service.

For Matthew Temitope and his friends, 2012 was a life-changing year. The young Nigerian had been browsing a secondhand store in Lagos when, among the used clothing and bric-a-brac, he spied treasure: a handful of vintage BMX bikes.

He knew he wanted one, even though he didn’t know exactly what he was buying; a swift Google search would soon open his eyes – wide. From this serendipitous discovery, a grassroots Nigerian BMX scene was born; a community that, in a country with no skateparks at the time, would have to hone its skills on the streets. Photographer TYRONE BRADLEY hung out with Temitope – better known to his peers as Starboy – and his crew in Lagos

Design for life Since discovering BMX, the sport has become the most important thing in Oluwasegun Adosu’s life, as his haircut shows. The rider, known as SKing, also sports numerous BMX tattoos.

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Quick fix Starboy strikes a typically nonchalant pose in his red work overalls, close to his father’s garage. As soon as lunch time arrives, he’s out riding on the streets.

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Lagos BMX Crew

Under the bridge SKing (pictured left) lives in Makoko, a floating slum village beside the bridge linking the mainland to Victoria Island, an offshore haven of wealthy residents. Deemed illegal by the government, which has threatened its demolition, Makoko is a community with its own laws.

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Spokes man SKing’s obsession runs deeper than even haircuts and tattoos – he asked a local artist to paint this picture of a BMX on the wall of his home.

Lagos BMX Crew

“BMX shows me all that’s possible, and that you can do anything” Oladejo Ibrahim, aka Keke Money

Homecoming hero BMX superstar Courage Adams in action in Lagos. Born in Nigeria but raised in Spain, Adams regularly challenges for top honours worldwide; last August saw him take second place at the international BMX/skate event Simple Session.

The rider, who now represents his adopted country, first discovered his new Nigerian peers on Instagram. For this audacious jump, they first had to build him a plywood landing strip.

Ultimate wheelie Oladejo Ibrahim, aka Keke Money, shows off his signature trick – a wheelie with the front wheel removed – at Lagos’ rundown National Stadium. This is a regular haunt of Lagos BMX Crew – on Boxing Day last year, they staged a BMX Jam here, with cash prizes for the best tricks.

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Lagos BMX Crew

Pushing the limits Pictured on his way to meet fellow members of Lagos BMX Crew at Freedom Park, Onyemechi Samuel is known for his fearless approach to every trick.

Born to ride Keke Money is a primary school teacher by trade, but he prefers to ride BMX, much to the displeasure of his family. They think he’s wantonly gambling away his future.

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Showtime

“I feel alive with my BMX bike.

It makes me the person I want to be“

Starboy performs a high bunny hop over SKing’s perfect balancing act near Lagos City Hall. SKing specialises in freestyle tricks, whereas Starboy favours traditional street-riding. This area has some excellent spots to showcase the talents they’ve honed on the streets of Lagos.

Matthew Temitope, aka Starboy THE RED BULLETIN

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VENTURE Enhance, equip, and experience your best life

DAKAR OF THE WAVES

THIAGO DIZ

The world’s first kitesurf rally

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VENTURE Travel

“Previously there had been 15 to 30 minutes between athletes; now it’s closer to four hours and a lot of the riders are giving up” Marcela Witt, Brazilian pro kitesurfer

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Pedro Macedo Soares de Araujo flies through the finish line on day three; (above) the starting point at Kauli Seadi Kite Center

TOM WARD

’m pushing hard, three days into the 2021 Sertões Kitesurf 500km.

My board is heavy in the water, my feet are sore and bleeding, and the wind is perpetually changing direction, which is why my kite keeps falling. This is the point where I miss the buoy. The buoys are crucial checkpoints in this, the world’s first long-distance kitesurf rally; they encourage competitors to keep up. Miss one and 30 minutes are added to your time. But worse than that, slow riders can get left behind, and that’s dangerous. The water is warm, and although I’ve never heard of shark attacks around here, this is still the ocean.

The Sertões Kitesurf 500km is the first of its kind – a six-day South Atlantic race up the northeast coast of Brazil, from São Miguel do Gostoso in Rio Grande do Norte to Preá in Ceará; an ocean-bound endurance rally where the

THIAGO DIZ, GABRIEL HEUSI

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VENTURE Travel Brazilian kitesurf pro – and writer of this feature – Marcela Witt prepares her equipment before the start of the competition

kitesurfers spend hours per day on the water with support teams riding along via car. This is its first year and there are around 100 riders, aged 14 and upwards, competing in four different classes: ‘adventure’ for amateur racers; ‘double’, where teammates split each day’s journey; ‘masters’ for those over 50; and ‘elite’. I’m racing in the women’s category of the elite class, which has a first prize of R$4,000 (£560).

I grew up kitesurfing with my family in Rio. Unlike regular surfing, kitesurfing doesn’t require waves; you’re powered instead by the wind propelling your large, hand-controlled kite. And it’s very fast. (In the late 2000s, the speedsailing record was regularly broken by kitesurfers; American Rob Douglas hit 55.65 knots, or 103kph, in 2010 and held the record for two years.)

Then, at the turn of the millennium, the sport really took off. I was 14 when THE RED BULLETIN

I entered my first competition, in 2005, and I took part in my first long-distance downwind event aged 20. I had no idea what I was doing and was completely out of my comfort zone, but it was one of the best experiences of my life. I was hooked.

Even with my expertise, the Sertões Kitesurf 500km is a hard race to predict.

Brazil’s coastal conditions change a lot; you might have offshore or onshore winds that help you go fast, or sidewinds that slow you down. It’s a really fatiguing sport – similar to running, you can go out for two hours and enjoy a steady pace, but in competition it’s like sprinting, going really fast – around 30kph – for days at a time. Pushing yourself for one day is OK, but day after day that can be exhausting.

Often you can’t see other competitors and just have to guess your position.

My initial plan was just to go and have fun. A lot of the athletes were riding twintips [boards that can go in both

Flight path

FINISH Preá

The route of the Sertões Kitesurf 500

Icaraizinho

Porto do Pecém Beberibe Icapuí Guamaré START São Miguel do Gostoso

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VENTURE Travel

Board and lodging Where to stay and where to play during the event Kauli Seadi Kite Center “The competition starts here,” says Witt. “Kauli is a windsurfing world champion and he now runs this great windsurfing school.”

Ilha dos Poldro Hotel, Maranhão “One of my favourite places, west of Preá. To kite in the ocean you need to be advanced, but here anyone can kite on the Parnaíba river.”

Vila Guará Hotel, Atins Beach, Maranhão “Amazing beach bungalows and another fantastic kite school.”

Vila Kalango Hotel, Jericoacoara, Ceará “Jericoacoara National Park is a paradise – great for surfing and unwinding.”

Rancho do Peixe, Preá, Ceará “The competition finishes here.

There are beautiful bungalows on the beach, and the food and wine are amazing. I spend a month here every year.”

Wave of emotion: (top) competitors in the Elite category line up for the start of the race on day one; (above) kitesurfer Bruno Melo Côrtes at the finishing line on the final day

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“Even with my expertise, the Sertões Kitesurf 500km is a hard race to predict”

good and I know that anything could happen. I finish the course in 17 hours, six minutes and 34 seconds. It’s not until I step on the podium that I’m sure I’ve won.

I believe that good things happen when we step out of our comfort zone.

Competitions are like life: it doesn’t matter if you are ahead today; you can’t just give everything in that one day only and not be ready for the next.

In competitions, as in life, you can go slow but you must never stop.

Marcela Witt is a Brazilian professional kitesurfer, the first woman to kitesurf in Antarctica and at the fearsome big-wave surf spot of Nazaré, Portugal. Follow her on Instagram: @marcelawitt. The Sertões Kitesurf 500km took place on October 8-14, 2021. For information on this year’s event, check out sertoeskitesurf.com.br THE RED BULLETIN

TOM WARD

I decide to just keep going. We get to rest overnight in tents in remote locations, but I don’t think the organisers expected us to be so fast. Often, competitors are arriving before the cars, waiting in the sun without food.

On day four, the wind is really light, causing big gaps in the field to start opening up. Previously there had been 15 to 30 minutes between athletes, but now it’s closer to three or four hours, with a lot of riders giving up. On the last day, I’m more than two hours in front of the nearest competitor, but she’s really

THIAGO DIZ

directions without having to be turned 180°] because they’re faster, but I was riding a surfboard. It’s slower, but I think it’s more fun. Pretty early on the first day I was 20 minutes behind the leader, but, judging the pace, I realised that if I swapped to a twintip there was a chance of winning. For the second day, I switched and started competing. Then comes that buoy on day three. It’s in a bay at the end of the longest section – more than 100km of riding. I’m less than a minute late crossing it, but the race officials have it on GPS. Upset, I push on. By the end of the day, I’ve passed the leader and I finish three hours in front.

Recovery in the evenings is proving really hard. At the beginning I was planning to stop and eat while riding, but after making up my mind to compete

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VENTURE How to… called Sketchy Andy [Tomin, from London-based team UGen] who’s so committed to getting a tag, he’ll hurl himself from one side of the quad to the other. He’s cut his face open a few times.”

Swot the quad

“Each year, the obstacles stay fairly consistent, so you can learn new manoeuvres. Xavia Rodriguez Alvarez, a Spanish player for the team Breach, has a thing called the ‘Guac Track’ – looping around all the obstacles above the floor in the most efficient way possible. My strength is being close to the floor and sliding under obstacles.”

Herd mentality

“There’s a strategy called ‘herding’, which is exactly how it sounds: you’re trying to herd your chaser or evader into a certain area. You stomp and clap to panic your opponent and their brain references the sound coming down one side of the court, forcing them the other way.”

JOIN

The It crowd World Chase Tag master Greg Ball schools us on an intense, professional version of an old playground favourite

JOHN MEYER

HOWARD CALVERT

T

ag – also known as It – is one of the most primal of childhood games. The skills required to win – to run from and dodge the player who is ‘it’ – are born from an ancestral need to survive in the wild: hunt, evade, escape.

For Greg Ball, these abilities translated directly into a competitive career in World Chase Tag (WCT), an intense, fast-paced contest between a chaser and evader in an obstacle-filled arena, known as the ‘quad’. Whoever succeeds in 20 seconds wins the round. It’s fiendishly simple, yet gripping to watch as its competitors are masters of gymnastics and parkour.

The 25-year-old Brit first encountered chase tag at his local parkour school. Having grown up obsessed with Jackie Chan, the Spider-Man

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films and the opening chase from the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale, he was instantly hooked. “I love it because it puts you in a ‘fight or flight’ mode,” Ball says.

“There aren’t many sports where it’s all-or-nothing.”

Having won back-to-back WTC World Championships between 2016 to 2018 with his team, Marrero Gang – and made it to the 2019 final of

Intimidation game Ninja Warrior UK – Ball now has his eye on a fourth WCT crown this June. Among the competition is French team Blacklist, captained by Sébastien Foucan – founder of freerunning, one of Ball’s opponents on Ninja Warrior UK, and the man who played James Bond’s quarry in that Casino Royale scene. Foucan is a friend, mentor, rival and childhood hero, but Ball isn’t intimidated. “Shut off your thinking and become one with the quad,” he says.

Here are Ball’s tips on how to avoid being ‘it’…

Forget fear Escape artist: parkour athlete, three-time World Chase Tag champion and Ninja Warrior UK finalist Greg Ball

“When you’re scared of hurting yourself, that’s when you get injured, because you’re preoccupied. Chase tag is about trusting your body and instincts. There’s a player

“Team UGen [who Marrero Gang beat in the 2018 WTC final] has players who love to intimidate us. Sketchy Andy stares you down, puffs up his chest – he enters the quad like an animal. But with players like this, it’s easy to throw them off their game. It must work – they’ve yet to beat us.”

Find your inner child

“One thing I learned from Sébastien Foucan is to add a ‘game mentality’ to life, and that transfers to chase tag because, after all, it’s just one big game. The more fun you see, the more you’ll start playing around and the better you’ll be. You need mental fortitude, but take it too seriously and it typically doesn’t work out too well.”

Instagram: @greg_balll.

World Chase Tag 5 UK is scheduled to take place this June; worldchasetag.com 83

VENTURE Equipment RACE

One step ahead The best running shoes for pounding the pavement during your daily 5K – and for weekend trail runs, too

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TIM KENT

Clockwise from top: THE NORTH FACE Flight Vectiv, thenorthface.co.uk; LA SPORTIVA Jackal, lasportiva.com; HELLY HANSEN Okapi ATS, hellyhansen.com; ARC’TERYX Norvan LD 2, arcteryx.com; ADIDAS TERREX Agravic Ultra, adidas.co.uk THE RED BULLETIN

VENTURE Equipment

Opposite page, clockwise from top: THE NORTH FACE Flight Vectiv, thenorthface.co.uk; LA SPORTIVA Jackal, lasportiva.com; HELLY HANSEN Okapi ATS, hellyhansen.com; ARC’TERYX Norvan LD 2, arcteryx.com; ADIDAS TERREX Agravic Ultra, adidas.co.uk This page, clockwise from top: COLUMBIA Escape Ascent, columbiasportswear.co.uk; LA SPORTIVA Karacal, lasportiva.com; SALOMON Speedcross 5, salomon.com; BROOKS Catamount, brooksrunning.com; MERRELL Moab Flight, merrell.com THE RED BULLETIN

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RUN

Heading the pack A running cap keeps you sun-safe by day, visible at night, and your eyes free from sweat. Here are 12 of the best…

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From top, left to right: SOAR Run Cap 3.0, soarrunning.com; RNNR Lightweight Running Hat Pacer, rnnr.com; THRUDARK Force, thrudark.com; BBCO Flow Gable, bbcoheadwear.com;

BUFF R-Solid, buff. com; VERSUS X FRACTEL Party Cap, versussocks.co.uk; BROOKS Propel Mesh, brooksrunning.com; ON Lightweight Cap, on-running.com; CIELE ATHLETICS

GoCap SC, cieleathletics.com; MONTANE Minimus Stretch Ultra, montane.com; LA SPORTIVA Stream, lasportiva.com; SALOMON Air Logo, salomon.com THE RED BULLETIN

TIM KENT

VENTURE Equipment

VENTURE Fitness

W

atch any basketball player sinking a perfect three-pointer in the NBA or WNBA and chances are you’re looking at a client of the man they call ‘Lethal Shooter’. It’s a nickname Chris Matthews has rightfully earned as the most soughtafter shooting coach in the world. His approach – “the art of shooting” – is a philosophy that emphasises consistency, repetition and mental focus.

Matthews fell in love with basketball at an early age. “I could shoot really good,” says the 36-year-old Washington DC native. His father was the first to call him ‘Lethal’: “He’d always tell me, ‘Don’t pass the ball, shoot every shot.’ That’s where the love came from.”

A standout shooter in college, Matthews played professionally in Europe, South America, Russia and China for seven years before a series of injuries ended his career. “I did it at an elite level, so teaching it is second nature,” he says. “Every day, I’m trying to master it myself.”

To stay sharp, he might sink 300 shots in a session.

Matthews has found deep gratification in his reinvention as a coach. After helping a few NBA friends, his reputation quickly spread. “It’s satisfying to see that with hard work, consistency and dedication, it can all pay off,” Matthews says. “That’s true not just with basketball, but in life.”

KOURY ANGELO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

JEN SEE

Find your range

“To be the best shooter, you have to do it every day – it’s muscle memory,” explains Matthews. “Form shooting is really good from close [to the basket]. Some people try to shoot from too far out too early, but you’ll develop bad form. Master each step before you step back. You’re learning the feel for the ball, of your body, of how to breathe. To warm up, I’ll go to the free-throw line and make 40 to 60 shots in a row. Then I step back.”

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PERFECT

Hoop for the best

Chris Matthews, coach to basketball’s elite, on how to shoot like a pro

Don’t get triggered

“There are certain things in basketball that you just can’t control, so you have to learn to block them out.

Do that and you’ve mastered the art of shooting. Everybody is different. Once I see what your trigger points are, I’ll keep bothering that trigger.

That way, you get to understand that nobody but you can distract you from your greatness.”

Do the legwork

“The art of shooting comes from the core of your legs,

so keep them tight. Riding a bike is the best way to build up the muscles around your knees. [Cycling] is one of my passions I got from my dad, and I own a NordicTrack [exercise bike]. As a hooper, try not to over-lift, and make sure you’re lifting light.”

“The only person who can stop you in life is you” Chris Matthews

Listen to your best self “Whenever you’re trying to master something, it requires the mindset to understand that the only person who can stop you in life is you.

It’s not your neighbour, not your mum or dad, not some person on social media… it’s you. It’s you telling yourself every day that you can be successful. It’s all about doing that every single day, being consistent, never being satisfied. If you want to master something, you must believe in yourself.”

Instagram: @lethalshooter 87

WELCOME TO THE NEW NORMAL

MARK STANLEY

Transform your workouts with the Compex CoreBelt

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orking from home for the last two years has been tough on your body. Sitting at a makeshift desk – whether that’s your kitchen table, sofa, or even the corner of your bed – for long hours without the incidental exercise that comes from being in an office is likely to have left you feeling seized up, particularly in your back. Even if you’re lucky enough to have avoided the dreaded knots and aches, there’s a good chance that your exercise routine has taken a hit with the shift to home working – morning spin classes swapped for make-do virtual videos; any heavy items you can find around

the house substituting for the weights room.

The new normal suggests that this way of living is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept the knock-on side-effects to your health. And the best bit is that it doesn’t require any additional time or effort either, as the new CoreBelt from Compex proves.

The concept of muscle stimulation is simple. Safe electric pulses are sent to your muscle’s motor nerves, and the intensity of these pulses will determine their effect. At the lower end of the scale, they will help to oxygenate the muscles and flush them of post-workout toxins, while stronger pulsations

can simulate cardio or weightbased workouts or provide deep tissue pain relief where you need it most. In practice, this also enables you to increase the gains you can get from a bodyweight workout without having to reach for any dumbbells – ideal if your front room is still doubling as a gym.

The CoreBelt is the latest addition to Compex’s extensive line of muscle stimulators and focuses on your abdominal and back muscles. Although often forgotten in favour of more noticeable gains elsewhere, a strong core enhances your stability with all functional movements, improving form while protecting your back,

PROMOTION

The CoreBelt tones and strengthens your abs and back more efficiently than standard crunches

and taking your athletic performance to new heights.

The easy-to-use CoreBelt can fire up an abdominal workout, enhancing and optimising your gains in a way that a standard set of crunches simply couldn’t.

So whether you want to turbocharge your sitting twists or spice up your sit-ups, the CoreBelt will get you toned and strong in a fraction of the time.

The top-of-the-range CoreBelt 5.0 comes with nine different stimulation programmes – from ab sculpting to pain relief for your lower back – that can be easily controlled, modified and tracked using the free Compex Core app on your smartphone.

The CoreBelt is also available in

two other models, depending on your needs and budget.

Whichever CoreBelt you opt for, you’ll get a belt and control unit with each purchase, as well as a fourpack of electrodes, an easyto-transport travel pouch, and a charging cable. If you’re completely new to using a muscle stimulator, the app also provides guidance on electrode placement for the best results.

For more information on the Compex CoreBelt, or to view the full product range, visit compex.com/uk

VENTURE Equipment

The smallest on the market, EARIN’s A-3 buds are ergonomically designed to stay in your ears, with 30 hours of playing time

TRAIN

TIM KENT

Safe and sound There’s nothing worse during a workout than unreliable headphones. These wireless earbuds ensure high-end audio and a secure fit, no matter how hard you train 90

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VENTURE Equipment

SKULLCANDY’s Push Active earbuds have voice control, allowing you to play, pause, adjust volume, take calls and skip tracks hands-free

Opposite page, from top, left to right: URBANISTA Athens, urbanista.com; SKULLCANDY Dime 2, skullcandy.co.uk; CAMBRIDGE AUDIO Melomania Touch, cambridgeaudio.com; NOTHING Ear (1), nothing.tech; SOUNDCORE Liberty 3 Pro, uk.soundcore.com; JBL Reflect Flow Pro, uk.jbl.com; EARIN A-3, earin.com THE RED BULLETIN

This page, from top, left to right: TECHNICS EAH-AZ60, technics.com; SKULLCANDY Push Active, skullcandy.co.uk; BANG & OLUFSEN Beoplay EQ, bang-olufsen.com; AUDIO TECHNICA ATH-SQ1TW, audio-technica.com

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VENTURE Gaming

PLAY

Beast of both worlds

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STEAM DECK

The Steam Deck features the A, B, X and Y buttons, dual analogue sticks and four shoulder triggers of a standard control pad. It also has two thumb-friendly touchpads

For hardcore video gamers, there has only ever been one true hardware choice: a PC. Even the latest consoles like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X can’t compare to a top-spec gaming rig, which is why some of the most cutting-edge games are first released on PC. But there’s a trade-off: you’re stuck playing it at a desk.

US games developer Valve Corporation wanted to change that, and as the owner of Steam – the digital platform that accounts for 75 per cent all PC game sales – it was in the ideal position to do so. The answer? Build a PC as portable as Nintendo’s hugely popular Switch. Much like that hybrid handheld/home console, the Steam Deck is a fully featured games controller wrapped around a high-resolution touchscreen.

What’s different is the raw power within, which is on par with the PS4 or Xbox One S, making it the most powerful handheld gaming machine by quite a margin. Most importantly, it houses Valve’s Steam games store, giving access to almost every PC game on the market. And, being an actual PC, the Steam Deck can be sideloaded with Windows OS or other games stores such as Xbox Game Pass. Plus, you can buy a dock to connect it to a TV or even your old PC monitor if you’re missing that deskbound vibe. steampowered.com/steamdeck

TOM GUISE

Power or portability? It’s the eternal video-gaming dilemma – and now the Steam Deck has solved it

VENTURE Gaming COACH

Like a boss Imagine being the talent scout who discovered Messi?

If you’d played Football Manager, you might have…

Undiscovered Pep Guardiolas can be found everywhere – on the terraces, in front of their TVs, propped up in a pub – all clearly more clued-up on team tactics than the overpaid fools running the football clubs.

Such is the appeal of armchair punditry that, each year, around eight million players pick up the latest edition in the Football Manager (FM) videogame series to test their skills.

And a few are actual top-flight football managers.

It’s serious business: the average FM player spends more than 250 hours a year in the game, and it’s been cited in divorce papers as a factor in the breakdown of at least two marriages. But as video-game critic Simon Parkin explains, these players might hold the secret to cup-winning glory.

this means studying visual stats of where you lost the most possession, showing diplomacy in interviews, and hitting performance targets for the board of directors.

Data mining

Much like the real sport, FM employs actual scouts – thousands of them, scouring the globe for new and established talent for the game’s database of 650,000 players, each with 250 data points. “You hear about footballers racing each other to see whether the game is right,” says Miles Jacobson, director at the London studio of FM’s developers, Sports Interactive. Former Chelsea manager André Villas-Boas has used the game to inform his decision-making, and Alex McLeish, ex-coach of Rangers, admitted ignoring a tip from his son about a player he’d spotted in FM,

playing for Barcelona B. It was a young Lionel Messi.

Give yourself options

“One of the biggest complaints we get is the number of injures in the game,” says Jacobson, “but we have only 70 per cent of what occurs in professional football.” He believes there’s a lesson here for every manager, not only those in sports. “If you blow your budget on a star

Simon Parkin is an author and The Observer’s gaming critic.

His new book, The Island of Extraordinary Captives, is out now; simonparkin.com

player with high wages, you’re not bringing people through.

That translates to running a business – spread the talent.”

Hyper realism

Football players also use FM to gain a better understanding of their sport. When Gareth Barry joined Aston Villa at 16, his contract stipulated that the club bus include sockets so he could play it on his laptop.

However, in-game dramas have crossed over into real life.

Everton’s Andros Townsend once received a text from his girlfriend asking why he’d been fined for missing training. She forwarded him what seemed to be a tabloid article. Townsend immediately recognised the game’s font and posted it to Twitter with the message, “Do you wanna tell her or shall I?”

Football Manager 2022 is out now on Xbox, Switch, Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android; footballmanager.com

The beautiful job

SIMON PARKIN

FM might seem more like impenetrable spreadsheets than a game, but then, this ain’t FIFA. Sure, you pick your starting squads, manage substitutions and choose match tactics, but it’s as much about negotiating transfers, managing injuries, building training regimes, even dealing with PR disasters. “We wanted a functioning football world,” says Paul Collyer, who built the first game (launched in 1992 as Championship Manager) with younger brother Oliver while still at school. In FM 2022

Overlapping centre-backs, xGs, Christmas-tree formations – if all this makes perfect sense, Football Manager could be the game for you THE RED BULLETIN

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VENTURE Calendar

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March to 29 August ROOTED BEINGS

8 March onwards FAST LIFE The life of a world-class mountain biker is one of epic highs and lows, and we’re not just talking about the insane trails they navigate in pursuit of glory. Emotions, injury, self-doubt – all come into play behind the scenes, often unseen by fans. This ongoing series reveals all of that, and in this fifth season we get an intimate insight into the lives and minds of US cross-country rider Kate Courtney (pictured), French five-time downhill world champion Loïc Bruni and Canadian elite downhill racer Finn Iles as they tackle the 2021 season of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup. redbull.com

Not eating your veg is the least of humanity’s crimes against plant life, as this exhibition reveals. It takes us from flora’s emergence from the oceans 450 million years ago, to the industrial destruction of an ecosystem accounting for 85 per cent of Earth’s biomass.

Exhibits include specimens from the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew; shamanic art by Joseca of the Amazonian Yanomami people; Eduardo Navarro’s biodegradable works (pictured); performance art linking marine and intestinal flora; and an ‘intimate’ opportunity to pollinate a flower by drinking its nectar. Wellcome Collection London; wellcomecollection.org

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to 9 April LE BAL DE PARIS Spanish choreographer Blanca Li has worked with legendary filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, the Paris Opera Ballet, and on iconic music videos including Daft Punk’s Around the World, and now she wants to work with you.

This show – Best VR Experience winner at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival – combines live performers and body-tracking software to transport you to a fantastical ballroom, with on-hand lessons from the dancers when the headsets come off. Barbican, London; barbican.org.uk 94

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VENTURE Calendar

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March onwards THE SANCTITY OF SPACE In the first half of the 20th century, US husband-and-wife mountaineers Bradford and Barbara Washburn made first ascents of some of Alaska’s highest peaks. More than 80 years later, filmmakers Renan Ozturk and Freddie Wilkinson followed in their footsteps… kind of. Rather than simply going upwards, the duo went sideways, pioneering a route across one of the most perilous mountain ranges, the Moose’s Tooth massif.

A breathtaking film. At cinemas nationwide; dogwoof.com

BARTOSZ WOLINSKI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, EDWARDO NAVARRO, BLANCA LI DANCE COMPANY, DOGWOOF, SAMO VIDIC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

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March onwards RACE CRAFT: INSIDE MXGP March onwards QT PRESENTS THE GREEN ROOM The past few years of lockdown have echoed the Prohibition-era of 1920s America, when drinking venues were closed and illegal ‘speakeasy’ bars emerged. Fortunately, their latest incarnation is perfectly legit, and this secret watering hole at the Middle Eight Hotel in Covent Garden is a shining example. The residency of Leo Green – named “one of the best and craziest saxophonists” by Jeff Beck – ensures a revolving door of high-profile patrons including Van Morrison and Beverley Knight. Expect better drinks than uncut moonshine, too. Covent Garden, London; middleeight.com THE RED BULLETIN

Midway through this series on professional motocross, you’ll see 27-year-old Dutch rider Jeffrey Herlings win a race with a fractured shoulder blade. It’s just one of many incredible moments in the series – a deep dive into what it takes to survive and succeed in this dangerous and downright dirty motorsport.

This is race craft. redbull.com 95

GLOBAL TEAM

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The Red Bulletin is published in six countries. This is the cover of our French issue for April, which features French kayak ace Nouria Newman.

For more stories beyond the ordinary, go to: redbulletin.com

The Red Bulletin UK. ABC certified distribution 145,193 (Jan-Dec 2020)

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THE RED BULLETIN Austria, ISSN 1995-8838 Editor Nina Kaltenböck, Wolfgang Wieser Proofreaders Hans Fleißner (manager), Petra Hannert, Monika Hasleder, Billy Kirnbauer-Walek Publishing Management Bernhard Schmied Media Sales & Partnerships Thomas Hutterer (manager), Michael Baidinger, Franz Fellner, Ines Gruber, ­Wolfgang Kröll, Gabriele Matijevic-Beisteiner, Alfred Vrej Minassian, Nicole Okasek-Lang, Britta Pucher, Jennifer Sabejew, Johannes Wahrmann-Schär, Ellen WittmannSochor, Ute Wolker, Christian Wörndle, Sabine Zölß

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THE RED BULLETIN USA, ISSN 2308-586X Editor-in-Chief Peter Flax Deputy Editor Nora O’Donnell Copy Chief Catherine Auer, David Caplan Publishing Management Branden Peters Advertising Sales Todd Peters, todd.peters@redbull.com Dave Szych, dave.szych@redbull.com Tanya Foster, tanya.foster@redbull.com

THE RED BULLETIN France, ISSN 2225-4722 Editor Pierre-Henri Camy Country Coordinator Christine Vitel Country Project M ­ anagement Alexis Bulteau Contributors, Translators and Proofreaders Étienne Bonamy, Frédéric & Susanne Fortas, Suzanne ­Kříženecký, Claire ­Schieffer, Jean-Pascal Vachon, Gwendolyn de Vries

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Semi-Rad Adventure philosophy from BRENDAN LEONARD

“A few weeks ago, running came up in conversation with an acquaintance who said something like, ‘I don’t run unless I’m being chased.’ I get it – I run hundreds of miles each year, and I don’t necessarily get anywhere; I always end up back at my house, or at the trailhead where I parked my car. I agree that it doesn’t really make sense in the context of human evolution, and that the only real reasons to run are if you’re late for a flight or someone is chasing you. But since running, and especially ultrarunning, has been shown to lengthen our telomeres – the protein caps on the ends of our chromosomes, which essentially prevent age-related disease – I guess I am actually running from something: ageing.” semi-rad.com

The next issue of THE RED BULLETIN is out on April 12 98

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