The Red Bulletin_1205_ZA

CERN / Habiba Ghribi / Kevin McCallum / Herbert Nitsch / Mariana Pajón / Santigold / Will Smith / Rufus Wainwright

MAY 2012

A BEYOND THE ORDINARY MAGAZINE SUPER SOARAWAY

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THE GOD PARTICLE INSIDE CERN, WITH 10,000 SECRET-SEEKING PHYSICISTS

FONDA’S LAZARUS RETURN

WHY EASY RIDER’S LATEST MOVIE MAKES AMERICA THINK AGAIN ABOUT 9/11

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THE WORLD OF RED BULL

May 64

18

GET ON DOWN At the opening round of the 2012 UCI World Cup Downhill series, in South Africa, perceptions of what downhill mountain biking has become – and what it can be – are left in the dirt

SHE SOUNDS LIKE NOW Santigold reveals how she overcame a case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome with much laughter, a serious side and a spot of transcendental meditation

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: PATRICK HOELCK. PHOTOGRAPHY: SVEN MARTIN, DDP, CP IMAGES/ZIPTREK ECOTOURS, LUKAS MAXIMILIAN HUELLER

Hard rides No one could accuse Peter Fonda of opting for – excuse us – an easy ride with his new movie, The Lazarus Protocol. The man who came to fame as the Captain America of counter-culture is once more challenging the establishment, only this time in a far more confrontational manner.

The film engages with the conspiracy theory that the US government might have been responsible for 9/11. Fonda himself, who takes the lead role as a terrorist, disregards the notion, but his involvement is tacit acknowledgement that ‘truth’ is not always as it may appear.

That’s a sentiment surely shared by the legion of scientists working on the CERN research project in Switzerland. Their quest is to find evidence of the ‘God’ particle and success would rewrite our understanding of the laws of physics. Searching for the unknown in the hope of explaining the inexplicable? Rides come no harder.

Your editorial team

82 KING OF THE MOUNTAINS

It’s a big claim, but if any town deserves the title‚ ‘Adventure Capital of the World’, it’s Queenstown on New Zealand’s South Island. The Red Bulletin heads down there to see what the fuss is all about

30 TO BOLDLY KEEP GOING

The Big Bang, antimatter, the God particle: the work of 10,000 physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is a global topic of conversation. But what do those guys do all day?

THE WORLD OF RED BULL

May 17

ME AND MY BODY: HABIBA GHRIBI The Tunisian Olympic hopeful, 28, has dodged bullets in the name of the 3000m steeplechase, and has bad public transport to thank for her athletic talents

56

GO WITH THE FLOW Big drops, huge rocks and local cops are just some of the challenges faced by the kayakers on the Red Bull Flow Hunters project

22 WHERE’S YOUR HEAD AT? He made a hit record in high school, then became the world’s biggest box-office star, but what makes Will Smith tick?

86

GET THE GEAR

Multiple BMX world title winner Mariana Pajón unpacks the essential kit she carries with her on her travels

92 UP RIVIERA

If you want to dance the night away in style and relax in a four-poster bed, you need to drop in to Le Bâoli in Cannes

42

WILD TO BE BORN Peter Fonda can’t escape Easy Rider, but why would he want to? Under cover of the legacy of that classic film, the Hollywood legend has built a career that includes an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and almost 50 years in the movies – and he shows no sign of stopping

08 Photos of the Month 14 News 20 Microscopes through the ages 24 Meet SA’s top female street luge and classic luge racer 26 Winning Formula: the science of rowing 28 The World’s Fair in figures

THE WORLD OF RED BULL

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RED BULL STRATOS A US company has made spacesuits for generations of astronauts and pilots, and is now supplying Red Bull Stratos with the last layers protecting Felix Baumgartner during his leap from the stratosphere. We go behind the scenes

90 YOUR PHOTO ON THIS CAR

The Faces for Charity campaign returns to Red Bull Racing Formula One cars this year. For R160 you can race around Silverstone on the RB8s of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber at the British Grand Prix

Felix Baumgartner

“

PHOTOGRAPHY: ANTOINE DOYEN, GETTY IMAGES, REUTERS, BALAZS GARDI/RED BULL STRATOS NEWSROOM, BREITLING, RED BULL CONTENT POOL (2), BAOLI, MARY EVANS/PICTUREDESK.COM, JEAN REVILLARD/REZO

You get enough air, but you have the feeling that it’s not enough

„

88 ROLLING IN THE DEEP

Diving 244m on one breath requires first-rate relaxation skills, and that’s why free-diver Herbert Nitsch does a lot of his training on the sofa

more

Body & Mind 84

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A world-renowned chef and a tasty recipe to follow

Our guide to the global essentials

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96

SAVE THE DATE

OUT NOW

New album from Rufus Wainwright

Out and about this month? Ink these in your diary

93

TAKE 5

97

KAINRATH

98

MIND’S EYE

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

48 FLY AROUND THE WORLD WITHOUT A DROP OF FUEL

A third-generation adventurer, a fighter pilot and a solar-powered plane that can fly at night: the testing times of finding a new way to travel

Ishmael Butler from US hip-hop collective Shabazz Palaces on the albums that have inspired him most

WORLD IN ACTION

Our cartoonist

The thoughts of columnist Kevin McCallum

SKINNY

KINGJAMES 22491

THE UNIFORM OF PROGRESS

M Oab D E S E RT, u Sa

FROM tHe tOP

Castleton Tower is 120m tall, but anyone who stands on its summit will be 425m above the ground, because this sandstone landmark of Castle Valley in the state of Utah stands on a cone of rock 305m tall. The first ascent of Castleton Tower was in 1961, and it has been a Mecca for mountaineers every since. In recent years, it has also become a popular destination for BASEjumping. The man in the air in this picture is Michael Tomchek, an American leaper of some distinction.

No less brave was the photographer, Krystle Wright.

She snapped Tomchek by hovering in position with the help of a motorised paraglider.

See more like this: www.wrightfoto.com.au Photography: Krystle Wright

08

D u bai , UAE

Pin High

Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy knew how to hold a golf club before he could walk (that is, when he was two). As a nine-year-old winner of the Under-10s world championship in Florida, he crowed into the BBC’s microphone: “I want to be the best golfer in the world.” At 22, he was – at the top of world rankings, for two weeks, as the youngest-ever number one. The 2011 US Open winner counts among his sponsors the Dubai-based Jumeirah Group, which count among their assets the spectacular Burj Al Arab hotel.

As a PR stunt, they turned the hotel’s helicopter landing pad, 200m above ground level, into a putting green.

No doubt about it: McIlroy’s place is at the top. www.rorymcilroy.com Photography: David Cannon/Getty Images

10

S n æ fe ll s n es , I c e l an d

Is this Heaven?

Credits:

Writer Jules Verne knew the beauty of the Snæfellsjökull volcano. According to his 1864 novel, A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, the crater was where the titular adventure began. But who would want to go to the planet’s core when its surface looks like this? “The picture shows my climbing partner Remi,” says Will Copestake, the Scot who took this photograph. “It’s as if he’s at the gates of heaven.” (As we all now know, and can all pronounce, it wasn’t Snæfellsjökull that erupted to worldwide consternation in 2010 or 2011. Those ash-pluming events came from, respectively, Eyjafjallajökull and Grímsvötn.)

Iceland videos: www.vimeo.com/willcopestake Photography: Will Copestake/Caters News

12

Bullevard Sport and culture on the quick

Riders of the storms Windsurfers wait by their laptops, watching global weather for force 10 gales. Two days later, they assemble to compete in the stormy waters. From May, you can apply to be a part of Red Bull Storm Chase.

Here’s where the ride may take you

MAGHEROARTY Where the eastern might of the Atlantic meets Ireland’s north-west coast. One of Europe’s leading windsurf spots, with three booming breaks.

MARRAWAH This spot in Tasmania is known as the ‘Roaring 40s’: partly because of its latitude and partly for the noise the water makes.

Tyree Callahan’s Chromatic Typewriter

AGAINST TYPE Is this what a thousand words look like when they literally make a picture?

When he replaced the characters on the typebars of a 1937 Underwood typewriter with paint-soaked pads, Tyree Callahan blurred the line between words and pictures at a point no one before him had reached. “The Chromatic Typewriter functions between visual art and literature,” says Callahan, who works out of

an artists’ collective in the US city of Bellingham, Washington. Inventing a new art form has its drawbacks, though. “Paint needs to be reloaded every time you type a letter,” he says. With long texts too labour-intensive, his fans came to the rescue: “They sent me love poems to do.” www.tyreecallahanpaintings.com

PICTURES OF THE MONTH

TARANAKI Over the Tasman Sea from Marrawah, a legendary New Zealand surf spot with northerly, westerly and southerly exposure: three times the chance of storms.

Reccomend locations, or sign up for storm-surfing: www.redbullstormchase.com

14

EVERY SHOT ON TARGET

Taken a picture with a Red Bull flavour?

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

Stockholm Techno pioneer Robert Hood on decks after his Red Bull Music Academy session.

Anders Neumann

F1 fashion The new Red Bull Racing collection

A head for the game: Red Bull BC One

MEN’S TEAMLINE SOFTSHELL JACKET R1 400

WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER, ULRICH CORAZZA, ANDREAS ROTTENSCHLAGER. PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKEY CLANCY, IMAGO (2), TYREE CALLAHAN, EMRE ERMIN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, CORBIS, DDP

Compiling the A-list of B-Boys It wasn’t too many years ago that the best breakdancers on the planet were only found on street corners in The Bronx.

But since the world at large embraced New York’s original urban street dance style and took it to wider audiences – first in Japan and Korea, then across Europe – you’re as likely to find an expert headspinner in Brazil as you are in Burundi. A world champion breaker has been annually crowned at the Red Bull BC One competition since 2009; at last year’s finals in Moscow, an American, Roxrite, beat Lil G, a Venezuelan. The 2012 contest begins this month, with national preliminaries, known as ‘cyphers’, in 49 countries, which will narrow down the field for six regional qualifiers (in Egypt, Holland, Russia, Mexico, New Zealand and the USA).

Winners at that stage go to Rio de Janeiro in December for the Red Bull BC One World Final. The one-on-one format of the contest keeps competition fierce – and replicates the way the first B-Boys would step out of the crowd to do their thing. www.redbullbcone.com

MEN’S VETTEL DRIVER T-SHIRT R364

RIFF OF SUCCESS A lesson in humility and the true power of the guitar from Tenacious D It’s been six years since Tenacious D – the comedy rock duo of Jack Black and Kyle Gass – last unleashed their mighty, merry jams.

Now they’re back with third album Rize Of The Fenix, a record they’re sure will exhume rock ’n’ roll from the shallow grave it has dug itself.

What’s with the album title?  : The D’s last effort was not as successful as the first one. So we had to come back from the dead, and not for ourselves: to actually save rock ’n’ roll.

Because rock ’n’ roll, let’s face it, has died. Is it too late to put some CPR on this guy’s ass? It’s also us saying there’s no point in doing it if we’re not the best. I don’t care

about being good. I only care about being the best.

Secret to great air guitar?  : I would say commitment. When you don’t actually have a guitar, you better be committed. : Don’t underestimate the power of the face muscles. Throw in a little pain with your pleasure.

How about great real solos? : Eruption, Van Halen first album. Why are you even asking? Oh Kyle, what are you going to say? : Elliot Easton (from The Cars’ Just What I Needed). : That is a good one. Wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah wah wah, waaah! I’m sticking with Eruption. But the Elliot Easton... that is a close one. www.tenaciousd.com Kyle Gass (l) and Jack Black are Tenacious D

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WE HAVE A WINNER!

Fujisawa Sebastian Vettel’s biggest fan in his made-by-mum cardboard car.

Chikako Yuasa

Rio de Janeiro The girls from Ipanema go beach soccer-crazy at Red Bull Roda de Bola.

Marcelo Maragni

Lincoln City

Kayaker Tao Berman adds Oregon’s big waves to his long list of paddle spots.

Richard Hallman

15

B U L L E VA R D

Hipnoteez

The Battle for Bloem

Riches in the Ditches Gouda, a small settlement at the western entrance of Nuwekloof Pass between Tulbagh and Wellington, is not a venue one would normally associate with street BMX. What it does have, though, is the Voëlvlei Dam with its series of 20km-long canals that feed water to Cape Town… and those make for a perfect BMX playground. “I’ve been riding the here for a couple of years,” says Wayne Reiche, “and I thought this would be cool place for an event.” Cue the inaugural The Ditches Riches event which saw invited BMXers pulling off some sick wall rides and transitions off a quarter-pipe ramp they’d had built in the dry canal. www.redbull.co.za

London Toms Alsberg of Latvia nets a

fourth win on the Red Bull Mini Drome track.

Roman Skyva

16

Movie star: Jordy Smith features in new surf documentary, A Deeper Shade Of Blue

JORDY GETS DEEP

Ubuntu, bunny chows, and fin-less surfboards – not usually subjects that enjoy each other’s company Legendary surf filmmaker Jack McCoy – he of The Green Iguana and Blue Horizon fame – has a new surf movie called A Deeper Shade Of Blue. Consciously avoiding making a lesson on the history of surfing, Hawaiian-born McCoy focused his lens on why people surf and what makes it so special to them. It’s a celebration of the Hawaiian spirit of Aloha, not dissimilar to our own notion of Ubuntu.

One of the surfers featured in the movie is Jordy Smith – we caught up with the SA superstar during the Quicksilver Pro at Gold Coast in Australia where the film had just made its Aussie debut. “It was a great experience shooting with Jack. He’s a trippy kind of guy, but he knew what he wanted and we went out and got the shots.”

One of Jordy’s co-stars was iconic ex pro surfer and board design innovator Derek Hynd, whose fin-less surfboards have championed what this Australian likes to call “friction-free” wave riding .

“He’s another strange kind of guy who gets so deep into everything,” recalls Jordy of their time together. He’s pretty cool though.”

What wasn’t cool was Durban’s famous bunny chow curry that Smith encouraged Hynd to sample: “We took him to this place that serves killer bunny chows – he’d never had one before, but he totally loved it.” www.adeepershadeofblue.com

Sydney At Red Bull Rapids Australia, homemade rafts were put through their paces.

Mark Watson

Seoul Cross-fading across cultures: Nicaraguan DJ Craze at the Red Bull 3Style mix contest in Korea.

Incheol Na

WORDS: STEVE SMITH. PHOTOGRAPHY: LUKE DANIEL, KOLESKY/NIKON/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, WAYNE REICHE

Ask South Africans to name their country’s Least Exciting City and Bloemfontein will be right up there. However, ask anyone who witnessed the recent regional qualifiers for the Red Bull Beat Battle, and they might recalibrate your perception.

Beat Battle – to give you a quick heads up – is SA’s premier street dance contest between crews representing all forms of street dance, from pantsula, krump, and s’bhujwa, to hip-hop and everything in between. Qualifiers are held throughout the country and eight crews are selected to compete in the finals on May 26, at Baseline on Jozi. Among the Bloem crews vying for a place were energetic outfit Hipnoteez: “Our dance inspiration is US hip-hop crew Jabbawockeez. We dance for ourselves as a unit. We inspire each other.” www.redbullbeatbattle.co.za

B U L L E VA R D

3 HEAD WIN

If someone puts me down, I run faster. Years ago, my father said, ‘Habiba, you are as strong as a man.

If you want something enough, you’ll get it.’ So in my mind I can always win.

ME AND MY BODY

HABIBA GHRIBI The Tunisian Olympic hopeful, 28, has dodged bullets in the name of the 3000m steeplechase, and has bad public transport to thank for her athletic talents Search ‘Ghribi 2011 Daegu’ on YouTube to watch her take World Championship silver

1 MEDAL OF HONOUR I was training hard for the 2011 World Championships when the Tunisian revolution began. There was tear gas, fighting, bullets flying.

I dedicated my silver medal to my country.

WORDS: RUTH MORGAN. PHOTOGRAPHY: ANTOINE DOYEN

2 DOUBLE TROUBLE

I had severe hallux valgus, painful misshapen joints that pushed my toes out of alignment and made my strides less effective.

In May 2010, I underwent two days of operations on both feet to remove a lot of bone. The doctor couldn’t guarantee that afterwards I could run at a professional level. I spent a month in bed, and it was four months before I started to run again.

4

GOOD FOOD GUIDE I follow a very strict diet.

I always know what I should eat when. My weight has to stay constant, and good fuel means good training. But I love dark chocolate, so every now and then I’ll have some.

5 BORN TO RUN

I started building leg muscles early. I lived 15km from school and if the bus didn’t come, I’d run instead. My father said, ‘Bibi, why don’t you walk?’ I said, ‘This way I arrive quickly.’

17

After a fouryear wait, Santigold is back with a new album

She Sounds Like Now

Santigold

Overcoming a case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome with much laughter, a serious side and a spot of transcendental meditation The electronic beats pump fast, the bass rumbles, the chorus sounds like a battle cry. GO!, the opening song on Santigold’s new album, Master Of My MakeBelieve, is a bundle of raw energy, a firework. Jay-Z says this woman is making music for the revolution.

“A lot of the new songs were written before the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement happened,” she explains, “but that’s their prevailing mood. The seething, the unrest that we’re seeing all over the world. People want to hear the truth. And this demand, this energy, is reflected in my music.”

Strong stuff, indeed, but the 35-year-old says it with a smile. She is keen, charming and smart.

When she talks, she gesticulates and her eyes light up. Words come tumbling out. Santigold, it could be argued, is one of the most important musicians right now. Not many others get across difficult ideas with an elegant levity like she does.

She first made the pop world take notice in 2007, with her song L.E.S. Artistes, which managed 18

Born September 25, 1976, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Back office to front of house Before she was ‘talent’, Santigold was a record company talent scout O for an I Until 2009, Santigold was Santogold. The name change came after a legal challenge from Robert Harris, a one-time jewellery salesman and director of the cult – that term is used generously – 1985 wrestling film Santo Gold’s Blood Circus

to be New Wave, punk and a little bit pop, but also, more importantly, it sounded fresh. When her selftitled debut album was released the following year, Santigold was readily brandishing all the tools in pop’s toolbox: writing songs, choreographing routines, designing outfits, devising videos.

She toured for the next two years, accepting invitations to appear alongside a disparate roster of artists including Björk, Beastie Boys, Coldplay (for whom she opened on their US tour in 2008) and Jay-Z (for whose management company she signed in 2011). She also wrote hits for Lily Allen and Christina Aguilera, and sang for Mark Ronson and Kanye West. Santigold was everyone’s darling.

Everyone wanted a piece of her cool. She moved to New York, and what with all the hype, for a while there was little time for her to take care of her second album. “I only realise that now, when people ask me why I took so long,” she says, and bursts out laughing. “I withdrew and worked on

words: florian obkircher. photography: Warner Music (2), ddp Images, ASP/Robertson, nathan gallagher/Red Bull Content Pool, Jonty Edmunds/Red Bull Content Pool. Illustration: Dietmar Kainrath

b u l l e va r d

b u l l e va r d

it until I was satisfied, and I am my own harshest critic.”

There were further distractions. She initially found it difficult to settle on the album’s direction. There were bursts of anger to deal with, unleashed by her father’s death. for a while, she had neither a manager nor a record company, and found it hard to write lyrics. It was during this dark time that dave Sitek, a music producer and guitarist in the band TV On The Radio, was tapped for advice. “‘dave, you’re always so level-headed. how do you do it?’ And he said, ‘Transcendental meditation.’

“So I went to California to meet this 89-year-old woman who went to India with The Beatles in the 1960s. She helped me Santigold’s second LP, become calm and relaxed.

Master Of My MakeShe advised me to write songs Believe, (Atlantic/ Warner), is out now on the subject of, “You’re the best”. And I did. Mind you, they’re called Look At These Hoes and Big Mouth.”

And so it was that, using an old lady’s mantra and the advice of one of indie rock’s finest, Santigold went on to make an album of energetic, exciting anthemic pop. She’s learning fast how good her ‘best’ can be.

“So I went to California to meet this 89-year-old woman who went to India with The Beatles in the 1960s. She helped me become calm and relaxed”

HaRd & FaSt

Top performers and winning ways from around the globe

www.santigold.com

Aussie surfer Sally Fitzgibbon stormed to her second win of the 2012 ASP World Championship on home soil (water?) at Newcastle, Australia.

At The Brits Slopestyle Championship in Laax, Switzerland, 18-year-old Jamie Nicholls (UK) kept up his fine 2012 form with a victory.

Santigold’s collaborators include Beastie Boys, Mark Ronson, Lily Allen, M.I.A. and Christina Aguilera

After a 2011 season ruined by injury, enduro rider David Knight (UK) bounced back with two second-place finishes at the GP of Argentina.

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B U L L E VA R D

KIT EVOLUTION

Small World

Microscopes developed through the manipulation of light and lenses. Now, they need neither, feeling for atoms in a vacuum close to absolute zero

MAGNIFICATION

Three options, the closest of which (in tandem with the lens in the eyepiece) gave a ‘zoom’ of x270

EYEPIECE

Positioned vertically and only for one eye.

It’s safe to say scientists did not do their best work hunched and with 50 per cent vision

HOUSING

Made from bronze and, like many parts of this device, hand crafted

ILLUMINATION

A concave mirror to concentrate light on the specimen. Light sources back then? Daylight, candles and oil lamps

1890 BRASS EYE: LIGHT MICROSCOPE Karl Landsteiner, the Austrian scientist who identified blood groups, used this microscope in his research. It’s a classic compound microscope, in which two lenses are used – one in the eyepiece, the other above the specimen – to enlarge the view, with a mirror to focus light. Although basic, compound microscopes enable specimens hundreths of a millimetre big (or small) to be seen clearly.

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Crystalline indium oxide (used in batteries and semiconductors) as seen through a light microscope

Then you see it, now you don’t: zooming in over time

SIZED UP COOLING

Liquid nitrogen is pumped through these valves to cool the chamber to -200°C

To-scale comparison with the light microscope

HOUSING

Robust stainless steel.

Inside here, a vacuum is maintained, to prevent contamination of the specimen

MAGNIFICATION

Behind this panel, the heart of the beast: where the ‘needle’ scans the specimen, allowing for a close-up of x50,000,000

EYEPIECE

WORDS: ARKADIUSZ PIATEK. PHOTOGRAPHY: KURT KEINRATH

Binocular viewing, enabling the user to monitor position of both the specimen and the needle

2012

ATOMIC POWER: SCANNING TUNNELLING MICROSCOPE

This would have got Landsteiner’s blood pumping: a metre-tall microscope that uses the electrical difference between a needle-like conducting tip and the object under observation to ‘scan’ for atoms. Black-and-white images are then created from the readings. Resolution: 500 millionths of a millimetre. The specimen is kept at -200°C to render its atoms immobile and therefore easier to see.

Atoms of an indium oxide crystal are readily visible, as grey globules, seen through a scanning tunnelling microscope

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b u l l e va r d

where’s your head at?

Will Smith

He made a hit record in high school, then became the world’s biggest box-office star, but almost lost it all to the tax people. Now he’s back in (Men In) Black, what makes Big Willie tick?

Bottom -Li ne To p

Nur sery Rhy mes

Do

g As per the plan, Independe nce Day and Men In Black turned Smith into box-office gold. From MIBII in 2002 to Hancock in 2008, he had eight consec utive US number one films, each one taking over $100m in ticket money: the best box-office run ever.

Globally, his films have made more than $5bn.

The first line of the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is factual: Willard Christopher Smith Jr really was, “in West Philadelphia, born and raised” (from: 25.09.68). His mom said he could talk before he could walk. Lil’ Will wrote short stories about superheroes; aged 10, he heard rap band The Sugarhill Gang. “It felt like those guys knew me,” he later said.

Old-S chool Sound

Aged 12, Smith was rapping on street corners. Around this time, a teacher named him The Prince, because he was so charming. In 1985, he added ‘Fresh’, the thenhot hip-hop term, to his moniker. In 1986, Smith’s senior year of high school, he released a record, Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble, with his pal Jeffrey Townes. DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince were go. They released five albums; Smith has four solo.

The Gre ate st?

His best turn yet, in Ali, took a year of prep.

A typical day: threemile run at 6am; eat; watch Ali videos; mimic Ali in the gym, 11-1; lunch; dialect training, 2-3.30; 3.30-5, Islamic studies; pump iron until dinner.

“By the time we were shooting,” he said, Ali.” “I was on autopilot. I was Muhammad

W ill Po

Bad Boy

It wasn’t girls that would give Smith trouble. Before he was 20, he received a bill for unpaid taxes of $2.8m.

“The IRS came and took all my stuff,” Smith recalled. “People talk , about being broke: rich people broke and poor people broke. I was poor people broke.” He moved to Los Angeles and met Benny Medina, a musician with an idea for a TV show.

The Breaks

Medina took Smith to a party at Quincy Jones’s place. TV execs were in attendance.

Medina pitched his show, based on his time living with the Gordy family (of Motown-founding fame), with Smith as leading man. Jones, excited, pulled strings; five weeks later, a pilot for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was being shot. Six seasons would be made. For the first three, the IRS took 70 per cent of Smith’s salary.

22

Her e The y Com e Aga in

Happiness Pursued After a hit TV show, the movies. Smith’s film debut came in 1992, in Where The Day Takes You, playing a wheelchair-bound homeless teen. In 1993, he played a charming (of course) conman in Six Degrees Of Separation. Bad Boys followed in 1995. But Smith and his manager were studying box-office data. Special effects movies with a romance plot were where the money’s at.

n, Before co-starring again with son Jade a dram ic alypt apoc in next year’s postAfter Earth, Smith this month stars in of Men In Black III. Trailers suggest more the same, man-versus-gooey-hidden l. trave time d adde alien action, with The filmmakers may be wishing for a real-life time machine, after a difficult production that began . with only a third of the script completed Men In Black III is in cinemas worldwide from May 23: www.meninblack.com

words: Paul wilson. illustration: lie-ins and tigers

w er So why is Smith Ho llywood’s hardestworking man, on scr een and off?

(For example: he att ended three UK premieres of 2005 comedy Hitch in on e day, in Manchester, Birmingham and London.) It’s becaus e he got dumped ag ed 16, and told himself he would “never no t be good enough [for an ything] again. That’ s the machinery tha t clicked on in my mi nd.”

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b u l l e va r d

girl racer

Nikki Caromba

Successful businesswoman, dedicated mother and rising star of gravity sports – meet SA’s top-ranked female street luge and classic luge racer

Born September 11, 1979, Johannesburg Runs in the family Husband Marco is currently ranked 16th for street luge in the IGSA 2011 World Cup Series, and 14th for classic luge Often board Apart from her skateboarding, Nikki is also a keen snowboarder, sand boarder, mountain boarder (off-road skateboarding), and freeboarder (a special skateboard that mimics the behaviour of a snowboard)

Ay, Caromba: Nikki has quickly shot to the top of the International Gravity Racing Association’s female rankings

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The steep, winding road leads down the side of a small mountain in Johannesburg’s western suburbs, linking an industrial area on top to a sewerage farm at the bottom. The air that hangs over this part of Krugersdorp is thick with the stench of raw effluent and diesel fumes. During the week, this stretch of tar is frequented by heavily loaded trucks and bakkies, but on weekends it’s the training ground for the International Gravity Sports Association’s fastest female World Cup Series street luge racer.

Meet her on any week day and it’s hard to picture 32-year-old Nikki Caromba flinging herself down hills at speeds in excess of 100kph. She’s a partner in an interior design business and a mother to her two-and-a-half-year-old son Sinjin.

During work hours she’s all about powerdressing, pre-school playgroups and highlevel meetings. Weekends, however, are a different story. She swaps her suits and heels for battered racing leathers and a pair of sneakers with pieces of car tyre glued to the soles.

Her riding gear has seen better days.

Caromba’s racing leathers are patched up in places with industrial-strength gaffer tape, but that hasn’t stopped her cementing herself as SA’s highest-ranked female street luge and classic luge rider.

“I was very surprised when I saw the IGSA 2011 World Cup Series rankings,” she says. “I couldn’t believe I had placed first among the female riders.”

It’s a particularly impressive achievement given the fact that Caromba has only been racing competitively for a year and a half. Overall she was ranked

18th for street luge in the 2011 World Cup Series standings, and 16th for classic luge. While her achievements may bode well for the future of South African gravity sports, Caromba says her competitive riding thus far has been a little frustrating. “There are only nine female competitors in the World Cup Series and I am one of the only female riders in South Africa, so I have to ride against the guys in local competitions,” she says. “I’d love to see more women showing what they’re capable of in the South African gravity racing scene. But beyond that, it would be amazing to see enough women competing in these events so that organisers can establish womenonly heats in the various disciplines.”

Beyond her competitive aspirations, however, Caromba has her heart cemented firmly in the local extreme sports scene.

“If I can use my World Cup Series ranking to inspire a few younger girls to get on a board and start racing, then I’m happy.

That’s what I want to see happening in South Africa from here on out: more girls getting on boards and showing the guys what they’re capable of doing,” she says.

And what about Caromba’s battered racing leathers?

“Yeah, this gaffer tape look just isn’t doing it for me anymore!” she laughs.

“I’m hoping to race so well that I impress someone enough to sponsor me a new set!”

“If I can use my World Cup Series ranking to inspire a few younger girls to get on a board and start racing, then I’m happy”

www.sagra.co.za

words: JP du Plessis. photography: JP Du Plessis, Ocker Odendaal

Name Nikki Caromba

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WINNING FORMULA

OARSOME POWER

The super-fast progress of a rowing boat on water results from the collaboration between a finely tuned human being and finely balanced physics www.worldrowing.com

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IN THE BOAT “To succeed in rowing, it’s 70 per cent leg muscle, 25 per cent back muscle and five per cent arm muscle,” says Marcel Hacker, former single-scull world champion and London 2012 Olympic medal hopeful. “Racing boats travel faster than other types of boat because the stroke is a lot longer, so the power we create can be distributed evenly over the entire length of the stroke. Of course, there are other factors affecting speed, like weight, shape and displacement.

“The oar goes in at the front of the stroke, then out at the back,

with controlled movements in between and then you enjoy the glide. It’s quite important for me to feel good about what I’m doing if I want to go fast.”

IN THE LAB “Rowers accelerate their boats around a zero point, which is the point at which the oar blade hits the water,” explains Professor Thomas Schrefl, a physicist who teaches at the University of Sheffield, UK, and the St Pölten University Of Applied Sciences, Austria.

“The oar doesn’t move through the water at this moment; rather, the boat

PHOTOGRAPHY: DDP IMAGES. ILLUSTRATION: MANDY FISCHER

Wet work: German former world champion Marcel Hacker has London and Olympic glory in his sights

moves past the zero point. Physics has an elegant explanation for this: the laws of conservation. The rower pushes a small quantity of water backwards with the oar. Conservation of momentum means the boat accelerates in the opposite direction. Although the oar appears to stand still in the water, it has to push water backwards against the direction of momentum, so overall forward momentum is maintained.

“The velocity of a rowboat can be determined by the equation of motion, which determines the location and velocity of the boat, the rower and

the oar. Here, the total mass, m, of boat and rower, multiplied by the change in velocity of the boat, gives us the sum of all forces operating on the boat in the direction of travel. That is, the driving force of the oar, wind resistance and resistance of the boat in the water. The equation of motion explains how the rate of efficiency can be improved: by increasing the driving force and reducing resistance. The driving force results from the reciprocal action of the oar blade with the water.

“Maximum driving force is achieved when the oar is perpendicular to the

direction of the boat – that is, the angle between the perpendicular of the boat and the oar disappears. Force increases by the square of the velocity of the oar blade in relation to the water. The relative velocity between oar blade and water is the differential of the tangential velocity, L∆Ф/∆ t, and the velocity of the boat, v. Here, L is the greatest extent of the oar and ∆Ф/∆t is the rotation velocity of the oar, which is set in motion by the force in the arm of the oar. The power of resistance declines with the crosssectional area of the boat, so long, narrow boats are at an advantage.”

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B U L L E VA R D

LUCKY NUMBERS

WORLD’S FAIR

In May, the eyes of the world turn to South Korea for the latest global Expo – a grown-up Disneyland celebrating mankind’s achievements, hopes and dreams. We’ve done the sums

There have been displays of creative ingenuity ever since the first two guys to carve wheels got together to see whose rolled downhill best, but the first international exhibition, of “the Works of Industry of all Nations”, was held in a glass pavilion in Hyde Park in London in 1851. Among the diversions in the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition were the world’s largest diamond, Mr Samuel Colt and his revolvers, and the first-ever public lavatories. Charging a penny a visit, the toilets took £3,447, which today would be worth about 115 times that sum.

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No one looked twice when Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Dr Henry Howard Holmes, built a hotel in Chicago in 1893 to take advantage of the influx of visitors to the city for that year’s World’s Fair. A year later, when Holmes was arrested on suspicion of horse theft, law enforcement traced back through his life and found that the hotel was in fact the killing fields of a serial murderer. Holmes confessed to 27 killings, and was hung for one, but some say his victims could number 200.

Looking to the future

Expo 2010 Shanghai China

Expo 67 was perhaps the greatest World’s Fair of the 20th century, a triumph for the city of Montreal, which hosted 50 million visitors and country pavilions so great they still stand 45 years on. The USA’s pavilion, a 20-storey geodesic dome was designed by the engineer/artist/ future-thinker Richard Buckminster Fuller.

It partly burned down in 1976, but was rebuilt and today is the Biosphère environmental museum. The Soviet pavilion was shipped back to Moscow and is now a centrepiece of the All-Russian Exhibition Centre.

1,032,700 Two years ago, after almost two decades of expos that were, you know, OK, the Expo 2010 Shanghai China brought the old-style, epic world-spanning festival of industry back to the public consciousness. Naturally, it was the biggest ever – in terms of visitors (73 million), size (5.28km²), participating countries and international organisations (246), spend (12 billion Yuan) and revenue (13 billion Yuan). The longest queues for dim sum came on October 16, when a record 1,032,700 visitors attended.

Expo 67 in Montreal

Dr Henry Howard Holmes

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The idea of the 1939 New York World’s Fair was to have eyes “on the future… to foretell the events of tomorrow.” The exhibits pointed to a better way of life for mankind; four months later, World War II would break out. A tangible connection with the future was made when a time capsule was buried on site, to be opened in 6939.

Our highly evolved descendants, hoping for a pristine original poster of The Wizard of Oz film, will instead find everyday items, seed samples, a 295-part essay and a pack of Camel cigarettes.

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This year’s venue

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On May 12, Expo 2012 opens in Yeosu, South Korea, about 400km south of the capital, Seoul. Despite the world economy, only two countries have declined the invitation to attend on financial grounds. The non-appearance of Greece is to be expected, but no Canada? With the 10th-largest per capita GDP? It might be soreness rather than the bottom line keeping the Canucks away: a report commissioned by Canadian Heritage showed no one cared about the Canadian pavilion at Expo 2010 unless Cirque du Soleil were playing. eng.expo2012.kr

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WORDS: PAUL WILSON. PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES (2), CORBIS (3), PICTUREDESK.COM

3,447

The Great Exhibition

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to BoLDLY KEEP GoinG Words: Andreas Rottenschlager Photography: Lukas Maximilian H端ller

The Big Bang, antimatter, the God particle: the work of 10,000 physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, isAndreas a global topic of conversation. But Text: Rottenschlager Bilder: Photograph

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Big Bang machine: the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator researches the state of matter directly after the Big Bang – where ‘directly’ means within a millionth of a second.

For starters: a crash course in particle physics The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) operates the world’s most powerful particle accelerator 100m below ground on the Swiss-French border. In the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), protons or lead ions, depending on operating mode, are fired at one other in a ring-shaped tunnel at close to the speed of light. This creates new

particles, which are analysed by four enormous detectors, known as CMS, ATLAS, ALICE and LHCb. The LHC physicists’ chief goal is to look for the Higgs boson, more commonly known as the God particle, which, in theory, gives mass to all matter in the universe – to the planets, to humans, to the magazine you now hold in your hands.

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Joe Incandela USA

Came to physics from fine arts, and became spokesperson for the research team at the CMS detector in 2012.

How do you catch the God particle?

“We don’t actually use the term ‘God particle’ here at CERN. We physicists prefer to say Higgs boson, even if it sounds less exciting. The Higgs is the only elementary particle that has never been detected in experiments. It is the last missing building block in the Standard Model of physics. To put it simply, we want to come up with it by making protons collide.

We might discover something fundamental and timeless from it. The Higgs gives mass, so everyone here wants to know what it’s “made of”.

These are philosophical questions, too. Particle physics is contributing to our culture, and I feel a responsibility as the spokesperson for CMS. The detector is a sort of digital camera consisting of almost a million measuring channels, which all need to work when it comes to the crunch. The CERN spirit helps, because particle physicists tend to work together as equals. There are 3,000 scientists working on the CMS detector, but they all have a say. When my period as spokesperson comes to an end, I’ll be a regular scientist again, just like them.”

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How to produce a Higgs boson Professor Incandela draws one possible scenario for producing a Higgs boson with the CMS detector. The sketch below shows two protons on a collision course (top left and right). The protons contain elementary particles, gluons (shown here as coil springs, left) and quarks. Incandela explains: “If two gluons radiate a top quark, this and an antitop quark could form the Higgs.” The great mystery remains the precise mass of a Higgs boson (M?).

The particle collision data is analysed in the CMS control room in Cessy, France.

Austrian, Swiss and German physicists are involved in the experiments.

CMS The Compact All-Rounder The Compact Muon Solenoid detector examines the collisions between different particles (protons or lead ions), just like its fellow ATLAS detector. The CMS weighs the equivalent of 30 jumbo jets, and its solenoid magnet is 100,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s magnetic field.

weight: 12,500 tonnes length: 21m diameter: 12m magnetic field strength: 4 tesla

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ATLAS The Underground Giant The world’s largest particle detector is at work in a 40m-high underground cave that would take up half of Notre Dame cathedral. ATLAS does research in the same area as CMS; in fact, the experiments using them monitor one other.

It gets its name (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) from the outer doughnut-shaped magnet (torus).

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weight: 7,000 tonnes diameter: 25m Length: 46m

Fabiola Gianotti Italy Studied music (piano) before a career in physics, and has been the ATLAS experiment spokeswoman since 2008

Setting the particle trap All the LHC detectors have various sub-systems to record the particle collisions. Here Fabiola Gianotti sketches the liquid argon calorimeter within the ATLAS detector. “Argon is a gas which only liquefies at 200 degrees below zero so we store it in a cooling unit. The Higgs (H) can consist of two photons (yy). These interact with the detector and produce a shower of secondary particles, which we gauge. This is one possible way of catching the Higgs particle.”

What do we know about the universe?

“Research has shown that about 25 per cent of our universe is made up of socalled dark matter – matter which we cannot yet define, as it consists of neither molecules nor atoms. The ATLAS detector is looking for these particles in addition to the Higgs boson. I think 2012 is going to be quite a year in research terms. We now know the approximate mass range where the Higgs is, and want to attack it in the months to come, so that by December we can say we have solved one of the greatest questions in physics.

In the next few years we’ll also be doubling the particle beam’s energy, so that we can produce yet more heavy particles and gather yet more data. I became a physicist because there’s always a problem to solve or a mystery to grapple with. Physics is a science that provides answers. Within the ATLAS experiment, there are physicists from Israel working with colleagues from Muslim countries and scientists from mainland China working with colleagues from Taiwan.

It works because they are all motivated by the same scientific questions. At CERN, the person who has the best idea wins, regardless of whether he or she is a famous researcher or a student.”

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Doser with a copy of the antimatter bomb featured in the film, Angels & Demons: “They got the facts wrong, but made people curious.”

AEgIS Galileo’s Antiparticle The antimatter experiments at CERN include a small accelerator to produce particles. Among other things, researchers want to show how antimatter reacts to gravity, along the lines of Galileo Galilei’s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment (see sketch, facing page).

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CERN is the only place in the world that can produce antihydrogen.

Michael Doser Austria Spokesperson for the AEgIS experiments involving antihydrogen

High-tech v Middle Ages About 400 years ago, Galileo is alleged to have thrown a wooden ball and a lead ball from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to demonstrate that both fall at equal speed.

By 2014, doser’s team hopes to discover if an antihydrogen particle (H) falls like a hydrogen particle (H) and whether the formula that applies to hydrogen – distance of drop (X) = 1/2 gravitational force (g) x time squared (t2) – also applies to antihydrogen.

How do you make antimatter?

“Antimatter is constructed in the same way as matter, but with the charges reversed. An atom of hydrogen is made from one proton and one electron, so in the case of antihydrogen, you need an antiproton and an antielectron. If you let them collide gently, they can form an atom. Antimatter is now used in PET scanners to help diagnose cancer, so medical scientists are also involved in the CERN experiments. We fire antimatter into hamster cells, for example, to see if we can find a better way to treat tumors, but basically it’s about understanding antimatter. Our experiment aims to investigate how antihydrogen reacts to gravity, but at the moment our production of it is very inefficient. Warp drive on the Starship Enterprise and antimatter bombs are fiction. Using current methods, it would take us a billion years to produce a gram of antimatter.

However, commonly believed falsities are good for us.

It means we physicists have to give people a better explanation of why reality is a lot more interesting than science fiction.”

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John Ellis UK Theoretical physicist, great believer in the pile-of-paper system

Do you know the Theory of Everything?

“Theoretical physicists come up with experiments and models which are then put to the test by the particle accelerator. The ‘Theory of Everything’, ie a formula that would explain all physical phenomena, is the holy grail of theoretical physics.

I don’t know whether it will be discovered in my lifetime or later. I’ve been working for CERN since 1973 and have twice been in charge of the Theoretical Physics Department, a highly intelligent group of people dealing with the universe’s most complex problems. It’s like herding cats. They all want to set out on their own. But that’s fine. I’ve made sure the basic framework is in place and that everyone can get on with their work. My motto has always been, ‘A good boss is invisible’. I still like working with a pencil, paper and notebook. As soon as I get up, I start ploughing my way through the latest scientific publications; today, for example, there was a paper from China about superluminal neutrinos. Then I think about what I’ve read when I’m in the shower. One subject I’m very taken with at the moment is supersymmetry, a theory that could explain the universe’s dark matter.”

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Know It All we asked Professor Ellis to sum up 4,000 years of theoretical physics with one small drawing. It took him two minutes. It shows the Standard Model (SM) and theory of relativity (GR = general relativity) working well.

But neutrinos (v) give physicists quite a headache, as they can be described only partially by quantum mechanics (QM). There are also question marks next to string theory (String?) and dark matter (dM).

The Theory of Everything (TOE) would solve everything.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer Germany director General of CERN, in charge of the world’s largest particle accelerator since 2009

“The staff canteen is a very important place” The CERN boss on the Big Bang, the economic crisis and why the Pope is pleased with his physicists Are you worried that CERN will lose member countries because of the economic crisis?

I don’t see any sign of that at the moment. We can’t do more advanced research without the basics. We are developing new technology in refrigeration engineering, in electronics.

Just look at the internet and grid computing. All countries get knowledge back.

The term was coined by Leon Lederman [American Nobel prize-winning physicist] for his book. It is an elementary particle, but has nothing to do with God. Are the experiments at CERN also about philosophy?

The experiments aren’t, but the way they are interpreted is. When you’re as close to the Big Bang as we are, questions automatically arise, but that’s dangerous ground for a physicist [laughs]. The Pope was very interested in our research when I visited him in 2011, in any case.

A bomb from CERN explodes above the Vatican in the film Angels & Demons.

Angels & Demons got a lot of people interested in us.

Recently a taxi-driver said to me, “I didn’t know what you were doing at CERN before, but ever since the film I’ve been checking your website.”

Going Underground ATLAS detector Higgs boson, supersymmetry, black holes

LHCb detector looks for antimatter that has disappeared from the cosmos

The LHC tunnel – circumference: 27km, diameter: 8.8km – snakes its way at depths between 60-100m below ground in the border area between France and Switzerland. Four detectors analyse the particle collisions

GENF

CMS detector like ATLAS, but constructed differently

ALICE detector looks into the state of matter after the Big Bang

A particle hunt from Geneva to Cuba

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CERN began as the European Council for Nuclear Research in 1954. Since then, scientists from more than 110 countries have contributed to its particle research technology and expertise. There are currently co-operation agreements with scientific institutes from Asia, Africa and North and South America, in addition to those involving its 20 European member states. CERN’s annual budget for 2011 was about R9 billion. You can follow its hunt for the secrets of the universe at: www.cern.ch

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES. ILLUSTRATION: SASCHA BIERL

  : How do you run an organisation with 10,000 scientists? - : With the authority one acquires in a professional career, and the credibility and constructiveness that the researchers here employ. The experiments we are doing are so complex that no one can get on alone.

What could other organisations learn from the co-operation we see at CERN? That a lot of things don’t work just from the top down.

It can also be the other way around. In our staff canteen, you have students sitting next to Nobel Prize winners.

We don’t differentiate.

You want to establish whether the Higgs particle exists or not by the end of 2012. Do you feel under pressure?

We’ve been testing the Standard Model of physics for 40 years. The only thing missing is this Higgs boson, which gives elementary particles mass. If we don’t find it, we’ll have a large hole in the Standard Model for the first time, but that would be a discovery too.

What would discovery of the Higgs change for your average citizen?

The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics didn’t change everyday life overnight either, but if you had a GPS system and no theory of relativity, you wouldn’t end up where you wanted to be.

Isn’t the term ‘God particle’ actually the best piece of marketing that CERN has ever had?

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Ready for action: Peter Fonda on the set of his latest film, The Lazarus Protocol, a globe-trotting conspiracy thriller

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additional photography: ddp images (1)

Wild To Be Born

Peter Fonda can’t escape Easy Rider, but why would he want to? Under cover of the legacy of that classic film, the Hollywood legend has built a career that includes an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and almost 50 years in the movies – and he shows no sign of stopping Words: Herbert Volker Photography: Philipp Horak 43

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e meet Peter Fonda in Vienna, where he has just finished shooting a film, The Lazarus Protocol. The veteran actor is relaxed, and carrying a water bottle. The bottle is light, made of plastic, and as Fonda explains, without seeming overly evangelistic about it,

contains no dubious chemicals such as BPA. The bottle came with him from America, and is filled straight from the tap, because Fonda had heard that Vienna had the best water of any large city in the world. He says he can taste the quality of the water, and gives the impression that he could talk for hours about water, and the dozens of other subjects he’s learned during a long, varied life that shows only few signs of slowing. He’s the son of a famous actor, the father of a famous actress, and with Easy Rider, which he produced, starred in and co-wrote, he made a landmark film that changed both Hollywood and the audience that flocked to see it in 1969.

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like what happened to James dean?

Yes, something like that. James was driving really fast then. When I go really fast, I know there is nobody else on the road. The problem is that I’m really tall, I have long arms and legs. The bike is built for someone quite short. When I sit on it, I look like a praying mantis. But it doesn’t matter, because if there’s an obstacle I can turn sharply. I couldn’t do that with a Harley or a Triumph, not even with my 1978 BMW R100RS – another great bike, by the way. Mine’s yellow. everyone remembers their first vehicle. your father, Henry Fonda, gave you a very used VW Beetle. Was that a deliberate measure to distract you from the glamour of Hollywood?

There was no Hollywood glamour at our place, zero. My godfathers were

“ If you know what you’re doing, you don’t have to act.

If you don’t see the wheels churning in my head, then I’ve got you” [laughs]. I like the idea that you can’t see my corpse in the film – as if I was just a dream, a mythological thing. And now I come back to earth with an F4. It’s a really cool motorcycle. It’s just like some Italian masterpiece: my Modigliani. I keep it in the living room, much to my wife’s regret.

Can you actually ride an F4 normally, without making the sheriff go berserk?

When there are no police, no other people on the road… then I crank it on! I know what to look out for. I know not to trust traffic lights and other signals. I don’t trust anything, because somebody can come and take me out just like that.

Gary Cooper and James Stewart, but to me they were our friends, not actors or celebrities. Once, when John Wayne and Randolph Scott played pitch, a type of cowboy card game, with my father in the living room, John Wayne came over to me, snatched my toy pistol and put it on the table, like they did in the Westerns. That was funny, and totally normal among our family friends. no hint of glamour. It was a long time before I realised that my father’s profession was something special.

My mother died when I was very young, so my father was a very central

ADDITIOnAL PHOTOGRAPHY: CORBIS (2), DDP IMAGES (1)

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the red bulletin: you look cool, young and fit. your figure is almost the same as it was in Easy Rider. Being Peter Fonda is obviously good for you.

Peter FOndA: I drink a lot of water.

I have a good head and a good heart. I like to be good to people. I don’t want to be bad, but if something has to be stopped, then I’ll make a stand against it. This authority comes from the heart.

It’s OK: I’m a very happy boy. I’m 72 years old, but I’m really eight. is it your younger side that, more than 40 years after you were so iconically linked to motorcycles as Captain america in Easy Rider, sees you thundering through California on an mV agusta F4CC, one of the fastest and most extreme road bikes?

Everyone worries so much about me

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figure for me – as a father, not as an actor. People think that it was easy for me as Henry Fonda’s son, but he never talked to me once about acting. He never explained how he worked. I had to learn by watching him. Sometimes he took me to work with him in the theatre because someone had to take care of me. Of course, the whole ambience still made an impression on me. At home once, when I was about

means ‘rock’ and that Fonda means ‘bottom’, and that we could trace our Italian ancestry back to the 13th century.

When I realised that I’m ‘Rock Bottom’, I thought it was pretty cool, and I still like it today. It means there’s only one way to go: up. Hey, I’m rock bottom! I have a chance to learn my entire life, and if I can learn, then I’m a free person. So I think I have taken some things from my family history that kept me on track.

“ When I realised my name means ‘Rock Bottom’, I thought it was pretty cool. I still like it today”

14 years old, I heard the men talking, and Gary Cooper said, “If I know what I’m doing, then I don’t have to act.”

Later, when I thought about my job as an actor, this sentence came back to me.

If you know what you are doing, you don’t have to act. If you don’t see the wheels churning in my head, then I’ve got you. That’s the ‘sex’ of what we do, because we are suddenly so intimate with the audience.

Easy Rider was released in 1969, and you haven’t made a film with a similar impact since. A person could easily fall to pieces over this, but you haven’t. Why is that?

My father’s genes, and that for which my surname and first name stand.

‘Peter’ is not exactly super-cool, though, is it?

Exactly. I hated the name Peter when I was small. I wanted my friends to call me something else. I didn’t like myself, I was very skinny, my hands looked too feminine. And the meaning of ‘peter out’ – that was the last straw. But then I discovered that Peter, from ‘petrus’,

Peter Fonda Family Peter Henry Fonda was born on February 23, 1940, in New York City.

The only son of actor Henry Fonda, his sister, Jane (born 1937) is also an actress, as his daughter Bridget (born 1964). He lives in Paradise Valley, Montana, with fourth wife Parky DeVogelaare Career His first acting jobs came at the Omaha Community Playhouse, Nebraska, where Marlon Brando also began his career.

He then moved on to Broadway and Hollywood

Career highlighs The Victors (1963, Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Actor), Easy Rider (1969, Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay), Ulee’s Gold (1997, Golden Globe Best Actor Oscar nomination), The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999, Golden Globe Award for best Supporting Actor), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) Music man Fonda was friends with The Byrds and The Beatles, and even recorded his own single in 1968

Other things from your history could be seen as less helpful. Easy Rider was hardly a call for a healthy, future-oriented way of life.

With the money I earned from Easy Rider I bought myself a 25-metre sailboat, the most beautiful and the best there was and will ever be. That was my home. I love to be on the ocean, sailing long distances.

I’ve often sailed more than 4,000 miles.

I navigate with the sextant – OK, GPS is now more precise. Hawaii is my spiritual centre as far as seafaring is concerned. It’s the most isolated country in the world, the last station of Polynesian migration and, in fact, language. Language starts with the bushmen in Africa and ends up with the Hawaiians. Yes, I’ll sail back to Maui soon, hike in the mountains, cycle, sail again. It’s a very healthy lifestyle.

With sailing, the drugs stopped as well.

People thought I was out there sailing on that ship stoned all the time, but you can’t pull over and park a boat at night. You must keep sailing. You can’t be stoned and use a sextant, you have to be totally sober. You have to understand your responsibility towards everybody else on the boat.

You have also been influenced by art.

I have Dennis Hopper to thank for that.

I got to meet all these famous artists. He showed me everything I needed to know about pop art. I was introduced to Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. And being Peter, son of the great Henry Fonda, I actually got to go into Picasso’s studio. His children ran in. He said to me, “I’ll just do a little thing here for you.” He’d looked at his pallet and spoke to his paints in Spanish. He said, “You are shit. You are nothing. It looks like a bird flew over and dropped his shit on you.” And he said in French: “You are beautiful. You are so fine. Everything about you is balanced and perfect – I can see it.” Then: “You 45

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called the Waterkeeper Alliance. Robert Kennedy Jr heads it; he’s brilliant. It’s in our constitution that water belongs to us as the people and we must not pollute it. Yet still we are polluting it with the arrogance of Cheney, Bush and others like them. Such arrogance is unbelievable.

That is decadence to me. People fail to see what they are destroying, because they are convinced about these leaders.

“ People fail to see what they are destroying because they are convinced about politicians”

other people who want this or that. And I have absolutely no prejudices. When I was nine years old, I came home from school and I asked my father: “Dad, what does nigger mean?” He blew up, he was furious at me: “Don’t you ever use this word again.” But he didn’t explain to me why. He just got so angry. The first black man I met was Nat King Cole.

He was so black, he seemed purple to me. But he was really kind, so I thought that purple people were the nicest people in the world. Whether that was nondiscriminatory, or naivety if you like, nothing has changed.

You are outspoken on the subject of American politics, and have attacked both George W Bush and, after the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Barack Obama. Why the prolonged annoyance?

The unbelievable ignorance of politicians when it comes to the world’s water and oxygen. Arising from this are the topics of health, hunger. I support Médecins Sans Frontières, an organisation I very much like. In the USA we have an organisation 46

he is so convincing in the film: I don’t know. I have enough trouble with the booze and all that stuff. You know, I don’t want to get hooked.”

“You won’t get hooked.”

The camera cuts to me and I don’t say anything. I just smile.

Jack says, “I don’t know. You say it’s alright? Let, let, let, let me see that! It smells good.”

“Here let me give you a light.” The first match breaks, this was not intended.

Jack leans over to me and I light it.

He takes it in and says, “Well that tastes pretty good I guess. You sure it’s alright?”

I don’t say anything. Then: “You have to hold it in your lungs a little longer.” He is holding his breath. We cut to Dennis, he’s talking about flying saucers and all that shit about people coming from

“I don’t see Jack Nicholson much, but we talk on the phone a lot. He’s a very funny guy. I like Jack. He did a good job in Easy Rider” Back to Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper died in 2010. Do you still stay in contact with the other face of Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson?

I don’t see him much, but we talk on the phone a lot. He’s a very funny guy.

I like Jack. He did a very good job for me in Easy Rider. The audience was not sure about two guys who were obviously smoking marijuana … although we never said, “This is my pot,” until I said to Jack, “This is grass.”

He said, “You, you… mean marijuana?”

That’s Jack! In real life Jack had been smoking pot a long time before that, but

Venus. In the background, you still see Jack holding his breath.

I say to Dennis, “Hey man, you’re stoned.”

He says, “I know I’m stoned. But I saw these three objects, they were going like that – and they stopped and whizzed off in that direction.” Dennis keeps talking about people from Venus are gonna come down, that they are actually among us right now, and that they are teaching us how to live good lives now.

Then Jack says, “That was a UFO beaming back at you.”

In this brilliant moment of his performance, Jack sucks the audience

additional photography: ddp images (1)

piece of shit!” That was unbelievable.

That was performance art.

Success, fame, art, the ocean, all of it in abundance. Did you ever feel tempted to step back, immerse yourself in the spirituality of something like Buddhism, as many others were doing it at that time?

No. But I have respect for meditation, because it really does something. I respect

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right into our lives. BANG! They are in the movie! They cannot escape now.

Thank you very much, Jack!

While I was writing the script in Canada in 1967, I said to myself that Jack’s character, the lawyer, will be killed.

He is the most innocent. In all the Greek dramas and tragedies I’ve studied, the first thing that’s attacked is innocence.

There is no reason to kill him, but he is killed just because he is with us. That is a dramatic effect; it makes the audience decide who are they going to go with. The two remaining people are me and Dennis.

It’s an easy choice. Do you want to go with a speed freak with a knife, or are you going to go with this enigmatic-but-verycool person? You want to ride and be easy and comfortable with life and to take the day as it comes. So you go with Captain

America and not Billy, Dennis’s character.

When Dennis goes down it’s a shock for the audience. Captain America turns around and comes back to help Dennis.

You see the people on the truck say: “We gotta go back.”

When I wrote this, on September 27, 1967, I said I wanted the audience to think that they were going back to help – that they’ve realised they have done something terrible. But the way I see it, the way I played it, the way it is on screen, it’s that they are going back to get rid of the witness.

And so this mythological character, Captain America, is killed, and his motorcycle blows up – I pushed the button myself. And from above, we see the burning motorcycle and Dennis’s body. You can’t see my body, but if you freeze the frame you can actually see it.

But I like the idea that you can’t see my body, as if I had only been a dream, a myth. People still love Easy Rider. I hear it all the time. People refer to me as ‘Easy Rider’. I’m not. I’m Peter Fonda. I’m Rock Bottom – but people forget that.

The Lazarus Protocol Fonda’s latest film, The Lazarus Protocol, is a conspiracy thriller that weaves pre-existing documentary footage into its fictional plot to give a very different complexion to the events leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Here he discusses playing a villain ripped not from the headlines, but between the lines

the red bulletin: Do you believe that ultimately the US government could have been behind the 9/11 attacks?

I’ve heard the theory, though it is not my position. In the movie, I play a man who is basically evil and there is this scene where I talk to my son, who thought I was dead.

He finds out what really happened, which entails me telling him the story behind the attacks. Things that he had already heard from a terrorist, but didn’t believe. But it was interesting to play this guy.

I do think we don’t know the truth – I think the same about President Kennedy’s assassination.

Later in the movie, I’m explaining about the terrorists and I say a phrase that George Bush said: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” I go on to say, “What did that buffoon” – meaning Bush – “say I could call [terrorists]? Evil-doers?” Can you

imagine that? The evil-doers!

I added that line in – it wasn’t in the script. But it makes the whole political thing so real, because it is foolish. The evil-doers! This is like reading to a third-grader. Whoever thought up such a word for terrorists exposes himself as the buffoon.

In the film, the terrorist who’s recruiting assassins for the attacks uses factors in the American lifestyle as motive: its decadence and irreverence.

I agree with the irreverence part,

because I like the Marx Brothers.

They were totally irreverent, very funny. I think that our government is truly decadent, but that is my personal feeling. Yes, OK, the American lifestyle may be crazy.

The movie also shows fear as being the driving force of the world.

Sometimes I think that the government claims to have certain information just to keep the fear going. I know we have enemies, I don’t want to sit down and have lunch with them, but I am not afraid of them. But I am unusual, in a sense, that I have lived longer and I have seen a lot. Babies are born with two fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Every other fear we have learned somehow in life. We are taught to fear things.

The Lazarus Protocol was directed by Paul Finelli, and was a co-production between Terra Mater Factual Studios, Tomcat Productions and Finger Films: www.terrameter.at. Watch the trailer at: www.redbull.com/peterfonda

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Bertrand Piccard in the cockpit of the HB-SIA solar plane: making a statement against mankind’s fuel consumption

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To fly around the world‌

…wIThouT a droP of fuel A third-generation adventurer, a fighter pilot and a solar-powered plane that can fly at night: the testing times of finding a new way to travel Words: Andreas Rottenschlager Photography: Jean Revillard

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B The HB-SIA solar plane flying over the fields of Payerne in Switzerland.

It has the wingspan of an Airbus, weighs as much as a medium-sized car and has zero emissions

ertrand Piccard squeezes himself into the narrow cockpit of his solar-powered plane and feels like a prisoner. There’s not a lot of room in there. He can barely move. An engineer has to climb up to him to hook him up to an onboard computer.

Piccard, 54, is wearing a life-jacket over insulated overalls to protect him from the cold. He has a parachute on his back. On the wing above him, 10,748 solar cells soak up the evening sunlight.

Piccard’s plane, codename HB-SIA, has a wingspan of 63m, the same as an Airbus A340. Yet he is huddled in a cockpit half the size of a telephone box.

“You can’t see the wings at all,” he says, of his pilot’s view. “You’re sitting in there like a horse wearing blinkers.”

Five assistants push the plane into position with their bare hands. At 1,600kg, the highest performance solarpowered plane in the world weighs the same as a medium-sized car. When the pilot gets in the cockpit, the carbon-fibre wings tremble all the way to their tips.

The nearby Payerne weather station is reporting winds of four knots (7.4kph), a light breeze wafting over this military base 50km south-west of Bern in Switzerland. Piccard looks out onto the horizon through his rimless glasses. The fire brigade position their fire engines on the edge of the runway. This is his third test flight in the HB-SIA this year.

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he day before the test flight, Bertrand Piccard is sitting on a white sofa in the hangar in Payerne. His most striking facial feature are the steely blue eyes with which he fixes everyone he talks to. He is a third-generation adventurer. In 1931, his grandfather, Auguste, became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon, and in 1960, his father, Jacques, was the first man to descend 11,000m into the Mariana Trench. The film director James Cameron was the last person to do so in March 2012.

“I was raised to be curious,” Piccard says. In 1999, he became the first person to circumnavigate the globe non-stop in a hot air balloon. He needed three attempts before finally landing in the Sahara after flying a distance of 42,810km. On his first attempt he fell into the Mediterranean. On his second attempt he had to come down in Burma.

“I realised then how dependent [humans] are on liquefied petroleum gas,” he says.

The Swiss hopes that his Solar Impulse project will make a statement against mankind’s fuel consumption, but without

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Right: Former jet pilot André Borschberg acquaints himself with the unique Solar Impulse conditions in a flight simulator.

Bottom: Bertrand Piccard (right) and Borschberg discuss test results.

Opposite: Borschberg in the cockpit of the HB-SIA. “It’s a completely new kind of flying,” he says

“When I flew from Switzerland to Belgium last year, I had more energy in the battery at landing than at takeoff.

That’s mind-blowing” André Borschberg

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wagging fingers. “No one wants to give up their comfortable lifestyle. But why would we have to? Clean technologies already exist and have huge potential.

If we can fly around the world without using a single drop of kerosene, we can also do without fossil fuels on our roads.”

The first circumnavigation of the globe by solar-powered plane, in a five-stage flight, is planned for 2014. In Dübendorf, near Zurich, Solar Impulse engineers are currently poring over the successor to HB-SIA. The electronic components need to be better protected against the rain.

The wingspan will increase by 8m and provide room for yet more solar cells.

The HB-SIA plane can already remain airborne night and day thanks to its ingenious storage technology. While the sun is shining, lithium polymer batteries collect energy which can be used for flying at night. The clock starts ticking when it gets dark. You have to be able to fly until sunrise, which is when the batteries go flat.

Pilots must fly in an energy-efficient way at night, which means as much gliding and as little propeller use as possible.

Solar Impulse can only carry one pilot, and it will take between 25 and 30 days to fly around the world. As no single person could last that long, Piccard will swap places in the cockpit with his fellow Swiss, André Borschberg. With his short hair and lively eyes, the gangly, 59-yearold Borschberg looks 10 years younger than he actually is. You can imagine him all too well as an instructor in flight school, standing in the classroom in his aviator sunglasses explaining manoeuvres to the wannabe daredevils. Borschberg got his pilot’s licence when he was 17, before ever laying a finger on the steering wheel of a car. After that, he flew fighter jets for the Swiss Army for 20 years and then set up his own technology firm.

Piccard says Borschberg is a workaholic who never stops. Borschberg says Piccard is a visionary who sees things differently from most of the people around him.

What would make a former fighter pilot who flew at Mach 1 for decades interested in flying round the world at 70kph?

“It’s a completely new type of flying,” says Borschberg. “In a jet plane, it’s like you’re flying 2km behind the jet.

The controls react so quickly that you really have to keep up with the distance in your head. In the Solar Impulse cockpit, on the other hand, it’s all about patience. You steer to the right and at first nothing happens, and then you turn.”

Borschberg also wants this roundthe-world flight to promote solar technology. “When I flew from 54

The solar plane HB-SIA over Geneva. Its efficient storage tech make day and night flights possible

Switzerland to Belgium last year, I had more energy in the battery at landing than at takeoff. We could have dispensed with some of it. It was mind-blowing.”

Borschberg set three solar-powered plane records on board the HB-SIA in 2010: the longest flight (26 hours, 10 minutes) with the highest absolute flying altitude (9,235m) and the greatest height gain (8,744m). Yet both pilots know that the greatest challenge facing them is a mental one.

If Piccard and Borschberg are to cross the oceans, they will have to remain in the air for 150 hours non-stop. In that time, you could fly from Paris to New York around 16 times in a passenger plane. The Solar Impulse pilots have to get through the marathon stage over the Atlantic without a break.

In a mini-cockpit. In a plane that steers like an over-sized paraglider.

The project has no contingency plan for an emergency landing on water. The light aircraft would smash to pieces on

here CoMeS The Sun Plane Solar Impulse mission timeline 2003: Feasibility study at the École Polytechnique Fédérale [Federal Institute of Technology] in Lausanne, Switzerland, Piccard and Borschberg announce the Solar Impulse project.

2007–2009: Planning and construction of the prototype HB-SIA solar-powered plane.

2010: German professional pilot Markus Scherdel conducts the first test flights.

On July 7, in the HBSIA, André Borschberg completes the first day-and-night flight by a solar-powered plane.

2011: Construction of the successor HBSIB model begins in Dübendorf, near Zurich, Switzerland.

2012: First HB-SIA intercontinental test flight.

2014: Planned attempt to circumnavigate the globe in an easterly direction in five stages, in the HB-SIB.

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contact. “We’ve got parachutes,” Piccard says. If the plane were to go down over the ocean, it’d be a case of bailing out and waiting to be rescued by boat.

Piccard also says that panicking is often a lot more dangerous than the actual risk: “Too many emotions then come rushing to mind and get in the way of your decision-making.” But pilots are trained to deal with panic.

Borschberg, the former military pilot, flies every mission in his head at home before going to sleep. He tries to visualise every manoeuvre in the plane.

He demonstrated his stamina at the project’s research facility in Dübendorf in February of this year, when he completed a long test in the flight simulator.

His mission was a 72-hour virtual test flight, alone in an artificial cockpit. Medics and engineers only communicated with him by radio. Borschberg went on Twitter during the test. His tweets read like building blocks in a personality profile: February 21, 17:27: First 10 hours in the cockpit are very fine. Starting to get used to my environment and lonelyness [sic] February 22, 15:08: Used for the first time the toilet on board. Needs careful manipulation but it worked...

(In case you’re wondering, the pilots use a toilet installed in the seat, otherwise known as a plastic bottle.)

February 23, 12:12: Getting used to my sleep pattern, think i found the right times to do my micro naps. Currently full of energy

An elated Piccard after his first test flight onboard the HB-SIA

February 23, 13:56: No more hot water, no energy to heat up water, i will eat cold today, snacks, dry fruits and right now a taboule [sic] Borschberg came tottering out of the simulator after three days. “There were people in the team who were worried he was going to collapse as soon as we took pictures of him,” says Piccard.

“I never doubted André for a second.”

During the simulation, Borschberg did leg exercises to stay active and avoid getting thrombosis in his legs.

On 32 occasions he had 20-minute naps. The pilots are allowed to squeeze in ‘micro-naps’ over uninhabited areas.

Auto-pilot takes over during these short sleeping breaks. Then the alarm goes off after 20 minutes. “Yoga and breathing exercises help you get to sleep exactly when you want to,” Borschberg says. Piccard prefers self-hypnosis.

When things get serious in 2014, the pilots will set off around the world in an easterly direction. One will be in the plane, the other on the ground. They’ll have a radio connection. Piccard will give Borschberg words of encouragement when his partner is sitting in the cockpit at an altitude of 8,000m, where outside temperatures are in the region of -40C, with only heating pads and insulation for protection. When wind gets hold of the plane’s wings, the pilot only has his own strength to fight it: there are no hydraulics – they’d use too much energy.

The first intercontinental flights are penned in for May and June 2012. Solar Impulse is due to set off from Payerne before crossing the Mediterranean and landing in Morocco.

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t Payerne for the third test flight of 2012, Piccard starts the HBSIA’s engines. Dozens of curious onlookers stare at the delicate aircraft.

It’s 5.30pm and the sun is low. Swiss Army fighter jets regularly thunder down this runway, but when the solarpowered plane takes off, there is merely the whirr of four, 10hp propellers.

Piccard quickly gains height in the first few metres because the plane is so light. It looks like a huge bird hovering in the sky. In a world polluted with noisy, fast-paced living, this means of conveyance seems almost like a provocative act; Solar Impulse flies at a leisurely pace. It is quiet and clean. Just over 10 minutes later, Piccard’s plane is nothing but a brushstroke on the horizon.

Watch test flights live at www.solarimpulse.com Discover more at www.redbull.com/solarimpulse

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go with the ow Action

Big drops, huge rocks and local cops are just some of the challenges faced by the kayakers on the Red BULL FLOW HUNTeRS project Words: Robert Tighe Photography: Graeme Murray and Miles Holden

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In search of adventure: To kayak the best sections of New Zealand’s rivers, such as the Tawhai Falls (above, where Rush Sturgess took to the water), Ben Brown and his team travelled many miles

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he four kayaks on top of the campervan outside the Tongariro Crossing Lodge tell me I’m in the right place. Sure enough as I step out of the car I’m greeted by Ben Brown, one of the most experienced adventure kayakers in the world. “You should have been here earlier,” he says, words no writer wants to hear. “We found this sick waterfall today.”

It’s a Monday evening in mid-March and it’s the fifth and final week of the Red Bull Flow Hunters project. Finding, 58

paddling and filming the best whitewater and waterfalls in his native New Zealand has been on Brown’s to-do list for years.

The 33-year-old travels the world in his kayak. On this trip he’s exploring his own backyard. Along for the ride are fellow Kiwi Jared Meehan, 29, Rush Sturges, 27, from California, and Rafa Ortiz, 24, from Mexico, some of the best kayakers in the business. Theirs is a small world: they are four of the 15 to 20 kayakers who can claim to make a living from the sport. All four

are keen chroniclers of their adventures.

For a professional kayaker, a camera and a computer are almost as important as a boat and a paddle. The kayakers run the rapids during the day and review the footage in the evening. When Brown introduces me to the team, they’re on their laptops in one of the bedrooms at the lodge, watching video clips and stills from various cameras and GoPros used to capture the day’s action.

“New Zealand as a kayaking location has never been well documented,” says

Wild ride: Rafa Ortiz (this page) negotiates the Aratiatia Rapids in Taupo. Opposite: Sometimes a helicopter is the only way into the desired location; Studying the terrain at Kawarau, Queenstown; Rush Sturges, Ben Brown and Rafa Ortiz check out Matariki Falls in the Central North Island

“New Zealand as a Kayaking location has never been well documented�

Falls guy: Rush Sturges goes over the Matariki Falls on the North Island. Ben Brown’s (top right) local knowledge was essential to prevent life-threatening accidents. The team tackle the Nevis Rapids (bottom right)

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“ The rivers are young and the boulders are shifting so much you have to treat every run as a first descent” Brown. “I wanted to do our rivers justice on this trip.”

“The crazy thing about New Zealand rivers is they change all the time,” explains Sturges. “The rivers are so young and the boulders are shifting so much you’ve got to treat every run as a first descent. Other rivers around the world have bigger waterfalls and are more spectacular. Here you might have a drop of 3m, but if you miss the move you’re probably going to die.”

Local knowledge is essential, particularly on the notoriously dangerous rivers of the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The Flow Hunters headed for Hokitika, the tourist and kayak capital of the West Coast, on the first week of the trip. It was one of the driest summers on record in the South Island: great for tourists; not so good for kayakers. The day after Brown & Co arrived in Hokitika, three low weather systems came in one after the other and the heavens opened.

“It’s been like that on this trip, the stars have kept aligning,” says Brown, “but we’ve also had a couple of sketchy incidents.” The first happened on the Mungo River, a two-day paddle

recommended by locals as the hardest run on the coast. Their guide was Justin Venable or JV, a doctor from New Orleans who now lives on the coast. On their second day on the Mungo they dropped into a gorge with a waterfall.

“We quickly decided we didn’t like it,” says Brown as he searches for the video clip. “It wasn’t a big waterfall, maybe 5m, so height wasn’t an issue, but there was water flushing into this cave behind the waterfall. JV decided he wanted to run it.

He’d run this section of river before and thought he knew the drop.”

The video filmed from the top of the waterfall shows Venable going over the edge. He plugs deep but instead of popping out downstream his boat is turned upside down and is pounded by the waterfall.

A few seconds pass on the video before Brown shouts urgently: “We need a bag!”

He explains: “I shut off the video at that point to get a throw bag (with a packed rope) down to him. He did exactly what we were worried about and got sucked back under the waterfall,” says Brown.

“It was a classic death trap.”

Another camera at ground level captures the rising panic as one, then two minutes pass without any sign of Venable or his boat. Brown, Meehan and Sturges were all throwing ropes into the waterfall in a hopeless fishing exercise. “We thought he was underwater all this time but he was actually behind the waterfall,” says Brown. “He managed to get out of his boat, find an air pocket and wedge his fingers in a crack in the rock.”

Somehow Venable managed to grab hold of Brown’s rope. The footage shows him hauling himself hand-over-hand up the rope, out of the mist, through the waterfall and clambering to safety over the rocks. “I’ve got goose bumps watching it again,” says Brown.

The second ‘sketchy incident’ happened on the Kokatahi River where another local guide, Jordy Searle, almost drowned when his boat got wedged under a rock and he got sucked into a sieve (where the water disappears beneath a rock). “It was gnarly,” says Brown. “We didn’t think we’d see Jordy again. Bits of his kayaking equipment started to flush out from under the rock.”

“In my 16 years of kayaking it was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” says Sturges.

“It makes you question if it’s really worth it. How many more drops, how many more rivers, how many more crazy rapids can you run before you lose a friend?”

“You know the consequences,” says Ortiz, “and sometimes I think to myself, ‘Why am I not at home watching TV? Why 61

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“ To find a waterfall like this in New Zealand is rare�

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do I put myself in these situations?’ But then you do it and come out of it OK and it’s cool. You have to go through these negative things to get the positive.”

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Taking in the scenery (clockwise from far left): Rush Sturges, Ben Brown and Rafa Ortiz in Tree Trunk Gorge; Rafa Ortiz; The team kayak the Kokatahi River, Hokitika, Westland; Ben Brown

ver breakfast the next day the decision is made to run the ‘sick waterfall’ again. I follow the RV for a few kilometres out of National Park, the gateway to the Tongariro Crossing. I’m confused as we pull off the main road beside a farmer’s paddock. There’s no sign of a river, never mind a waterfall. Just a couple of hundred metres across the field however is a row of trees. Behind the trees is a steep cliff, a spectacular gorge and this perfect 15m waterfall. It looks stunning and nobody knows it’s here, apart from a few kayakers and the farmer.

“To find a waterfall like this in New Zealand is very rare,” says Brown, “particularly one that’s so easy to paddle and easy to access. At least it was easy to get to; it was hard to get out. We had to bush crash up this steep slope carrying our kayaks, but I guess it’s the fee you pay for paddling a waterfall like that.”

Not for the first time on the trip Sturges is amazed at the lack of regulations and restrictions on New Zealand rivers. “In California it’s a felony to kayak some rivers,” he says. “If you get caught you’re in trouble and there are a lot of park rangers around. Kiwis are about as relaxed as you can get.”

The point is illustrated that afternoon at Tawhai Falls, a well-known tourist spot.

The team set up a dIY camera shuttle using two lengths of parachute cord stretched between two trees. It’s hard yakka. It takes four hours to capture what will probably be a few seconds of footage in the Flow Hunters TV documentary. But at least as they film run after run over the picturesque 5m falls, there’s no park ranger around to ask them what they’re doing. Nobody shouts stop.

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he next halt is Taupo and the Aratiatia Rapids. The plan is to spend the last few days of the trip running one of the toughest and most unique stretches of whitewater in the country. Water is released through the dam at the top of the rapids three to four times a day. The release is controlled

by Mighty River Power, the company that runs the hydro-electricity power station on the river. Signs advise tourists: WATeR WILL RISe RAPIdLY. KeeP OUT OF RIVeRBed. NO SWIMMING. NO

FISHING. What’s the power company’s attitude to kayakers?

“It’s pretty chilled,” says Brown. “It doesn’t see a lot of descents anymore.”

Soon after the kayakers run the first release at 10am, the first of four planned for the day, the gates to the power station open and a man in a suit approaches.

“What’s happening,” says the power station employee who doesn’t introduce himself.

“Not much,” replies Brown. “Just enjoying the sun.”

“With kayaks?”

“We just had a paddle.”

“You guys aren’t going to jump off the bridge?”

“In kayaks?”

“We’ve seen it done before.”

“No. We’re just out for a paddle.”

“All good. don’t do anything silly. And I didn’t see you.”

“That pisses me off,” says Brown after he’s gone. “You work in a power station.

Concentrate on making power. don’t come out here telling kayakers what to do. After all we’ve achieved in the last few weeks, I’d hate for this to be the focus of the story.”

Brown and Meehan wander off to prepare for the next release leaving Sturges and Ortiz on the bridge.

Fifteen minutes before the second release at 12 noon, a police car pulls up. After some polite chit-chat the local constable informs Sturges and Ortiz that Mighty River Power called the police and will not release the water while the kayakers are here. Brown and Meehan arrive back to the bridge to be told the news. “Why are we not allowed to paddle here?” Brown asks the policeman. He’s told that under Waikato River bylaws, any activity in the water within 200m of Mighty River Power structures is illegal.

“It’s embarrassing,” says Brown. “This is the last place in the world I expected this to happen. It’s a sad day for kayaking in New Zealand.”

Forced off the river, Brown and the three kayakers do some pieces to camera in front of the gates of the power station.

“Kayaking is a dangerous sport,” says Brown with the polish and poise of a news anchor. “There’s an element of risk and we’ve been exposed to that first-hand on this trip… But to stand here and have some guy in an office tell us we can’t paddle the rapid… Where will it end? We’ll take away a huge amount of awesome memories from this trip, but for now I guess we’ll just have to load up the RV and find somewhere else to float our boat.”

Check out the Flow Hunters TV documentary at www.redbull.co.nz and www.redbull.com/flowhunters

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ucI worLD cuP 12 0 2 e th f o d n u , at the opening ro urg, South africa b tz ri a rm te ie P s, in DowNhILL serie t downhill mountain biking has ha irt perceptions of w e – are left in the d b n ca it t a h w d n become – a

CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPHY: VICTOR LUCAS

Words: Steve Smith

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CREDIT:

racING For GLorY

Months of preparation lead to just one thing: the charge downhill to see who’s fatest. This is Swiss rider Nick Beer, who finished 12th for the Devinci Global Racing team.

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wo elite sporting seasons began, 6,000 miles apart, on March 18. On different continents, two men prepared to defend their hard-won 2011 world titles. Both strapped on full-face helmets, climbed aboard cutting-edge carbon-fibre machines, and stared down the track with focused intensity. Both were champions at the very peak of their chosen sporting disciplines.

Months of off-season preparation were about to realise their purpose. In the millisecond it takes for a light to change from red to green, questions would be answered, speculation laid to rest, and the weight of pressure brought to bear.

In Australia, Sebastian Vettel flexed his right ankle to catapult his RB8 Formula One car off the line at the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne. In South Africa, Aaron Gwin pumped both legs 66

to hurtle his Trek Session 9.9 mountain bike out the starter’s gate of the UCI Downhill World Cup race at the Cascades MTB Park in Pietermaritzburg.

Like Vettel, Aaron Gwin is his sport’s reigning king. Similarly fair-haired and blue-eyed, the American dominated downhill mountain biking last year with a supremacy seldom seen in the sport.

Gwin came out of nowhere to blitz his peers by winning five of the seven World Cup races. Former champions in the field, such as South Africa’s Greg Minnaar, England’s Gee Atherton, and Australia’s Sam Hill, were humbled by the American’s record-breaking performance. Gwin’s focused fitness regime and motocross experience had led him to throw down a new marker for the sport.

At the opening round of the 2012 World Cup in Pietermaritzburg, the

response of Gwin’s competitors to his resounding slap upside the head was eagerly awaited. Make no mistake; it was a hell of a slap. Gwin is a very quiet and humble individual, who places great importance in his faith and family, but there’s a steely glint to those blue eyes.

They don’t blink often.

Neither do Steve Peat’s. The lanky Englishman has seen it, and won it, all. He’s a downhill mountain biking legend, the archetypal Grizzled Vet – as grizzled a vet as a New Era cap-wearing downhiller can be. At 38, his best days may be behind him, but Peat can still turn it on. His second place last year at the World Cup round in Windham, New York, is evidence of that.

The race in Pietermaritzburg is a landmark for Peat: his 100th World Cup start. Through 19 impressive

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“Everybody has to look at Gwinny and re-evaluate their training”

Photography: Sven Martin

The man to beat: Last year's champion, Aaron Gwin from the USA, continued his form in the first round of this year's World Cup. He finished second, watched by hundreds of enthusiastic spectators

seasons, he has seen his sport change dramatically. Back when he started, bikes were still made of carbon-steel tubing with a few inches of front suspension and cantilever brakes.

Since then, the R&D boffins have readily evolved Peat’s steed into a carbon-fibre-framed, hydraulic discbraked, dual-suspensioned wonder of a bicycle called the Santa Cruz V-10.

Reacting to innovation, therefore, is not new to Peat and his peers, but when the latest came in the flesh-andblood form of Gwin and his winning methods, it sounded a wake-up call.

“Everybody has to look what Gwinny’s doing and re-evaluate their training,” says Peat, with a shrug. “You just have to lift your own game. People come in all the time and lift the skill and training boundaries. They lift the approach to testing and improve their equipment.

He had a really good set-up on his bike last year, and people know what it is now. It should be a lot closer this year.”

With Peat as the Grizzled Vet, then the young Englishman Danny Hart, the last man to beat Gwin, is The Kid. At the 2011 downhill mountain bike World Championships – the traditional season finale, a one-off race separate to the World Cup, at which the winner gets the rainbow jersey awarded to cycling word champions in several disciplines – Hart rode a treacherously wet and greasy course in Champéry, Switzerland, as if it was bone dry. He won by 11.7 seconds, an unheard-of margin in a sport usually measured in hundredths. Watch his winning run on YouTube to see how brave The Kid was, just a couple of weeks before his 20th birthday. He gave everyone a lesson in balls, but he also gave them hope: Gwin could be beaten.

“After the World Champs, I know I can win these things now. I want to win more races, that’s the thick and thin of it,” says Hart, in his broad north-east England accent.

To go with the Grizzled Vet and The Kid, there’s a Local Hero, Greg Minnaar.

The South African has been the most consistent rider on the World Cup series 67

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“There’s a lot of kids going really fast, but that’s good for over the past decade. His smooth, flowing, unhurried style is not so exciting, or fast and loose in the way The Kid’s is, but three World Cup series titles in 2001, 2005 and 2008, as well as a World Championship in 2003, are testament to his ability. This year, the Local Hero is also The Challenger.

Minnaar lost to Gwin in Pietermaritzburg last year, a defeat in his own backyard, and they always hurt. As well as changes to his bike, 68

Minnaar is coming into the 2012 season stronger than ever, yet weighing less than he did at the start of his career.

“Psychologically I know that we raced well last year,” he says. “I won two World Cup races – I was the only other guy to win [apart from Gwin] – but the physical side I needed to work on. And we’ve improved our bike set-up as well.”

It’s never easy playing catch-up.

Despite The Challenger’s new bike and fitness regime, Gwin remains a formidable opponent. “My approach this year will be the same,” says the reigning champion, confidently relaxed.

“You can’t worry about what the other guys are doing. Maybe I motivated them to do things differently, I dunno.

Whatever it was, it helped elevate the sport in certain ways. I do think it will be more competitive this year. There’s

a lot of kids going really fast, but that’ll be good for racing.”

The competition runs equally high off course. World-leading bike brands, including Trek, Giant, Santa Cruz, Specialized and GT, run factory teams.

Victory in this series translates into actual retail sales. It’s the same ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ maxim that motivates car manufactures to get involved in motor racing.

Prototype bike parts – such as the carbon-fibre wheel rims on the bikes of teammates Minnaar and Peat – are put to the test in World Cup races. If they can stand up to the loads, the 60kphplus speeds, and the huge jumps these riders impart, they are most certainly able to handle anything an amateur can dish up. It’s exactly the same philosophy employed by brands involved in Formula

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PHOTOGRAPHY: SVEN MARTIN

Fast and furious: Pietermaritzburg isn’t the steepest course on the World Cup tour, but it’s the quickest

One. The trickle-down of technology, from that pinnacle of motorsport, to the next generation supercar, and the subsequent generation’s hatchback, is mirrored in mountain biking.

What isn’t similarly fostered in F1 as in downhill mountain biking is a communal spirit among the teams and competitors. The two sports could not be more different here. Whereas F1 drivers on the same team are often not on speaking terms, never mind the opposition, on the downhill scene riders and teams fiercely contend for position on Sunday, but between the timed runs, there’s a far more inclusive atmosphere.

Throughout the World Cup season, the pit area at a race is open to the public, with exotic machinery there to be touched and gawked at. Riders happily chat to one another and to fans.

“Everyone’s pretty friendly,” says Brook MacDonald, a bulldog-strong young rider from New Zealand, “and that’s really cool. It’s kind of like a big family. Pretty awesome, actually. The guys become your mates and you get to hang out all over the world with them.”

The mechanics are especially chummy. If there’s anyone who needs to be stopped from speaking to the opposition, it’s the tech crew.

Belgian Mark Maurisson has been a bike mechanic in the downhill World Cup since 1997, and he currently looks after the GT Fury of the 2010 champion, Gee Atherton.

He’s seen first-hand the growth of the sport into the super-professional global series it is today, while retaining the sense of community at the sport’s core.

“Yeah, it’s one big family here,” Maurisson says. “We might get paid by different companies, but if I need anything – it might be a missing part for the bike’s brakes – I can go to a mechanic in another team to get one. It’s a real good atmosphere, and one of the reasons I’ve been doing this for so long.”

Out in the car park, away from Maurisson and Atherton, and Gwin’s World Trek Racing team and its prototype equipment, team mechanics, personal trainers and corporate pit area, there is another group of equally committed competitors. Servicing their own bikes out of the back of rental cars are the privateers. These guys are the lifeblood of the downhill mountain biking scene and they make up a third of the 157-strong Men’s Elite field in Pietermaritzburg. They may have some minimal sponsorship, but they’re all paying for expenses out their own pockets.

“We’ve all got other jobs,” says Englishman Rich Thomas, sitting in the open hatch of his small Nissan rental. “I’m an engineer, and though we get free bikes and kit, we still have to pay for all our flights, accommodation and food. I don’t think a lot of the top guys know how lucky they are. I couldn’t think of a better life doing what we’re doing – even though I do have to pay for it myself.

“I’m just living the dream trying to make it happen,” says American rider Curtis ‘The Dream’ Keene.

“In the winter I work a little bit and save some money, but come summer

ThE FaVourITES

Gee Atherton (GB) is the 2010 World Cup winner and is on a new GT bike this year.

Greg Minnaar (SA) is seen as consistent and reliable and has persistently been in the running for overall World Cup victory in recent years. World Champion Danny Hart (GB) became a living legend with his spectacular ride to World Championship gold in Champéry. His style is new school: spectacular, unorthodox, ripping every jump.

Aaron Gwin (USA) dominated last season.

He’s the consummate professional. A man of few words he gets tips from mountainbiking legend John Tomac.

See the next live broadcast of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup at www.redbull.com/bike

Gee Atherton

Greg Minnaar

Danny Hart

Aaron Gwin

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Four to watch…

Racers we expect to achieve podium finishes.

Stevie Smith (CAN) has steadily worked his way to the top of the sport in recent years.

He’s brilliant technically but hasn’t quite been fit enough. Brook MacDonald (NZ) is a fearless 20-year-old powerhouse. Now riding a Mondraker, he knows he has a bike that can win. He competes for the Austrian team MS. At 38, Steve Peat (GB) is the veteran in the field. In spite of his easy-going image, he’s a consummate professional who specifically targets the season’s highlight races. In his best years, Sam Hill (AUS) dominated proceedings like Gwin did last year, but he has been hampered by injuries. This year he’s riding the carbon version of the legendary Specialized Demo for the first time.

Stevie Smith Brook MacDonald

Steve Peat

Sam Hill

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time, I’m on my bike trying to get to as many events as I can. Getting here from California cost me $2,000, but I’m getting to race my bike in Africa, man!”

And what a race it would turn out to be. After Friday’s qualifying session whittled down the field to 80 men and 20 women, Greg Minnaar and Aaron Gwin topped the men’s list.

Privateers Rich Thomas and Curtis Keene both made the cut. With a run of 3:59.62, Minnaar set a time eighthundredths of a second faster than Gwin’s, which meant the South African would be the last man down the hill on Sunday. It’s the event organiser’s dream.

The big finish will also be enjoyed by far more fans than those lining the course. In the late ’90s, the downhill World Cup benefited from title sponsors like Grundig and Volvo, whose funding allowed organisers to spend six- and seven-figure sums on live TV broadcasts of events. When those big-money sponsorships ended, however, the quality of the broadcasts dipped and TV channels dropped downhill from their schedules. Since a deal was struck between Red Bull and the UCI in March, all World Cup events will be broadcast live online. It’s an important boost for the sport. “We believe this TV internet will take us to the next level,” says Melanie Leveau, the UCI World Cup events co-ordinator.

A huge local crowd on Sunday is buoyed by the performance of another South African rider, Burry Stander, who finishes second in the cross-country World Cup event held here (the UCI cross-country World Cup series makes four of its seven series stops alongside the downhillers in 2012). The downhill route is 3.06km long, and drops 435m down through the Pietermaritzburg hills.

It’s not the steepest course in the series and, with a flat middle section called Khathala (Zulu for “tired”) that requires energy-sapping pedalling, it’s not a favourite among the competitors.

Unlike the steep, technical European courses epitomized by Champéry, Pietermaritzburg demands everything in a rider’s skill set. It’s the fastest course on the World Cup tour, with some riders hitting 70kph through the speed trap. That’s very fast for a push bike. It also has the biggest jumps, including, on the men’s course, a tabletop jump spanning 23m.

This is tough terrain. Kiwi rider Brook MacDonald overcooked a tabletop jump during a qualifying run, and landed flat. Not many riders would’ve got up from that, but not many riders

have MacDonald’s brick-outhouse build.

That MacDonald is competing on Sunday is an achievement in itself. At the starting line, he is notable for a large cut on his cheek and plenty of bandages on his right leg “Yeah, I’m all right, mate,” he says. He doesn’t look all right.

The downhill World Cup reaches its climax late on Sunday afternoon.

Australia’s Tracey Hannah has made an impactful return to the sport, after a four-year absence, to sensationally win the women’s race. The men’s race is down to the last two. The Grizzled Vet, Steve Peat, has finished in 14th place – a good solid run for the big man. The Kid, Danny Hart, has a disappointing ride and ends up 30th after a fall.

Tracey’s brother, ‘Sick’ Mick Hannah is unexpectedly fast. His time of 3:58.97 puts him in the hot seat as leader, with only Gwin and, lastly, Minnaar left to possibly unseat him. The American’s subsequent run of 3:58.61 sets the stage for the South African to exact a measure of revenge for last year’s usurping and, most importantly, show the rest of the field that Gwin’s dominance is consigned to last year.

It looks bad for Minnaar right out of the gate. A split-time early in his run shows him to be two seconds down on Gwin: a huge difference at this level.

Before the last split, the crowd is expectant, like NASA enduring orbit entry radio silence. Then Minnaar emerges, airborne, through a gap in the trees and negotiates a large jump.

The split flashes up. He’s made up the time; more than that, he’s half a second up. The South African, the Local Hero, The Challenger, holds his lead over the final two jumps to fulfil the Hollywood ending. Cue the wild celebrations. Cue the champagne-soaked scenes. Cut to the F1 lads in Melbourne, where they’re doing the same.

A late-afternoon summer downpour hastens the crowd’s departure and, just like the task faced by Sebastian Vettel’s team, the downhill crew begin the arduous job of striking their pit areas. It’s a long way back home from this southern point of Africa. Plenty of time on the journey to think about the season ahead.

To recalibrate expectations, cement early advantages – and plot comebacks.

With less than a second separating the top three in Pietermaritzburg, the 2012 World Cup series has got off to the best possible start.

Watch the 2012 World Cup live: www.redbull.tv More at: www.redbull.com/bike/downhill-worldcup

Photography: Sven Martin

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SA’S UP FOR THE CUP

Aiming for the top: Minnaar is hoping to regain his World Cup crown

2012 World Cup series Contender GREG MINNAAR took a storming victory in Pietermaritzburg

WORDS: STEVE SMITH. PHOTOGRAPHY: SVEN MARTIN

If you’re looking for a role model in the sport of downhill mountain biking, South Africa’s multiple world champ is it. Aside from his many on-course accolades, this 30-yearold rider has handled himself and his career with a measure of maturity and professionalism you might not associate with this kind gravity-fed extreme sport. We caught up with a relaxed and confident-looking Minnaar in his Santa Cruz Syndicate team pits…

THE RED BULLETIN: It’s hard to believe, but you’re something of an elder statesman on the World Cup these days. After more than decade, how do you still keep the levels of motivation up?

GREG MINNAAR: Hey, I’m still a young dog compared to Steve Peat! (His 38-year-old English team-mate). But, yeah, it is hard to keep your levels of motivation up all the time. You basically just have to keep changing things up.

Moving from Honda to Santa Cruz really at the end of 2008, and then also coming back from big injuries both motivated me. I’ve had major shoulder and leg injuries that got me charged up again, and I’ve done things like train and compete in the Dusi Canoe Marathon to change my training up a bit.

It’s got to be tough to keep up all the training that’s required to stay at the top…?

Sure. Racing has always been fun.

There are seven World Cup series races and then World Champs at the end of the season and everything gets built up toward that. You never lose motivation for racing, but it’s the hours of training that are tough. To throw your leg over that bike at home is hard. It helps to mix my Santa Cruz mountain bikes up a lot. Aside from my downhill bike, I’ve got a full-on cross-country bike and a trail bike, plus I have a cyclo-cross bike and a road bike. I combine those every week. I have to otherwise I get bored.

And how has the off-season training gone this year?

My prep’s been good. Apart from my coach, Stefan Gerard, I’ve also been working with someone to help me get my body into balance. I’ve had a lot of injuries – to my one leg and my shoulder – so my body hasn’t been in balance. I’ve really focused on getting different areas of my body in better shape. I’m in the best condition of my life – lighter and stronger than ever before. Because the level among all the riders has increased so much, you have keep on improving your training programme. As new guys have come into the sport, they’ve brought in higher levels of fitness and you have to adapt to that. Some new guy will come in with a new way of training and while you don’t have to copy him, you have to train harder. One of those new guys has obviously been 2011 World Cup champion Aaron Gwin, who was pretty dominant last year.

What’s the game plan to beat the American this season?

Well… firstly we had some work to do on our bikes. We went back to the drawing board and did a lot of testing to improve them. We’ve got that covered now – the bikes are amazing.

Physically we had to perfect ourselves too. As I said, for me it was getting stronger, more balanced and maybe

Name Greg Minnaar Nickname GM Born November 13, 1981, Pietermaritzburg Hometown Pietermaritzburg Height 188cm Weight 86kg Team Santa Cruz Syndicate Bike Santa Cruz V-10 Racing CV World Cup champion 2001, 2005, 2008 World Champion 2003

losing little excess weight. I’m a pretty tall guy and I’ve never been lighter than 85kg until now. I’m lighter than I was when I was 19. Psychologically, I know I race well, so we just needed to get the other stuff sorted. That’s my answer…. well that’s the one I’m going with, whether I’ve got it correct this year I don’t know.

As a rider, what do think is your biggest asset?

The mental side. That’s definitely more my game. I feel that mentally I can turn things around regardless of what happened in practice or qualifying. I won’t give up easily…

You must’ve seen the sport change a lot in the time you’ve been competing. Then and now… what’s been the main difference?

It’s just gotten way more professional.

I remember being at a race in Italy when I first started racing downhill. There was this little patch of grass on a slope right next to the hotel and guys like Steve Peat and Shaun Palmer had built a little course with jumps and berms.

Straight after the downhill race we all went there to mess around on our bikes.

Now after a race, everyone is cooling down and getting massages back at the hotel. Guys are training harder and they’re more serious. It’s not the “Let’s party every night and then go racing on Sunday” vibe anymore.

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Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos spacesuit is packed full of practical little details. For example, it has a rear-view mirror on each glove to compensate for the helmet restricting his vision

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Tailor through time and space

For more than 50 years, David Clark Inc has been the haberdashery for very special occasions. The US company has made spacesuits for generations of astronauts and pilots, and is now supplying Red Bull Stratos with the last layers protecting Felix Baumgartner during his leap from the stratosphere. We go behind the scenes Words: Werner Jessner & robert sperl 72

photography: sven hoffmann/red Bull stratos

This is Red Bull Stratos Red Bull Stratos is a mission to the edge of space in which Felix Baumgartner will ascend to 36,576m in a helium balloon and come back down to Earth in free fall. He will collect useful scientific data and set four world records as he does so:

1. Break speed of sound unaided 2. Free fall from highest altitude 3. Longest free fall time 4. Highest manned balloon flight

The Red Bulletin is following the mission closely, each issue focusing on a specific topic. All back issues can be downloaded for the iPad.

IN FEBRUARY we interviewed Felix Baumgartner (1.1) and Joe Kittinger (1.2).

IN MARCH we took a look at Baumgartner’s capsule (2.1), his cockpit (2.2) and the cameras on board (2.3).

IN APRIL it was all about the helium balloon carrying the capsule and

its occupant: how it gets airborne (3.1) and how Baumgartner went about getting his licence for it (3.2).

THIS MONTH we discuss Baumgartner’s spacesuit (4.1) and explore the colourful history of spacesuits (4.2).

AT THE EPICENTRE OF DAVID CLARK INC The travellers’ destinations lie beyond our world, but the required garb – in this instance, Felix Baumgartner’s spacesuit – is still checked over in the most traditional manner. The only piece of digital equipment in the test area is a mobile phone.

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DCCI looks more like a wooden toy factory. This impression lingers behind the narrow entrance door. The only security you pass to gain access is a doorman who seems to know all 300 employees by their first names.

Visitors are shown around by an assistant, who leads the way first up an austere stairwell. There is the kind of silence of a school during the holidays. You are very conscious of your own footsteps. The route winds through offices with booths separated by half-height wooden partitions for the technical staff and aquariums for the more senior staff, past simple metal cabinets and desks from which friendly staff greet you as you pass

David Clark pioneered anti-G and hearing protection. And every astronaut who took the Space Shuttle wore a David Clark suit

by. The longer you stay, the more palpable the sensation that this company is involved in something special. door after door reveals similar scenes, until we arrive in the inner sanctum, a windowless room of modest proportions with wooden panelling and linoleum floor. Anyone expecting a eureka moment, to walk into a neon-lit futureroom, is in for a surprise. The heart of David Clark Inc – master-tailor of suits for Shuttle astronauts, a company that has clothed every elite pilot to have conducted missions as a spy or a test pilot in ultra-fast secret jets – is a room in which the only piece of digital equipment is the mobile phone in our guide’s pocket.

There are pieces of equipment the size of cupboards, all of them analogue and covered in olive-green tin panelling.

Each one has shiny chrome controls and gauges. On top of these machines, people have placed measuring beakers and other smaller equipment. There is a pulley dangling from the ceiling to simulate a parachute jump, and even though there is a set of kitchen

PHOTOGRAPHY: SVEN HOFFMANN/RED BULL STRATOS

W

orcester lies around 70km west of Boston and must be the most mispronounced city in America.

(It is pronounced ‘wuss-ter’, because of its relationship to Worcester in England, home of the sauce.) What is also confusing, is that although Worcester only has a population of around 200,000, from whichever direction you enter this city, you become entangled in the suburban jungle of car parks, supermarkets, apartment buildings and factories. The latter are hidden behind anonymous brick facades, and David Clark Company Inc, on Franklin Street, is no exception.

The company’s introduction to this business came in 1941 when the company founder, David M Clark, a knitting manufacturer, devised the first anti-G suits (worn by pilots in World War II). This developed into hearing protection and pressure suits, as well as helmets for pilots and astronauts of the United States Air Force and NASA. The company offers a range of hightech products, but from the outside,

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scales (inventory number DC1452) standing on a filing cabinet, you sense that this is a place where genius, aptitude and experience coexist with a pioneering spirit. It is like a traditional watchmaker’s workshop in here, but these people are not in the business of minutes and seconds. They’re about going into space.

Hanging on the walls is a small gallery of certificates documenting the DCCI team’s areas of expertise. Alongside them are two dozen photographs, of pilots standing at the gangway of their jets, of teams of astronauts in front of their spacecraft. Many of the photos have been signed by their subjects, thanking staff for their faultless work.

Dominating the room is a platform with a pilot’s seat on it. It resembles ‘Old Sparky’, as the Americans dub the electric chair. This is where astronauts of the future are measured up, and subjected to final tests and leakage checks in their newly delivered suits. Only after these tests are complete do the engineers at DCCI tick the final boxes and the suits can leave the premises. (Some come

VALET Baumgartner (above) is dressed in his suit by Mike Todd (right). Even one small crease could cause problems.

Todd will be the last person to see Baumgartner before he gets in the capsule and the first person to greet him when he lands. This professional closeness has made them great friends.

back after the mission is complete: trophies wrapped in nylon and kept in an archive room, complete with name tags, just like in a fancy dress hire shop. Diving suits, which DCCI developed as a kind of exercise, are kept here too.) felix Baumgartner sat in this test room for the first time in January 2008, for three hours of measuring-up. The initial, critical introduction phase was already behind him. Contact with DCCI was established by Art Thompson, the technical head of the Red Bull Stratos project, and a well-known figure in the aerospace industry. Things were decidedly frosty at the negotiating table when Baumgartner first sat faceto-face with the DCCI management.

Expectations were high on both sides.

The aviation and space industries have been built on precisely worded projects and contracts, worked out at what, to the uninitiated, looks like an exceedingly unemotional level. This is a business which only works on complete infallibility, with no place for feelings. For Baumgartner, this was all new. “Red Bull is simply

A few used suits are wrapped in nylon and kept in a store room, just like in a fancy dress shop a warmer world,” he says, “full of jokes and smiling faces, everything’s laid back, no one wears a tie.”

On the other side of the table sat John W Bassick, then executive vicepresident at David Clark Inc. He explained his firm’s reservations about civilian projects. The last time they were involved with one was in the mid-1960s when Nick Piantanida, a truck-driver from New Jersey, wanted to beat Joe Kittinger’s high-altitude leap record, set in 1960, and also the record that Baumgartner will attempt to break. During Piantanida’s record attempt, there was an incident when he was at an altitude of 19km.

Oxygen deprivation threw him into a coma; four months later he was

THE HELMET

This helmet, made of composite materials, was also developed by David Clark. Inside the helmet Baumgartner has a microphone and earphones for communication. The visor, which can be heated so that it doesn’t fog or ice up, has an adjustable sunshade. Baumgartner will also get oxygen through the helmet; during the jump the oxygen comes from two portable cylinders contained in the parachute rig.

You can distinguish Baumgartner’s suit from those made for pilots and astronauts by the cut. Mobility is not of such importance for them, whereas Baumgartner will be in free fall: imagine a skijumper in flight, but positioned head first.

The strap in front of the chest is a helmet tiedown. It is there to keep the helmet on the head when the pressure suit inflates (because the pressure tends to lift the helmet right off the shoulders). The strap affects Baumgartner’s position because it is short while he is sitting and he has to extend it to stand up when he exits the capsule.

THE CUT

4.1

Imagine the second layer of the suit – the netting – as a crocheted net made of special thread. This stops the inflated membrane stretching too much.

THE SECOND LAYER Twenty-first century chainmail

The inner layer of the suit is made of a rubbery membrane with ultrasonically welded seams. It lets nothing in or out. (It can cope with holes the size of small coins in an emergency.) Once Felix opens the door of the capsule, the suit will be filled with air so that the pressure is equivalent to an altitude of 10,700m. This artificial atmosphere prevents decompression sickness (where gas bubbles form in the blood). During the free fall phase, a control valve – the ‘brains’ of the suit – will regulate the pressure and maintain it consistently despite changes in his altitude. Once Baumgartner puts on the suit, it’s time for the pre-breathing: two hours of breathing pure oxygen to free the blood of nitrogen. Bubbles of that gas could form at altitude. However, anyone breathing pure oxygen has to make up for its dehydrating properties. So, in Baumgartner’s case, there is a food inlet on the helmet that delivers liquids through a tube.

However, it follows that a person eating and drinking more will make more waste products. Baumgartner decided against the rather ungracious wearing of a nappy, and chose a condom-style device linked to a container. The container will remain in the capsule, Baumgartner says, “because you don’t need it during free fall”.

THE FIRST LAYER An atmosphere for Felix

Once he is 36,500m above Earth, Felix Baumgartner will leave his pressurised capsule and start his free fall back down to terra firma. He needs a pressurised suit to survive that.

Temperatures of around -60°C will have to be endured.

The low air pressure at altitudes above 19km means that without the suit, water in the blood would practically boil and then kill the man in whose veins it flows.

Felix Baumgartner’s spacesuit is the first David Clark Inc has manufactured especially for a private individual. Three have been made for him

The suit in detail

The gloves are detachable from the suit, which offers optimal comfort and dexterity for as long as possible before flight. A mirror has been affixed to each glove to aid Felix’s limited peripheral vision in the helmet.

Felix will be wearing a pair of boots that are substantially larger than his foot size so that pressurized booties (which are part of the suit’s interior “bladder”) can go inside them.

The white suit fabric that covers the exterior of his boots is fire retardant.

hands & feet

Like the helmet, the gloves are also made airtight. They are attached to the suit by a rotatable wristband

OPEN & CLOSED

...you’ve got to go.

There is a urine collection container under Baumgartner’s seat. A hose connects it to a condom-like device inside the suit. Before exiting the capsule, he will disconnect the hose and close the zip on his suit.

IF YOU DRINK...

Used to ventilate the suit with warm or cool air during the ascent. Warm air can help to keep Baumgartner from being ‘cold soaked’ while cool air can avert perspiration, which fogs the visor.

Vent hose fitting

A peek below the surface. Here you can see how painstakingly the crocheted artificial fibre netting has been put in place. The wires lead to Baumgartner’s boot heaters

Automatically maintains the pressure in the suit at a steady level despite the changes in altitude that Baumgartner experiences.

suit controller

The third and outermost layer of the suit is a single layer textile with a fire-retardant and insulating effect. Baumgartner will also be wearing a thermal undergarment for protection during the ascent (which will last about two-and-a-half hours) and the descent – about five and a half minutes of free fall, and then his parachute to be deployed from about 1500m above the ground. Only three suits have been produced for Baumgartner: a prototype which was continuously adapted during the test phase, a follow-up model for more tests and finally the third suit, which, for safety reasons, will only be used for a few test jumps and the actual record attempt itself.

THE THIRD LAYER To protect against wind and fire

photography: Balazs Gardi/Red Bull Stratos (2), Sven Hoffmann/Red Bull Stratos

4.2 The history

of spacesuits

The first spacesuits, with a design based on diving suits, were made in the 1930s. The Second World War hastened the development of spacesuits and anti-g suits, as did the subsequent Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

The David Clark Company has always been at the forefront of the industry

1965 This suit was worn in the experimental rocket-powered X-15 plane, which could achieve speeds of Mach 6.72 (7,274 kph).

It was the first suit with a restraint layer made completely of Link Net, a material developed by David Clark that has proved its worth from the first space walk in 1965 until today. Felix Baumgartner’s pressurised suit has elements made of Link Net.

FROM 1973 The Russian Sokol spacesuit was used for journeys to the International Space Station. It was tailormade for its wearer and, unlike the multi-use NASA Space Shuttle suits made by David Clark, was a one-wear type of spacesuit.

CIRCA 1960 This Soviet-made capstan suit for a dog was used in early space travel development programmes. In capstan suits, the pressure is produced directly by a serious of inflatable tubes, a method developed by Dr Jim Henry of the University of Southern California in about 1940. Later, the David Clark Company created suits for the X-1 pilots based on the same design. The technology reached the Soviet Union in 1960, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet territory in his U-2 spy plane.

1965 Ed White wore this Gemini G4C suit on the first American space walk in 1965. You can see the additional TMG (thermal micrometeoroid garment) outer protective layer and a gold-tinted visor.

Frank Borman and Jim Lovell wore more developed versions on their record-breaking 14-day space flight in the Gemini VII later that year.

CIRCA 1950 The 1950s saw a number of firms experimenting with the manufacture of a range of spacesuits: BF Goodrich, General Electric, US Rubber, Arrowhead, ILC and, last but not least, David Clark. This prototype suit of unknown origin is typical of the era.

FROM 1977 With their hard torsos, Hamilton Standard Space Shuttle Extravehicular Mobility Units were known as ‘suits of armour’. Suits similar to this one carried the kitbag with the survival and monitoring systems on journeys into space, and helped secure tools for work outside the Space Shuttle.

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CIRCA 1959 This suit is from back when the US Air Force was first given sole responsibility for all pressurised suits (still the case today, incidentally). The suit is based on a range by BF Goodrich, but rather than a diagonal front zip, it has a U-shaped zip in the style of David Clark’s X-15 suits.

This prototype is similar to the suit David Clark made for the US Navy.

FROM 1975 This replaced the first suit for Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird pilots and was used by NASA for high-speed test flights.

An anti-G suit was also built into the inside.

The microphones and micro-switch pressure sensors were meant to eliminate the noise of breathing during communication.

CIRCA 1955 This early Apollo spacesuit was made by the International Latex Corporation. The polycarbonate helmet comes complete with a communications unit and was developed by Air-Lock Inc, founded by David Clark and a firm which now forms part of the David Clark Company.

1961 As worn by Alan Shepard, this Mercury Spacesuit is based on the Mark IV model that BF Goodrich devised for the US Navy. In the course of its development, highly qualified staff moved from the US Navy over to NASA.

FROM 1960 For more than half a century, scientists have been looking at ‘soft suits’ that could be worn on other planets. The ideal here would be to wear the suit outside the controlled interior of a spacecraft, and easily remove it inside an airlock, which would minimise contamination.

Many such concepts are currently being evaluated by NASA.

FROM 1961 With a polycarbonate inflatable helmet, the Apollo suit’s design (worn here by Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott) is still used outside the International Space Station.

ACTION

PHOTOGRAPHY: PICTUREDESK.COM (2), GETTY IMAGES (7), CORBIS (3), FRANÇOIS PORTMANN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, GIAN PAUL LOZZA

LIMITED EDITION At David Clark, spacesuits are made by hand. It can take a month to make one complete suit – a work rate sufficient to keep up with demand.

dead. “I got to know him right here at David Clark,” says Bassick.

But Baumgartner and Thompson argued their case well. The idea of being able to develop, with the Red Bull Stratos team’s help, a prototype for the next generation of full-pressure suits, that might save the lives of future astronauts, won over DCCI, and that evening the two parties dined at The Country Club, in nearby Brookline. At a classic American country club – this is the country’s oldest – dress trousers are an absolute must, and Baumgartner, as usual, was wearing ripped jeans. Thompson leapt to the rescue, but as he is considerably larger than Baumgartner, so too were the borrowed pair of trousers. “I sat there,” says Baumgartner, “looking like a Bulgarian car salesman.”

Baumgartner underwent initial testing wearing a suit of a model similar to that made for reconnaissance aircraft pilots, explains Mike Todd, a member of Baumgartner’s mission team. The American is the mission’s life support engineer. Todd is responsible for every aspect of the suit and how it functions in coordination with the rest of the mission’s equipment. He also helps Baumgartner into the suit before the jump to conserve his energy, making sure each component is positioned and sealed perfectly.

From parachuting to BASE-jumping to crossing the English Channel in a suit with a carbon wing, Baumgartner has had a great deal of experience of suits. (“I’ve also been to weddings,” he says.)

But his Red Bull Stratos suit brings with it greater difficulty: little movement, a narrow field of vision. Then there’s that claustrophobic feeling of being stuck in narrow confines, and finding it hard to

“Felix should spend as much time as possible in this suit.

It has to become like a second skin to him” breathe. “Your breathing always meets resistance,” says Baumgartner. “It’s like holding a permeable cloth up to your mouth and then running fast. OK, so you get enough air, but you have the feeling that it’s too little.”

Joe Kittinger, now part of the Red Bull Stratos team, is under no illusions about a man’s relationship with his suit. “Felix should spend as much time as possible in this suit,” he says. “It has to become like a second skin to him.” (Baumgartner needed psychological help to wear the

suit, the story of which is featured in the February edition of The Red Bulletin, available to download on iPad.) Back on the tour, the DCCI assistant continues to the area where 12 specialists finish off the suits. Even in these lowceilinged tailoring rooms,DCCI prioritises tradition. Tradition has proved itself infallible down the decades. Time has been deliberately put on hold here. It is in this room that seamstresses make netting – a layer to be sandwiched between the air-tight underlay and the outer protective layer of a suit on machines that have performed their duty, clacking away for the past 40, 50 years.

Netting prevents the innermost layer from inflating incorrectly. It is like complicated macramé, and resembles the chainmail of a Samurai. David M Clark, the company’s founder, helped develop the mechanical marvels that weave the netting, row for row, into complex webs.

The suit materials are state-of-the-art, breathable and fireproof, but are still cut using shop-worn templates on large, flat, wooden tables. The people who work here are virtuosos with scissors, measuring tapes and tailor’s chalk. The many individual pieces are sewn together on mechanical Singer sewing machines.

Stitch by stitch, every seam is checked several times over and documented. It takes hundreds of hours before a suit such as Baumgartner’s is finished, at a rate of one per month. Were there to be a power cut, this department wouldn’t stop producing. The workers would just light candles and their Singers would keep on singing. www.redbullstratos.com

5 Next month:

How Felix Baumgartner gets his body and mind into stratospheric shape.

Plus, a quick trip into science fiction.

gET FIT, STAY FIT Even if gravity does provide a little help, Felix Baumgartner’s leap from space still needs him to be in good shape.

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Contents 82 TRAVEL IDEAS New Zealand’s adventure paradise 84 GLOBAL FOOD One inspired chef and a tasty recipe 86 GET THE GEAR Mariana Pajón’s BMX essentials 88 TRAINING Tips from the pros 90 F1 SPECIAL How to get your face on the RB8 92 BEST CLUBS Top spot in Cannes 92 OUT NOW New album from Rufus Wainwright 93 TAKE 5 Go-to albums of a hip-hop collective 94 WORLD IN ACTION 96 SAVE THE DATE 97 KAINRATH’S CALENDAR

PHOTOGRAPHY: FRITS VAN ELDIK

98 MIND’S EYE

A donation to Wings For Life, which funds research into spinal cord injury, will pay for your photo to be printed on Red Bull Racing F1 cars at this season’s British GP. Find out more on page 90

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King of the mountains

Island life this month’s travel tips

It’s a big claim, but if any town deserves the title‚ ‘Adventure Capital of the World’, it’s Queenstown on New Zealand’s South Island Queenstown

It was the discovery of gold in the Shotover River in Queenstown in 1862 that first attracted people in search of fortune and adventure. The gold rush was short-lived, however, and while the river still offers up the occasional nugget of gold, adventure of a different kind now brings almost two million visitors here every year. Over the last 40 years, adventure tourism has transformed Queenstown from a rural backwater into a bustling, vibrant town. Lonely Planet picked the Southern Lakes region of Queenstown, Wanaka and Fiordland as one of its Top 10 regions to visit in 2012.

But what makes it so special? It’s the scenery – request a window seat on your flight into Queenstown; the views are spectacular. It’s the climate – mainly dry and sunny in summer with cool, clear winter days. It could be the food, the nightlife and the town’s good-time vibe.

It’s the variety of activities available – as well as almost every adventure sport you can imagine, there’s golf, vineyard tours and hiking. And that’s the real secret to Queenstown’s success (there truly is something for everyone). www.queenstownnz.co.nz

Flight path: If you’ve got a head for heights, the Kea 6-Line Tour will get you from the top of the mountain to the bottom in spectacular fashion

NEED TO KNOW

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NZ Due south: Queenstown’s adventure paradise is located on New Zealand’s South Island

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Top trails: Mountain bikers can choose from some of NZ’s best runs

When Any time is a good time to visit.

While it‘s better known as a winter ski destination, Queenstown has seen a huge increase in visitor numbers in recent summers.

Stay Named after William Gilbert Rees, who founded Queenstown in 1860, The Rees Hotel and Apartments offer stunning luxury, lakeside accommodation with spectacular views of The Remarkables mountain range and an award-winning restaurant, True South.

Eat Vudu Cafe and Larder is hard to beat for breakfast, Atlas Beer Cafe does tasty tapas washed down with the best local brews and there’s a reason people queue out the door for a Fergburger and the ice-cream from Patagonia Chocolates.

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WORDS: ROBERT TIGHE. PHOTOGRAPHY: DEREK MORRISON/SKLYINE, QUEENSTOWN RAFTING, SHOTOVER CANYON SWING, CP IMAGES/ZIPTREK ECOTOURS, MILES HOLDEN/OFFROAD ADVENTURES

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TOP TIPS

Seven wonders of Queenstown Whether on land, water or in the air, there is a vast range of activities on offer, for every grade of adventurer wHAt to Do

5 Tree falling Ziptrek Eco Tours is the ideal introduction to adventure in Queenstown and perfect for families and teenagers. The Kea 6-Line Tour takes you from the top of the Skyline Gondola to the bottom via six flying foxes, including the steepest treeto-tree flying fox in the world. The cleverly designed launch and landing platforms make this an idiot-proof way to get your thrills. www.ziptrek.com

1 Wild ride: Get down and dirty on a quad-bike tour 1 Off-road action “You don’t get treated like a muppet unless you act like one,” says Lachie Columb of Off-Road Adventures, a family-run business offering quad-and dirt-bike tours. Columb started riding a quad bike when he was three; his brother Scott is a professional motocross rider and their father Denis started Off-Road Adventures in 1989. You can opt for a three-hour spin in the hills on purpose-built tracks or multi-day tours of Central Otago. Either way, be prepared to get dirty. www.offroad.co.nz 2 Trail-tastic The Queenstown Bike Park opened last year, but already it has been dubbed the ‘Whistler of the Southern Hemisphere’ and earned a reputation 3

Jet-powered: Speed down the Shotover River

as New Zealand’s best mountain bike destination. You can hitch a ride up the mountain in the Skyline Gondola before choosing from more than 30km of trails on the way down.

Hammy’s Track is a long, flowing, fun-packed trail; the blue trails are that bit steeper and faster, and if you fancy mixing it with the pros, there are seven black runs. www.skyline.co.nz/queenstown/MTB 3 Thrills and chills One of the oldest adventure activities in Queenstown also happens to be one of the best. The jetboat was invented by a New Zealand farmer in 1954 and the Shotover Jet began operating in 1970. More than three million passengers have experienced the thrill of a high-speed ride on the Shotover River, where the boats come within inches of the sheer canyon walls and getting cold and wet is all part of the deal. www.shotoverjet.com 4 Rolling on the river A Queenstown Rafting experience starts with a hair-raising road trip to Skippers Canyon. After you’re introduced to your guide you experience incredible scenery and the rush of rafting through rapids like Rock Garden, After Shock, Toilet, Pinball and Jaws. The 170m Oxenbridge Tunnel is a unique feature of rafting the Shotover River and for hardcore rafters, September to November is when the water levels are highest and the biggest rapids emerge. www.queenstownrafting.co.nz

6 Grand canyon “Oh no, wait” says the jumpmaster with mock concern as you launch yourself off the 109m-high platform overlooking the Shotover River. The 60m free fall is over in seconds and the sheer terror is replaced by pure relief. Queenstown is a bungy Mecca but the Shotover Canyon Swing has given people who enjoy falling from great heights even more ways to freak out with over 70 jump options including Gimp Boy Goes to Hollywood and the Elvis Cutaway. www.canyonswing.co.nz 7 Ready, aim, fire The most popular activity in Queenstown, according to travel website Trip Advisor, is clay target shooting. Break One’s shooting range is located in the back paddock of a deer farm, just 10 minutes out of town. Your instructor shows you how to hold the Beretta 12-gauge shotgun and with each hit (or miss) you get expert feedback and advice.

It’s an ideal way to get a few hours’ break from all that action. www.breakone.co.nz 6

Big leap: choose from 70 jump options

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THE WORLD’S BEST CHEFS WHAT’S ON THE MENU AT HANGAR-7

Italian passion

PINO LAVARRA Great Italian cooking traditions are brought right up to date and interpreted with total precision and creativity

There’s an answer to a question which top chefs often use to show off their roots: it’s the one about their favourite meal. “Fresh bread with fresh butter,” is a typical response, or “Grandma’s roast pork”, and it can sometimes it comes across as pretentious.

With Pino Lavarra it’s different. The Italian might respond with “pizza”, but no one would doubt his sincerity. And although he might not say it, you can be sure that he means the perfect pizza. Lavarra, Executive Chef at Rossellinis in Ravello on the Amalfi coast, is, after all, a great traditionalist when it comes to Italian cuisine. You can see that in his variations on a theme with mozzarella – raw, cooked, liquid, frozen – an “ode to the product by the master” says Roland Trettl, Executive Chef at Ikarus at Hangar-7 and the man who’s kitchen Lavarra is visiting this month. Or the basil spaghetti with swordfish and squid and tomato ragout (right) which Trettl describes as “Italian flavour high-tech cuisine, alla perfezione”.

It would be unfair to describe Pino Lavarra’s food as being rooted deep in tradition: he has drawn inspiration from working in Malaysia and England, for example. He returned home in 2001 where he now produces world-class Italian cuisine, which has earned him two Michelin stars.

Basil spaghetti with swordfish and squid

MY RESTAURANT Rossellinis Hotel Palazzo Sasso Via San Giovanni del Toro 28 84010 Ravello, Amalfi Coast, Italy Tel.: +39 089 818181 www.palazzosasso.com It’s difficult to focus solely on culinary pleasures here: the Palazzo Sasso, which opened as a hotel in 1997, dates from the 12th century and sits 350m above the Amalfi Coast. It has view of the sea and fishing villages… and yes, there is a terrace.

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Growing up with…

Pino Lavarra spent his childhood at the stove – his mother was a school cook. “That’s where it all began; I became a part of the world of food.” …Italian specialities…

“Among the formative memories of my childhood are homemade bread, tomato sauce, fresh homemade pasta and an endless variety of different vegetables.” …and falling in love with cooking “My most important teacher was a professor at the hotel school I went to as a child: his knowledge and passion inspired me. Through him I learned to love the culinary arts.”

Hangar-7 Guest Chefs Every month, a top guest chef comes to the Ikarus Restaurant in Hangar-7, at Salzburg airport, and teams up with the in-house kitchen staff to create two special menus. May 2012 is Pino Lavarra, chef of Rossellinis restaurant in Ravello. Learn more about his menus and other guest chefs at Ikarus at www.hangar-7.com or www.facebook.com/hangar 7. To book a table or make enquiries send an email to ikarus@hangar-7.com or call +43 662 2197-777

PHOTOGRAPHY: HELGE KIRCHBERGER, OLAF PIGNATARO/RED BULL HANGAR-7 (2)

MY PHILOSOPHY

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COOK GLOBAL LET THE WORLD BE YOUR KITCHEN

Man food

Today a fishy national dish, once something to fear if you were invited ‘for dinner’

WORDS: KLAUS KAMOLZ. PHOTOGRAPHY: FOTOSTUDIO EISENHUT & MAYER

MOQUECA BAIANA, BRAZIL

Bahia is a state in Brazil that’s bigger than France. So it’s plenty big enough to have developed its own culinary traditions, of which moqueca baiana is the prime example. It’s a unique take on the classic Brazilian fish stew best cooked in a clay pot. Moqueca, though, gets its name from the word ‘moquém’ – the term used by Brazilians in the 16th century for barbecues made using leaves and dry wood. Food cooked therein would also be covered with hot ash. In 1554, when Brazil was still a colony, a Portuguese priest observed, aghast, how natives would use their moquém to cook human flesh. But that custom, rather like the unfortunate victims of Brazilian cannibalism, was short-lived. Fish emerged as preferable to human flesh, accompanied by two ingredients: palm oil and coconut milk, both of which made their way to South America from Africa via Portugal.

THE RECIPE Serves 4 1 kg fish, such as sea bream or tilapia 8-12 prawns The juice of 1 lime 1 tsp smoked paprika 1 bay leaf 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 1 bunch coriander, chopped 1 red and 1 green pepper 1 onion 4 tomatoes Salt, to taste

100ml coconut milk 50ml palm oil For the Molho (Portuguese sauce) Finely chop half an onion, 1 green pepper and 50g of chillis, then leave to sweat in a pan with some olive oil; add 5 cloves, 1 cinnamon stick, 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg and 1 bay leaf. Stew for approximately 45 minutes then purée; will keep in the fridge for weeks.

Cut the filleted fish into large chunks and marinate with the prawns in lime juice, paprika, bay leaf, garlic and coriander (set aside 1 to 2 tbsp). Meanwhile, slice the peppers, onion and tomatoes and put half in a large stewing pot. Add the fish and prawns and salt, then another layer of vegetables. Stir the coconut milk and molho together and pour over the dish along with the palm oil. Give the pot a vigorous shake to make sure the liquid seeps all the way through. Simmer on the hob over a medium heat for 45 minutes, then sprinkle with the rest of the coriander and serve very hot with boiled rice.

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Winner takes it all

GET THE GEAR ESSENTIAL PRO KIT

MARIANA PAJÓN Since 2000, there has only been one year in which the 20-year-old Columbian hasn’t won a BMX world title.

This is the stuff she carries with her

2 Leatt brace Protects the cervical vertebrae if you fall – in extreme cases it can save your life. Riding without a neck brace is very irresponsible.

3 Oakley MX O-Frame goggles I have tons of Oakley goggles.

4 Fly F2 carbon helmet Gives me a feeling of security.

5 Shimano DX SPD shoes Click-system pedal-shoe combination for quick starts out of the gate: the holeshot [first position at the first turn] protects you from problems in the pack.

6 Maxxis tyres A small selection of what you’ll find in my tyre storage. Depending on the course and the conditions, we ride with different profiles, widths and rubber hardness.

7 Alienation spare wheel Not really quite a ‘wear’ part, but heading out without replacements would be negligent.

8 Fly F-16 trousers A pair of long trousers is a must in BMX. 86

9 Tool kit and floor pump The necessary little things for keeping my bike fit and in good working order over the weekend.

10 Bike Stand This one is made of robust plastic and can be adapted to any bike.

It’s light and, what’s more, it looks good.

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11 Shimano PRO grips Having a good feel for your bike begins with having the optimal grips.

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13 Oakley Factory Pilot gloves I always wear gloves in two different colours.

It feels like I’m racing against myself and gives me an extra kick.

14 World Champion tricot Even though I’m usually the smallest competitor at the start, with the world champion rainbow stripes I’m big in the eyes of others.

I’m very proud of the stripes and they mean a lot to me.

15 GW Pro XS frame Normal pro frames are too big for me; children’s frames are too small.

My dad, who is also my coach, tailor-made this Pro XS frame with the manufacturers, GW, so that it fits me perfectly. www.marianapajon.com.co

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12 UCI number I chose my start number deliberately: I give 100 per cent in every race.

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WORDS: WERNER JESSNER. PHOTOGRAPHY: MAURICIO GRANADOS

1 Knee and elbow pads BMX supercross [off-road, or off-road style] courses are fast and dangerous, so being well protected gives me confidence.

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Wheely good: 13 world championship titles, 10 Pan American: Mariana’s next goal is Olympic gold in London

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Under pressure

Couch, exercise bike, water: Herbert Nitsch’s six-week pre-dive preparations Week 1-6 (daily)

Week 3-6 (daily)

The CO2-resistance couch workout Get comfortable on the couch and switch on a sitcom. Then alternate between: twice inhaling and exhaling. 50 sec without breathing (exhaled).

Total time: one hour.

Pressure adjustment in the water: 8-10 dives to 20m (exhaled, to simulate greater depths) then one dive to 200m (inhaled)

1 attempt at max nonbreathing (around 4.5 min, exhaled) 60 sec breathing 1 max attempt then 30 sec breathing and another max attempt with 15 sec breathing after.

WORK OUT

CO2-resistance (exercise bike) Ergometer resistance: 80 Pulse: 100bpm Ride for 45 min; inhaling and exhaling every 20 sec.

Stress management “I practise the hand movements I need underwater, on land with my eyes shut. It has to be second nature when you’re high on nitrogen underwater.

Training also includes sled tests. It’s important to leave as little as possible to chance. For every system there’s a back-up.

If something doesn’t work automatically, such as the air engine, I can operate it by hand. I always have a plan B. That’s the only way to ensure inner calm.”

TRAINING WITH THE PROS

Rolling in the deep HERBERT NITSCH Diving 244m on one breath requires first-rate relaxation skills, so this free-diver works out on the couch

www.herbertnitsch.com

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Nitsch goes into energy-saving mode before diving

Plunging the depths

To take him all the way down to a world record, Nitsch needs a sled that’s robust, fast and smart In the No Limits category, divers can deploy any equipment to penetrate and return from the depths.

Ballast, sleds, large fins and balloons are all used.

Nitsch’s high-tech sled has been specially designed for his latest world record attempt, and is in two parts. The upper part initially holds water, and the lower part is made up of two compressed air cylinders. The sled pulls Nitsch down at a rate of 3m per second. Once it reaches 244m, the sled comes to a complete stop and the air cylinders are opened. The air rises and expels the water in the upper part, which propels him upward. Measuring 7m in length and made of fibreglass, carbon and Kevlar, the sled is extremely safe and pressureresistant. “There’s only one bulge in the material and no holes just in case something gets in the way,” says Nitsch. “Holes would not be good at all.”

WORDS: ARKADIUSZ PIĄTEK. PHOTOGRAPHY: BREITLING

As the world’s top free-diver, Herbert Nitsch holds 32 diving records – itself a record number.

Next month, the 42-year-old will set out to break his own record (214m) in the most extreme category of deep-diving, No Limits, in which he will use a sled to descend and a balloon for the ascent. The Austrian will be underwater for about four-and-a-half minutes without breathing. At the deepest point his body will be subjected to enormous pressure of 22 bar – more than seven times that found in a car tyre. “For every second you have to use as little energy as possible,” says Nitsch, “so your body has to adjust and be as CO2-resistant as possible. You also need inner calm, because stress demands oxygen.

All three things can be trained. My preparation begins six weeks before the world record attempt.”

Where? “On the couch, watching a sitcom.”

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

13-time Formula 1 Grand Prix Winner and Wings For Life Ambassador.

SPINAL COrD INJury muST bECOmE CurAbLE. In funding the best research projects worldwide focusing on the cure of spinal cord injury, the Wings for Life Spinal Cord research Foundation ensures top-level medical and scientific progress. We assure that hundred percent of all donations are invested in spinal cord research.

your contribution makes a difference.

Donate online at www.wingsforlife.com

Free advertisement.

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Your photo on this car

FACES FOR CHARITY This campaign returns to Red Bull Racing Formula One cars this year. For just R160 you can race around Silverstone on the RB8s of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber at the British Grand Prix

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TAKE A PHOTO OF YOURSELF

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Help raise R10.5m for Wings For Life

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RACE! 90

The Faces For Charity campaign has a bold aim this year: to raise R10.5m for Wings For Life, a charity which funds world-leading research into spinal cord injury. This year’s campaign follows the success of the 2007 initiative (left). This time, uploaded photos will appear on both RB8 cars – doubling your chance of appearing on the winning car. To be one of more than 25,000 ‘race faces’, simply go to www.facesforcharity.com and upload a photo of yourself. Red Bull Racing is matching every donation made, so the final figure may even top the magic million. Wings For Life was founded in 2004 after Hannes Kinigadner, son of twotime motocross World Champion Heinz, was left tetraplegic following a motocross accident. The vision for Wings For Life is: “Spinal Cord Injury Must Become Curable.”

Find out more at www.wingsforlife.com and www.facesforcharity.com

WORDS: ANTHONY ROWLINSON. PHOTOGRAPHY: SUTTON IMAGES, RED BULL CONTENT POOL (2), SHUTTERSTOCK

UPLOAD AND DONATE AT wwwfacesforcharity.com

EVERY MOVEMENT HAS ITS HEROES EVERY FIGHT, ITS VICTORS EVERY ARMY, ITS FOLLOWERS SATURDAY 26th MAY, BASSLINE, NEWTOWN, JOBURG WWW.REDBULLBEATBATTLE.CO.ZA

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“Working on this album was like a holiday” RUFUS WAINWRIGHT The great eccentric is back with the poppiest, yet most personal, album of his musical career

PARTY THE WORLD OVER

Up Riviera LE BÂOLI, CANNES If you want to dance the night away in style and relax in a four-poster bed, you need to drop in here

The name Le Bâoli comes from…

A spring in Rajasthan, India, famous for its purity.

A club in Cannes makes business sense because…

With all its trade fairs, and the film festival, the town is a window on the world. We wanted to create a hot location to hang out close to the town centre and with Asian flair. We opened in 2000.

The first thing guests see when they come here is…

Our 3m wooden archway at the entrance.

To get in, patrons should be...

Well-dressed and come with good-looking friends. A nice smile helps, too.

Le Bâoli has a capacity of…

One thousand.

The best thing to drink is…

Champagne and Red Bull.

The craziest night was when…

Bono decided to play an off-the-cuff concert here, in 2006. It was an incredible experience because he’d only come in for something to eat.

The decks are manned by…

Internationally renowned DJs only.

Those tired of dancing can…

Chill out in a four-poster bed, out in the open air.

A great evening ends with…

A dip in the sea.

Marjorie Mondon, Le Bâoli press officer Le Baoli Port Canto Blvd de La Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France www.lebaoli.com

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OUT NOW ESSENTIAL LISTENING

Rufus Wainwright From classic to (38) pop, fühlt sich in Operhäusern Rufus Wainwright, wie 38, auf Konzertbühnen is a music daheim master

WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: BAOLI (3), TINA TYRELL (1)

BEST CLUBS

The album sounds Elton John says like a record Rufus Wainwright from the 1970s. is the world’s best There was no songwriter. Another better time for opinion, more widely music. There’s held, is that the Wainwright’s never been a time Canadian is the last new album is where styles, from dandy in the music produced by disco to country, business, a genius Mark Ronson have mixed more. who hovers elegantly And I think that’s exciting. in the grey area between The title track talks about serious music and classic the child in you. Do you pop. He can write elegiac feel more grown up now piano ballads (Dinner At that you’re a father?

Eight) and opera (Prima No. My daughter, Viva, is Donna, which premiered in only one year old and she Manchester in 2009 and was can’t speak yet. A lot of the performed in New York in songs deal with my mother’s February). His latest album, death. It’s two years ago Out Of The Game, is his now, but it still hurts. seventh and most surprising.

Do you find it easy to   : work the personal into Where did this new your songs? lightness come from?

I can’t do things any other  : way. Some of my fellow Working on the album musicians, like Lady Gaga was like a holiday from and Leonard Cohen, create the opera. Mark [Ronson, these alter egos but I can’t. the album’s producer] With me, it’s the same and I had a lot of fun person on- and off-stage. in the studio. I like the classical music world but everything’s a lot more Available now: rigid there. I enjoyed the Out Of The Game www.rufuswainwright.com freedom I had doing this.

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TAKE FIVE

WORDS: FLORIAN OBKIRCHER. PHOTOGRAPHY: LEIF PODHAJSKY/ORIGINAL BAND PHOTO BY DAVID BELISLE

THE MUSIC THAT INFLUENCED THE STARS

“I’d listen to an album eight hours a day” SHABAZZ PALACES Distorted vocals, deep rolling bass and percussion straight out of Africa. Call it hip-hop, call it what you like: you’ve never heard anything like it

Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire are frisky and freaky. A rapper and multiinstrumentalist, respectively, what they find when they dig at the roots of pop is the sound of Shabazz Palaces. At times, their music resembles aliens communicating with ancient Egyptians, passing on the coded blueprint for the pyramids over brittle grooves, mystic mantras, African chants and weird raps. It can be intense and trippy.

Established magazines and influential blogs agree that their debut album, Black Up, is one of the year’s best. Experienced critics have spoken of new listening experiences. The record has been put out by legendary indie rock label Sub Pop, which uncovered Nirvana and now has Shabazz Palaces under contract as its very first hip-hop act. In fact, the duo are trailblazing in the wide middle ground between hip-hop and indie guitar music. Some onlookers have called what they do avant-garde rap.

“I don’t care what people call it,” says Butler, who won a Grammy in 1993 with his former jazz-rap group, Digable Planets. “For me, it’s still hip-hop”.

He’s right, and it’s hip-hop which stands in a tradition of African-American musical futurists, the kind of pioneers you’ll find among Butler’s selection of favourite albums: from George Clinton, who travelled the world in a spaceship with his funk group Parliament, to space-jazz god Sun Ra.

Parliament – Mothership Connection I love funk. There’s James Brown, of course, but the sound of Parliament was somehow always even closer to me. When I was growing up, it was like my engine, my gas, my magic potion, to keep me going. I was listening to their music – and especially this album – eight hours a day. That’s probably one of the reasons our music is so funky. But in Shabazz Palaces we don’t need to talk about funk.

The funk is just there, because we grew up with this stuff. The music is circulating in our veins.

Sun Ra – Atlantis My connection with Sun Ra goes way back. My father came from Philadelphia like he did, and was a friend of his saxophonist John Gilmore. The band used to do social work in poor neighbourhoods in the city.

I think I was eight or nine years old when I first heard this album. I was hooked straight away, but I couldn’t tell what it was exactly.

Today I would say it’s the weirdness, the courage and the expertise. He’s a brother in spirit. I like to space out sometimes, and let the music take me wherever it wants – just like him.

Miles Davis – Live-Evil I always liked Miles’ albums from a musical, as well as from a sonic, standpoint.

The aesthetic of that sound is magical. The richness, the warmth, the certainty influenced me from early on. This is what an album is supposed to sound like: a very different aesthetic from all that flat, digital crap that’s out there today.

Michael Jackson – Off The Wall Nobody will be able to do what Quincy Jones did on this, and also later on Thriller. Nobody.

You could say, that in his arrangements and in his mixes, everything was in the right place. Or more precisely, he made sure that there was a place for everything, that all the different elements had room to breathe. And let’s not forget: he was working with a Michael Jackson at the top of his game, too.

Coleman Hawkins – Night Hawk As a musician you sometimes need to get away from influences. In the end, it’s all about independence and originality. Coleman Hawkins did that every time he picked up his saxophone.

And just like Miles and Quincy, this album has a special aesthetic.

Black Up (Sub Pop) is out now; tour dates at www.shabazzpalaces.com

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World in Action

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May 2012

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A GLOBAL ROUND-UP OF SOME OF OUR FAVOURITE THINGS TAKING PLACE OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS

Sports 09-20.05.2012, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

Billabong Rio Pro

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The third stop on the ASP Tour takes the professional surfers to the Brazilian metropolis – or Barra da Tijuca, to be precise, an area set to host a number of Olympics events in 2016.

In addition to the lure of dream beaches, further incentive is provided by the season’s highest prize fund of US $500,000. Local hero Adriano de Souza must be giddy with anticipation; last year he was a class apart when he rode these Atlantic waves.

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27.05-10.06.2012, PARIS, FRANCE

French Open

The only clay-court Grand Slam tournament will be played out at Roland Garros for the 111th time this year. And the question on everyone’s lips once again will be, ‘Who can challenge Rafael Nadal on his favourite surface?’ Last year, the man from Mallorca won a superbly fought final against his long-time rival Roger Federer 7-5, 7-6, 5-7, 6-1, thus equalling Björn Borg’s record of six triumphs. The victory of Li Na from China in the women’s tournament marked the first time an Asian player had won a Grand Slam singles title.

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3 Adriano de Souza knows his home waves

The freestyle motocross pros are back in the US after a two-year break, but this time in a new venue. In 2010 the airborne acrobats were busting tricks in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards in Texas, but this time round they’re moving to sunny southern California. The spectacular mountainside course in San Bernardino, which also hosts the US Pro Motocross Championships, is a fitting backdrop for the high-octane action.

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Monaco Grand Prix

IIHF Ice Hockey World Championships

Alongside the Indy 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix forms the holy trinity of motorsport. Three-time Formula One World Champion Nelson Piquet, once described the race through the narrow streets as like, “flying a helicopter in your living room”.

Sebastian Vettel got himself onto the list of winners for the first time last year and thus received his trophy from Albert II of Monaco in the royal box. Though he has a long way to go to better Ayrton Senna’s record six wins at the circuit.

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Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour

24-27.05.2012, MONTE CARLO, MONACO

04-20.05.2012, HELSINKI, FINLAND AND STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

This will be the first time since 1930 that an ice hockey world championship has been held in two countries. What’s also new is how it’s organised into two seeded preliminary round groups of eight teams.

As hosts, the Finnish team can expect strong support – not that they need it: they’re the current title holders.

Fans will also be craning their necks to see which NHL stars show up to support their national teams.

12.05.2012, GLEN HELEN RACEWAY, SAN BERNARDINO, USA

Rafael Nadal is the man to beat at Roland Garros

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House maestro Moodymann is Big in Japan 26-28.5.2012, HART PLAZA, DETROIT, USA

Movement

Catholics make a spring pilgrimage to Rome, but electronic music fans go to Detroit, where techno was born and where electronic music has been created with soul ever since the early 1980s.

It goes without saying that the city’s greatest sons – Jeff Mills, Kevin Saunderson, Carl Craig – have got to be at Detroit’s most important festival. They will be accompanied by big names from the international scene and up-and-coming DJs, such as Red Bull Music Academy graduate Nina Kraviz and AraabMuzik.

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16-27.05.2012, CANNES, FRANCE

Cannes Film Festival As the Formula One engines roar in Monaco, the film projectors will be hotting up in Cannes.

Hollywood stars gather on the French Riviera to present their new movies at Europe’s most important film festival. The opening film will be Moonrise Kingdom, directed by Wes Anderson. Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Bill Murray star in this tale about a search for a young couple who have fled their town.

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25-27.05.2012, EZULWINI VALLEY, SWAZILAND

Bushfire

This is a festival that sets an example: all the proceeds go to the local art scene and social projects. Africa’s most exciting musicians perform here, not least Nigerian-German singer Ayo, who is currently enjoying chart success all over the world. Theatre, circus and dance stages expand the party even further, and with 20,000 visitors from all over the world, Bushfire also gives the Swaziland tourist industry a mighty boost.

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Red Bull X-Fighters return to the US

PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHIE HOPSON/RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY INTERTOPICS, IMAGO, GETTY IMAGES (3)

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Culture

10.06. 2012, CASTRILLO DE MURCIA, SPAIN

El Colacho

12.05.2012, MAKUHARI MESSE, TOKYO, JAPAN

Babies have a dangerous time of it in Castrillo de Murcia in northern Spain; the devil – ‘El Colacho’ – is chased through the village on the Feast of Corpus Christi, with the traditional highlight of the procession being Beelzebub, dressed in yellow and red, leaping over locally born babies.

This ritual protects the children from illness and misfortune, or so thought the Catholic brotherhood of Santísimo Sacramento de Minerva who initiated the tradition in 1620. But be warned: if you have to shield your eyes at TV murder mysteries, you’d probably better steer clear of diabolic baby-jumping.

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Spring Metamorphose Last September, Japan’s best-open air show fell prey to a typhoon and the music festival had to be called off just a few hours before it was due to begin. But the Metamorphose organisers have not been put off. They have invited the leading lights of electronic dance music – Moodymann, Orbital, 2562, Derrick May to name a few – to Tokyo once again, but this time they’re being weather-wise and playing it safe: the festival’s being held in a convention centre.

The devil wear adidas in Northern Spain, at least

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Edward Norton as a scout in Moonrise Kingdom

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Last year’s Red Bull Beat Battle champions Artistic Intelligence

Save the Date May & June

A WHOLE LOTTA SPORT AND SOME WINE: THE BEST THINGS TO DO AND SEE IN SA OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS

MAY 26

Move on up You’re not a proper Gauteng mountainbiker until you’ve made it up the 9km rocky trail that’s part of the Magaliesberg Monster Mountainbike Classic, a hugely popular race in the North West Province.

Distance options range between 20km and 70km. www.magaliesmonster.co.za MAY 26 JUN 7-10

The great estates Home to some of SA’s most celebrated wine estates, the Cape’s Robertson Valley hosts the ninth Wacky Wine Weekend festival. Four themed days – Seriously Wine Thursday, Wine Up Friday, Full On Wacky Saturday and Wine Down Sunday – hint at what’s in store with wine tastings, presentations and yet more tastings with the Valley’s esteemed winemakers. www.wackywineweekend.com

The Final Battle Off the back of an epic first event in 2011, Red Bull Beat Battle returns this year packing more punch than before. At last year’s event, eight crews were picked to showcase their talent in a closely fought final in Johannesburg. This year, however, national qualifiers in Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Joburg have unearthed more of the nation’s most talented hip-hop, krump, pantsula, isbhujwa, and breaking dance crews. They’ve had two months to perfect their routines and now they are set to go up against each other at The Bassline in Newton, Joburg. Defending champs Artistic Intelligence will be the ones to beat for the title of Red Bull Beat Battle champions.

More info at ww.redbullbeatbattle.co.za. Tickets available from www.computicket.co.za

MAY 20

Hit the roads

Free runners flock to Joburg this month

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JUNE 9

The old enemy You’d have to go all the way back to 2006 to find the last time the Springboks lost to England in Test rugby. Since that 21-23 defeat at Twickenham, the Boks have beaten the English seven times both on English and SA soil, and at the World Cup. This clash, however, might be the best chance England has of winning in a long time. A new era dawns for Bok rugby with new coach Heyneke Meyer preparing to assemble a new team with a longterm goal of reclaiming the Rugby World Cup in 2015. Whereas Stuart Lancaster’s England side should

Lwazi Mvovo scored against England in 2010

be battle hardened by the recent Six Nations tournament, the Boks will line up at Durban’s Kings Park Stadium as an untested unit. www.sarugby.net

PHOTOGRAPHY: TYRONE BRADLEY/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, GETTY IMAGES, JUMP CITY

The Jump City GP Urbanathlon is part of a series of events that takes the pursuit of free running and turns it into a race. The 10km course around Mary Fitzgerald Square, Newtown, Joburg, uses the city’s concrete and brick landscape to have you running, jumping, dangling and climbing through some of the toughest obstacles the streets have to offer. www.shiftsm.co.za/events/jump-city

illustration: dietmar kainrath

K a i n r at h

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n a coffee shop in Camps Bay in late March, two of South Africa’s greatest sporting talents, now in their early 40s, had a chance meeting. One had kicked the most important drop goals in the history of rugby, and the other had been one of the most unplayable bowlers of his generation. Both looked little different from when they had retired – a few lines here and there, a lick of some grey in the hair – but the heart, the centre of them remained unchanged.

Joel Stransky and Richard Snell were born just under 14 months apart in cities 600km apart (I had typed in that they were born 90km apart, but Stransky looked over my shoulder as I was writing this and told me it was a misconception he was born in Pietermaritzburg. He’s a Joburg boy, born on the West Rand, which explains a lot. He also denied he has grey hair although he will admit to the lines on his face). They were part of South African sports teams that took a newly discovered country, a land that was somewhat discombobulated, uncertain and hopeful, and gave them a sense of place in a big wide world that had worried, sanctioned and campaigned to have them excluded, noticed and then welcomed them back with open arms. It was a strange time to be a South African, an even stranger one to be an South African international sportsman or woman. There was the gratitude for being allowed to compete, the uncertainty of not knowing just how far the country had been left behind and a determination to give it a go anyway.

Did they ever give it a go.

Millions of South Africans woke up in the wee hours of 1992 to watch the Cricket World Cup, that first match against Australia in Sydney. Snell was the first change bowler, while Allan Donald and Meyrick Pringle took the new cherry. Donald should have had Geoff Marsh out caught behind with the first delivery but umpire Brian Aldridge

Mind’s Eye

Coffee, Balls and Bicycles While training for the Cape Epic bike race, Kevin McCallum recalls some great sporting achievements of New Zealand had heard that Donald sometimes overstretched on his first delivery and was too busy watching the Bloem boy’s feet, and so missed the big edge behind. Donald took 3/34 that day, but it was Snell, quiet and unassuming, who killed off Australia for South Africa.

He bowled nine overs for 15 runs, including a maiden. He took no wickets, but Australia found him impossible to play. Australia slumped to their second defeat in two matches at the World Cup; South Africa returned to their changeroom at the Sydney Cricket Ground to find messages of congratulations from Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk.

When the South African team arrived back in South Africa after the World Cup, having been done by rain in that devastating semi-final, I, my mother (a cricket nut) and around 5,000 others waited at the then Jan Smuts international

airport to bid them welcome. It was an overwhelming thing to experience.

Mike Proctor introduced the players to the crowd, with Pringle being called the “destroyer of the West Indies” with his four wickets for 11 runs, but it was Snell’s run of 16 runs from seven overs that stifled the Windies. Richie Richardson said he was “unplayable”.

In 2003, at the opening game of the World Cup between South Africa and the West Indies at Newlands, I bumped into Snell sitting in the stands with a beer and some clients. I asked him about the match and what he remembered of his performance. He ruffled his hair, looked at me with a smile and said: “I can’t really remember all that much, Kev. I bowled OK, and Meyrick was good.

But, yeah, we played well.” I walked back to the press box and asked Kepler Wessels, his captain, about it: “That’s Snelly for you.

He was so laid back about everything.”

Stransky is now a television commentator on the side, and has an eye for detail. He could tell you about THAT drop kick, the one that united a nation, but it doesn’t come up much. It was in the past. Stransky lives very much in the present. When he bumped into Snelly in Camps Bay, Stransky and I were on a short ride to warm up our legs ahead of the Absa Cape Epic. We were both part of Team Absa, a charity-celeb-media group. As I write this, the prologue of the world’s best mountain bike race has just started. It’s just another in the slew of great sporting events that South Africa puts on. In less than 20 years as a free country, South Africa has hosted every major international sporting event it is possible to host, save for the Olympics.

It seems a lifetime ago since Snell and Stransky led the way on a brave new world, and yet it feels like yesterday.

We have so much to be proud of.

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

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

The next issue of the Red Bulletin is out on June 16

Illustration: Albert Exergian

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