The Red Bulletin US 01/22

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

U.S. EDITION JAN./FEB. 2022, $5.99

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

SUPERPOWERED Speed skater MAAME BINEY is ready for action

THE RED BULLETIN 01-02/2022

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T-Mobile’s 5G-powered drone cams delivered a new look at Rampage Red Bull Rampage fans will never look at freeriding the same way again. This year, our 5G drone cams delivered high-definition, first-person angles of the world’s greatest freeriders.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

HUMAN INTERESTS Perhaps you know that a big international sporting event for winter athletes is coming to Beijing in February. This issue highlights a few athletes who will be in China to compete in the Games. These are what some people might call human-interest stories: features that focus more on metaphysics than on medals. Take “Ready for Liftoff” (page 34), a profile of freeskier Eileen Gu that ponders identity, the essence of perfectionism and the odd parallels between sports and modeling.

CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE

TRACY ROSS

“Maame’s famous exuberance came shining through from the first sentence,” says the Colorado-based writer on her profile of speed skater Maame Biney. “Then I learned from her dad about some challenges she’s had to overcome to become the champion skater she is, and I was all the more impressed with all that she’s accomplished.” Ross’s work has appeared in Outside, 5280 and Backpacker. Page 22

After a big training block in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Gu showed another side.

There’s also a deep dive on speed skater Maame Biney.

In “Fire & Ice” (page 22), you’ll see a side of Biney that few have seen. She’s known for her exuberant personality and powerful skating, but she has a well-formed alter ego (named Anna Digger) who is a relentless competitor brave enough to face genuine struggles. These stories plumb the elements that draw fans to elite sports—the humanity of the athletes, the pursuit of excellence in a complex world.

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In this issue, the Seattle-based writer profiles freeskier Eileen Gu. “Reporting on Eileen as a superstar was the easy part of the assignment,” says Spence, whose work has appeared in Skiing, Outside and Sunset. “Which left the harder task: writing about her without just gushing praise or listing her accomplishments.

Everyone I interviewed was pretty much in awe of her. And, if I’m honest, so am I.” Page 34

THE RED BULLETIN

CHRISTIAN ANWANDER (COVER)

EVELYN SPENCE

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CONTENTS January/ February

FEATURES

2 2 Fire & Ice

Off the ice, speed skater Maame Biney is effervescent, but on it, she transforms into an apex predator who’s ready to pounce.

3 4 Ready for Liftoff

With one foot in China and the other in the U.S., freeskier and multihyphenate megatalent Eileen Gu is poised for greatness.

4 6 The Reluctant Ambassador Climber Manoah Ainuu doesn’t want to be a spokesperson.

But still, he’s changing how many people look at the outdoors.

5 8 The Pioneer

Phil Henderson is a groundbreaking adventurer. And this spring, he’ll be leading the first all-Black team on Everest.

6 6 Picture Perfect

Red Bull Illume is a photo contest that honors the world’s best action and adventure images. Here are this year’s winners.

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SPECIAL ENVOY “I’ve realized the impact that sports can have on diplomacy,” says 18-year-old Eileen Gu, who excels at all three freeskiing disciplines.

MOUNTAIN MAN

Manoah Ainuu, who was born in South L.A., moved to Spokane when he was 10 and then fell in love with climbing.

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THE RED BULLETIN

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THE

DEPARTURE

Taking You to New Heights

9 Freeskier Nick Goepper

wants to make history

12 Soccer coach Jesse Marsch

on welcoming life’s chaos

14 Aurora skies in Norway;

freediving in Taiwan

16 Radiooooo: a music player for every time and space 17 Preserving nature’s silence 18 YouTuber Kofi McCalla’s

ascent in the fashion world

20 Carlos Santana’s top tracks

GUIDE

Get it. Do it. See it.

81 Travel: Nine U.S. ski resorts

CHRISTIAN ANWANDER, ROB SNOW, ROD HILL/RED BULL ILLUME, LUKE WEBSTER

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up their snowsports game

84 Motocross racer Justin

HEAR HER ROAR Maame Biney, 21, admits to having an alter ego that comes out in competition. Her name is Anna Digger, and she has the fierceness of a panther.

Barcia’s training tips

86 Dates for your calendar 88 The best new winter gear 92 Top tools for your home bar 94 Anatomy of gear 96 The Red Bulletin worldwide 98 Flying high in Virgin, Utah

66 SPLASH DOWN

This shot of kayaker River Mutton by photographer Rod Hill is one of this year’s winners of Red Bull Illume.

THE RED BULLETIN

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geico.com/cycle | 1-800-442-9253 | Local Office Some discounts, coverages, payment plans, and features are not available in all states, in all GEICO companies, or in all situations. Motorcycle and ATV coverages are underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company.

GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, DC 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. © 2021 GEICO 21_ 550729928

LIFE

&

STYLE

BEYOND

THE

ORDINARY

THE

TIME TO SHINE DOM DAHER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

After a few years without a big win, veteran freeskier Nick Goepper is suddenly at the top of his game. His timing couldn’t be better.

After a muchneeded win at the 2021 X Games in Aspen, Goepper is back in top form.

THE RED BULLETIN

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or Nick Goepper, the return to top form couldn’t have come at a better time. At the relatively ripe age of 27, the freeskier is already the oldest elite slopestyle athlete in the U.S. program. And Goepper is the first to admit that he went through several years of downtime and self-doubt.

Arguably the most decorated slopestyle skier in U.S. history—with a combined 10 medals at the X Games, Olympics and World Championships—he hadn’t been on the top step of a toplevel competition since 2015.

That drought ended in a big way in January 2021, when Goepper roared back into action by dominating the field at the X Games Aspen, taking home gold for the fourth time in his storied slopestyle career.

“This win feels incredible, and it’s validating,” he said after hoisting his skis in the air post–medal ceremony in Aspen. “Especially with all the hard work I’ve been putting in. After a few years off the podium, a little selfdoubt started to creep in.”

But Goepper isn’t done. He has big plans to compete in international competitions this year—including a highly

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anticipated trip to China in February. On that front, Goepper is finding his second wind at the best possible moment. And that huge win in Aspen gave him the confidence that he’s truly on the right track. “Honestly, I still have a hard time believing that I won,” he tells The Red Bulletin. “It validated that I can do anything I set my mind to.”

In particular, Goepper has focused on tightening up his training. The expression “spin to win” is common in freeskiing, indicating that the more rotations you can fit into a trick, the better your chances of impressing the judges. Once upon a time, 720s and 900s were the top of the pyramid. But today, athletes are pushing the limits of what’s possible, completing 1620s (four and a half rotations) and beyond. But not Goepper. With his years of experience came the realization that he needed to put on the proverbial blinders and emphasize his strengths, rather than watch what other athletes were doing. “I don’t want to dedicate my time and energy into being a jack-ofall-trades,” Goepper says.

“Instead, I’m trying to focus on what I’m good at and what has made me successful for so many years.”

Goepper has been completing 1260s for nearly a decade, but he has no plans to add in more rotations. In fact, he believes that there is a physical limit for what freeskiers can be doing. “It’s not like we’re getting rocket boosters or that our equipment is progressing in crazy technological ways,” he laughs. So instead of focusing on the “big cheese” tricks like the last booter or the first rail, he is working on the nittygritty details that amass the bulk (nearly 70 percent) of his performance.

Bottom line: Goepper is going for smooth and

consistent rather than glitz and sparkle. To do so, he is leaning into the mantra of working smarter rather than harder. He still spends most mornings on his Rollerblades at Woodward Park City. This indoor/outdoor mountain complex in Park City, Utah, features enclosed freestyle zones and foam pits that Goepper can use to practice his tricks. From there, he heads over to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard USANA Center of Excellence, where he emphasizes additional practice on the center’s ski ramps, as well as strength training and recovery. His afternoons are his “free time” to catch up with family and friends, because as soon it gets dark outside, the lights come to life at Goepper’s backyard training compound. There, Goepper built out a 30-foot flat rail with a large drop-in that he uses for both fun and function. “It’s reminiscent of what I was doing when I was 14, living in my parents’ house in Indiana,” he says. “So not only is it legitimately good practice, but it’s also inspiring.

I feel like I’m bringing back memories from early in my career when I was super young and hungry.”

Goepper has also worked to calm his mindset and stay focused. Unlike many of the skiers he is competing against, who are far younger and new to the international stage, he knows exactly what to expect at the biggest events. He is using that experience to help keep himself sharp and avoid unnecessary distractions.

“It’s funny to sit back and watch some of the younger guys go through the hype and the photo shoots and all that stuff that I went through when I was their age,” he says with a laugh. “But I have to remember that I’ve done this before and my experience will take me a long way. There’s no sense in getting worked up.”

—Heather Balogh Rochfort THE RED BULLETIN

LORENZ RICHARD/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, DOM DAHER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

In September 2021, Goepper attended a Red Bull Performance Camp in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, alongside other top winter athletes.

“MY EXPERIENCE WILL TAKE ME A LONG WAY.” THE RED BULLETIN

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Jesse Marsch

J

esse Marsch is an extraordinary soccer coach, and not only because he’s from Wisconsin—a place where soccer has a lot less history than sports such as basketball and ice hockey. The recently appointed head coach of German Bundesliga team RB Leipzig began his career as a player in Major League Soccer after graduating from Princeton with a history degree. He spent 14 seasons in MLS, winning three league titles, before being hired as an assistant U.S. national team coach in 2010.

Following a stint with Montréal Impact, arguably his biggest break came in 2015 when he took charge of the New York Red Bulls. In his first season the team enjoyed a club-record 18 victories, and Marsch was named MLS coach of the year.

Then in 2018, he took a giant leap into the unknown. Moving to Europe, Marsch spent a year as assistant to Ralf Rangnick at RB Leipzig before stepping up to the head role at Red Bull Salzburg. The team won two Austrian Bundesliga titles during his reign and earned acclaim with their attractive style of play in the Champions League. But in June 2021 the head coach position at Leipzig—runner-up last season in the German Bundesliga—came calling.

Now he faces his biggest challenge yet. But the 48-yearold American has built a reputation for stepping outside his comfort zone, even learning French to coach at Montréal and German at Leipzig. Here, Marsch reveals how he embraces chaos and copes with the Druck.

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the red bulletin: How does it feel to return to RB Leipzig? jesse marsch: Great. I wasn’t just assistant coach to Ralf Rangnick for a year; as New York Red Bulls coach, I often came to Leipzig. I know the club set-up and the people.

I have a picture in my mind of how I can take the next step forward with the team.

You’re known for thriving in unpredictable situations…

My head never works faster than when there’s chaos all around. When things are hectic and confusing, you have to come up with new solutions.

But I also understand that a lot of people here in Germany like having everything under control—a perfect schedule, all tasks clearly delegated.

How do you square that circle?

By finding a balance that suits everyone. And by instilling a mindset that we’re constantly learning. Every match has unpredictable aspects. The player has to understand every situation while being able to react to it physically, at full speed and power.

Has that been the case in your own career—chaos, then clarity?

I’ve learned a lot when times are tough. At Salzburg we had to realize that winning doesn’t always mean progress.

Everyone had to take on board that complex situations offer opportunities for selfdevelopment.

Have you developed a European way of seeing things?

Before I could speak German, I was at a game in Wolfsburg with [then team coordinator at RB Leipzig] Jochen Schneider.

I watched an interview with a player, and they used the word Druck about 15 times, and so did the coach. So I asked Jochen what it meant.

“Pressure,” he said. “As in going hard in soccer?” I asked. “No, in society,” he replied. “Everyone feels they must be a success.”

Pressure is relative. If you come to the ground and only talk about pressure, you can’t play soccer or be the coach with a clear head.

You traveled the world for six months after your first coaching gig. How did that help?

I realized that more than 99 percent of people have zero interest in Major League Soccer.

They don’t care. People have totally different pressure—life pressure, not soccer pressure.

The journey taught me to set the idea of pressure and success to one side.

What have been some unexpected sources of coaching inspiration?

When I was still at college I’d speak to coaches in other sports.

I learned a lot from rowing.

Rowers are on the water at 5 a.m.; they take things beyond the limit. When they cross the line, all eight rowers literally collapse. I want a soccer team with the same mentality.

THE RED BULLETIN

CHRISTIAN SEILER

The American head coach of German Bundesliga team RB Leipzig explains why he welcomes chaos in his life.

JULIAN BAUMANN

KICKING UP A STORM

Do you mean losing matches?

In February 2020, the media were reporting we were midcrisis. We’d won only one of our last six games and we were out of the Europa League, but that set a process in motion. I began to understand how Austrian soccer functioned in the winter, the ideas needed to win games on bad pitches in bad weather.

How are you instilling togetherness at RB Leipzig?

Speaking German, for a start. It would be easier for me to speak English—most of the players are better at English than German— but we’re a German team, so everyone has to adapt. My German is good enough to be understood.

THE RED BULLETIN

Does a sense of humor help, too?

Fallibility means being able to laugh at yourself. There are times when we’re fully focused on our work, but we should always have fun and laugh with and at each other. Yes, a sense of humor definitely helps. rbleipzig.com

“MY HEAD NEVER WORKS FASTER THAN WHEN THERE’S CHAOS.” 13

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Lofoten, Norway

NORTHERN EXPOSURE Nature won’t be stage-managed. So when Norwegian photographer Emil Sollie was intent on capturing the holy trinity of perfect waves, clear skies and aurora borealis, he had to sit and wait—for days.

“Then, around midnight on the third day, the shoot was on,” recounts Sollie. “Half asleep, [retired Aussie surf pro] Mick Fanning jumped in a wetsuit and ran into the water, screaming in excitement at all the stuff going on.” This shot won Sollie a spot as a finalist in an international photography competition. Job done. emilsollie.com

DAVYDD CHONG

Orchid Island, Taiwan

EMIL SOLLIE/RED BULL ILLUME, WANG WEI CHIH/RED BULL ILLUME

PRESSURE DROP

Underwater is where the magic happens for Taiwanese photographer Wang Wei Chih. Every element of this dive image was executed beneath the surface of the Philippine Sea. This was extra hazardous for freediver Ding Xi Xiang, diving from a depth of 13 feet with positive buoyancy still at play. “To perform this action, he must spit out air, which increases the risk,” says Wang. “Not only do you lose oxygen, but it adds pressure on the lungs.”

Instagram: @kennywang627

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Radiooooo heads: Moreau (far right) and his jet-setting, time-traveling entourage.

Every song is a product of its time and place. This music player wants to transport you there.

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n 2012, Benjamin Moreau was sitting in his father’s newly purchased 1960s sports car. Admiring the vintage interior—leatherette seats, Bakelite wheel—the Parisian visual artist and DJ was, he says, “transported to another time.” Then he turned the dial on the radio and was confronted by “some abominable commercial techno music.” It shattered his idyll but spawned an idea: What if we had a musicdiscovery system that selected tunes from across time and space instead of by trend, genre or algorithm? That vision became Radiooooo.

Accessed via a website or app, Radiooooo’s interactive

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Passport to tune-isia: Radiooooo cofounder Ferst works on her musical map of discovery.

In 2013, the team attempted to launch it via crowdfunding site Indiegogo, but with little success. Radiooooo finally saw the light of day in 2016, but lockdown provided the opportunity for a revamp.

The map now features curated elements such as themed “islands” of music and a “taxi journey” function that lets you chart a path across the globe, enjoying a playlist en route.

“The idea is to push people to share their culture and their knowledge while engaging their curiosity about what’s happening close to them,” says Moreau. “I’m a French guy, but I know American music better than Spanish or Swedish, and they’re my neighbors.”

So, where to explore first?

Modern Mexican techno is an untapped genre, Moreau says, or Korean disco from the ’70s.

“Our musical time machine is a way to make radio a cool mix of history and science fiction [and understand] the story behind all the music that you uncover.” radiooooo.com THE RED BULLETIN

MAURO MONGIELLO

TIME STREAM

map—drawn by cofounder Noemi Ferst, a visual artist, sound curator and Moreau’s partner—is stacked with hundreds of thousands of songs. Users choose a location and any decade dating back to the start of the 20th century, then press play. Initially, Moreau, Ferst and a group of friends drew from their own music collections; they had been commissioned to create a musical identity for the global Le Baron group of nightclubs, so they already had a large, eclectic collection.

“We began by digging all this random and forgotten music,” says Moreau. “Once we’d put all that in, we started calling friends from different countries, then their parents began contributing music, too.

Finally, we opened it up to anyone. It’s become this huge multicultural, multigenerational project.” Today, around 1,500 people from across the world submit records each month.

The project’s gestation has its own timeline of discovery.

LOU BOYD

Radiooooo

NINA ZIETMAN

T

he world is undergoing an extinction-level event. Beyond the rumble of traffic or the notifications from your phone, there’s a distinct lack of quiet. We’ve become so accustomed to the constant cacophony of daily life, we don’t even notice it.

Silence is endangered, and the situation is inflicting massive harm on humankind.

According to the World Health Organization, noise pollution not only damages hearing and affects sleep, but also increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension and cognitive impairment.

“We need quiet for our physical health and to connect with people and the world around us,” explains Matt Mikkelsen, a sound recordist and documentary filmmaker from Ithaca, New York.

Mikkelsen was focused on a career as a drummer when, in 2012, he met Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who has spent the past four decades recording the rapidly vanishing sounds of the natural world. He instantly became an advocate for protecting nature’s soundscapes and spent the next four years working on a documentary about Hempton and his work—2016’s awardwinning Being Hear. In 2018, Hempton cofounded Quiet Parks International (QPI), a nonprofit dedicated to identifying and preserving Earth’s last remaining noiseless spaces.

Today, Mikkelsen, 28, is its executive director of Wilderness Quiet Parks. He and his team study the levels of human-made noise around the globe, identifying quiet places and working to protect them. Spaces that meet QPI’s standards are presented with a QPI Award and offered assistance in areas including maintenance, park guidelines and management practice.

THE RED BULLETIN

Noise annoys: Quiet Parks advocate Matt Mikkelsen is helping to protect the planet from sound pollution.

Quiet Parks International

It’s not only humans who benefit from quiet spaces.

“Wildlife is just as busy communicating as we are,” says Mikkelsen, “and noise pollution prohibits their ability to do that effectively.”

QPI began its work in pristine wild spaces such as the Zabalo River in Ecuador but soon ascertained that quiet places need to be more accessible. In July 2021, it named London’s Hampstead Heath the first Urban Quiet Park in Europe. These spots aren’t devoid of urban sounds, but birds tweeting and leaves rustling make them a haven for city dwellers. “You shouldn’t have to book an expeditionlevel backpacking trip to be able to find quiet. Quiet brings a lot of joy. It gives space to listen, think and feel.”

The nonprofit plans to spread its message across the globe in 2022 with parks in Canada, Poland, Namibia, Sweden and beyond.

Mikkelsen hopes the impact

ENJOY THE SILENCE

Amid the constant chatter about environmental crises, one team of ecologists believes we should all shut up a bit—it could save the world. will be felt by all, and he believes that creating protected quiet spaces will also help tackle other problems such as ocean-plastic and air pollution. “When you find a quiet place, it’s a good indicator for the overall health of an ecosystem,” he says.

“By preventing noise, we’re preventing all those other sources of pollution from having an impact, too.” quietparks.org 17

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Kofi McCalla

Creating content has been my life since 2014, and it’s always been escapism for me, but now it’s something I live off. It’s my job to run over and try.

W

alk around central London dressed smartly enough and there’s a chance you’ll be approached by Kofi McCalla. He might even ask what you’re wearing. Don’t be affronted, you’re in prestigious company. Bella Hadid, Usher and even infamously frosty Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour have all been hit-andrun by the British vlogger—the latter two at a Balmain show at Paris Fashion Week, where Wintour responded to his probing with a curt “No.” But McCalla is the fashion world’s opportunist, creating content through risk and gamble, and begging others for forgiveness over permission as he quizzes them on a handheld camera for his YouTube channel, the Unknown Vlogs.

What he began as a teenage hobby in 2014 has amassed more than 120 million views and made McCalla a leading voice in the streetwear market—a fashion subculture that mixes the skate and sportswear aesthetic with highend independent brands.

“Streetwear is a community and a form of escapism,” McCalla explains. “When I first started, there was no documentation of streetwear on the internet. Most of the world doesn’t get it. I decided to fill that space, explain it to everyone.”

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From revealing first drops of street brands such as Supreme to tracking thrift-shop trends in Tokyo and hitting runway shows for Prada, McCalla’s videos make the scene accessible and easy to understand.

This has earned him a following as diverse as those he approaches. In 2019, Canadian rapper Drake DMed McCalla to ask if he could appear in an episode—something the vlogger describes as a “Whoa! WTF?! moment.” But then, McCalla has a knack for looking past the image, labels and price tags and finding the individual beneath. the red bulletin: What drew you to film streetwear? kofi mccalla: Growing up, I lived in a town that was closedminded. I’d visit the Supreme store in London and go home like, “Boom, check out these clothes,” but no one got it. That’s why I first posted online—I found an audience on YouTube that was just getting into streetwear and wanted to know more.

It takes some courage to approach Anna Wintour.

At that show in Paris, I wasn’t thinking about what Anna Wintour would think of me; I was thinking that I had this amazing chance to tell her about my channel and feature her in my video. I’m always thinking, “I’ve made it in here, I need to make the most of it.”

How do you pick the right person to approach?

I try to feature people as diverse as possible. I look at the color palette they’re wearing, the silhouette and what kind of shapes they’ve made with their clothes. Sometimes I recognize a random low-key designer, but once I approached a guy and he turned out to be wearing almost all Primark. It’s how you style it.

Where do you find the most interesting people?

It’s a cliché, but Soho in London.

You can wear anything there and not be judged. I’m heavily inspired by Parisian fashion.

Thrifting is big there. Gen Z are thrifting the craziest clothes.

What’s Gen Z’s influence?

They’ve brought more awareness of sustainability. Is it ethically made? Are you using real leather or not? They’re also buying more into people and less into brands. I think there’ll be a point, even with high-street brands, where influencers become creative directors.

Tell us about that Drake DM. He just messaged me out of the blue. Of course I’m a fan, but when we met I was more “Right, let’s get this done.” He was the one telling my friends he’d watched my videos. By that point I was already working with Balmain, Dior. I felt I was in a position I’d earned. Watch the Unknown Vlogs on YouTube.

THE RED BULLETIN

EMMA FINAMORE

The fashion world is famously impenetrable, but this YouTuber went from making videos in his bedroom to waltzing into its inner circle.

Did anyone try to stop you?

Definitely. The whole Balmain team were scared, and just before I walked up to her, everyone behind the camera was telling me not to. But she’s still human, and talking to people about clothes is what I do, so I was just like, “Anna Wintour. Oh, hey, what’s up?”

LOUIS FRY

THE ART OF STYLE

“JUST BEFORE I WALKED UP TO [ANNA WINTOUR], EVERYONE WAS TELLING ME NOT TO.”

THE RED BULLETIN

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Playlist

SNAKE CHARMER

Four songs containing the best guitar solos in rock history, as chosen by a guy who knows his stuff—Mr. Carlos Santana himself.

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CREAM “WHITE ROOM” (1968) “Eric [Clapton, Cream’s lead guitarist] is incredible, and this is one of his finest moments, right up there with ‘Layla.’ Him, [American blues guitarist] Derek Trucks and me plan to make an album called Eric, Derek and the Mexican—sort of our own cosmic version of the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Music that is about discovering the unknown and unpredictable.”

BUDDY GUY “DAMN RIGHT, I’VE GOT THE BLUES” (1991) “Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck—they’re all great, but the guy my British brothers and me all learned from is [legendary Chicago blues guitarist] Buddy Guy. That’s the guy. There wouldn’t be Jimi Hendrix without Buddy Guy, you know? He invented turbo blues. And you can hear it on this song. Nobody plays like him.”

METALLICA “NOTHING ELSE MATTERS” (1991) “When I was living in San Francisco, these guys were my next-door neighbors; we bumped into each other a lot. I love [front man James Hetfield’s] guitar work on this song—it’s so melodic, passionate and powerful. I’ve always wanted to do a heavy metal album— I love the energy of that stuff.”

THE RED BULLETIN

JAY BLAKESBERG

JIMI HENDRIX “PURPLE HAZE” (1967) “Hendrix is one of the greatest guitar players of all time, and this is his signature tune. Of course, there’s ‘Foxy Lady’ and his version of [Bob Dylan’s] ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ but this is where his skills shine the most. Honestly, you have to be Albert Einstein, musically, to play like that.

It’s unbelievable. Pure feel, pure magic.”

MARCEL ANDERS

t was at Woodstock in 1969 that a 22-year-old guitarist from Jalisco, Mexico, had his big break. With a debut album ready for release, Carlos Santana’s band had secured a place on the lineup, but when their slot was bumped up on short notice, the front man took to the stage while still high on mescaline. The performance became one of Woodstock’s most legendary moments. As Santana’s fingers galloped across the strings, he looked as if he were trying to tame his guitar. He later said that in his drug-addled state it was an “electric snake—it wouldn’t stand still.” What came out of the speakers was magical. From the landmark 1970 album Abraxas to 1999’s sensational comeback Supernatural to recent release Blessings and Miracles, Santana has established himself as one of rock’s most innovative guitarists. Here, the 74-year-old reveals four of his favorite axe tracks. santana.com

FIRE & ICE

Off the ice, speed skater Maame Biney is an effervescent 21-year-old, but on it, she transforms into an apex predator. Now, with her eyes on Beijing, she’s ready to unleash all of her superpowers.

Words TRACY ROSS Photography ROBERT SNOW

Biney admits to having an alter ego that comes out in competition. Her name is Anna Digger.

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F

or as long as Kweku Biney can remember, his daughter, Maame, has had one of the most robust laughs of anyone he’s ever met. Take the morning he brought her to his office in Reston, Virginia. As he proudly presented her to his boss, 17-month-old Maame started laughing.

“But it was a big laugh,” says Kweku, “and my boss was like, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’ ” That was 2001, and according to The Story of Maame, she’s been laughing ever since. She’s also a world-class short-track speed skater, the only Black female one in the United States. In 2018, she became the first Black woman in history to race short track for the United States at a Winter Olympics, which she did in Pyeongchang, South Korea. And come this February, if all goes well, she’ll head to China to compete again in the Games.

According to people who know the nuts and bolts of speed skating, Biney’s style is unconventional. “Up until recently, the trend in skating has always been about being as light and slender as possible, about having good body position, and about being as technically sound as possible,” says Simon Cho, one of Biney’s coaches. “But Maame gets her success from her raw power. That’s what makes her an exceptional skater.”

Case in point: When she was 5 years 24

old, Kweku enrolled her in a figure skating class at a rink near their home.

Little Maame had no idea what skating was, nor had she ever stepped on ice.

But she immediately took to it. The hitch: After a few lessons, Maame’s instructors found that she was too fast for figure skating, so they directed her into speed skating. Kweku enrolled her in a class, she fell in love, and soon she was competing and winning races.

Eleven years later, in 2017, she won a bronze in the World Junior Short Track Speed Skating Championships.

Less than a year later, she was invited to the Winter Olympic team trials. She won the 500-meter event, qualifying for the Games. That’s when the collective sports media pricked up its ears and descended upon her, not only because of her preternatural speed and strength on the ice, but because she was a Black speed skater with so much preternatural speed and strength.

As soon as the interviews started, The Laugh made its appearance. In every segment, it bursts out of Biney’s body.

At times it seems to come unbidden, overshadowing whatever else she might hope to convey. By the time she was practicing for Pyeongchang, it had appeared in more than a dozen interviews, including ones with CNN, NBC

and People. It was so uplifting, so effervescent, so ever-present that some interviewers started calling more attention to her laugh than her incredible skating.

A CNN story from February 2018 describes Biney as having “a power that belies her youth” and as being “America’s best hope for a medal in the 500 meters.” But it later said: “Maame’s greatest contribution to Team USA isn’t necessarily her athleticism. It may be her smile…Her positivity is boundless.

Late last year, a Belgian skater’s 17½inch blade snapped, flew into her face and ripped into her lip and chin, requiring stitches. But Maame didn’t dwell on that. She took to Instagram.

‘Who won? You guys should see the blade,’ she posted.”

But as beloved as she was becoming for her giggle, something dwelt beneath that winning smile and self-effacing personality. It was a hidden entity, a source of immeasurable power. It had an identity, too, and its name was Anna Digger. Anna was capable of turning the smiling, giggling Maame into a menace on the ice. In Pyeongchang in 2018, Anna was still developing. But Anna has since fully emerged, and in advance of the next Games, she’s giving Maame the tools she needs to unleash her superpowers.

THE RED BULLETIN

“Maame gets her success from her raw power,” says coach Simon Cho.

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he laugh that made Kweku’s boss’s head turn? It happened in 2001. Young Maame was still living in Ghana; her mother (Kweku’s then wife) had brought her to Virginia to visit Kweku. Biney says she remembers exactly one thing about her life in Ghana: a birthday party her mother threw for her at her hair salon.

After that, the story gets cloudy; her parents divorced, but Kweku still wanted to see his daughter. So in 2006, Kweku bought 5-year-old Maame a plane ticket and had a trusted friend bring her to the U.S. from Ghana.

When Maame got off the plane?

Disaster. She started crying and told Kweku she wanted to go home. They got in the car and started driving, and twice more she repeated her wish. Each time, Kweku calmed her by saying, “Okay, we can do that,” but in his head, he was thinking, Oh my god, what did I get myself into? Looking for a diversion to ease Maame, he took her to a JCPenney store and let her run up and down the aisles. When she saw all of the shelves filled with pretty things, she cheered up, and the following morning, upon waking, she said, “Daddy, I’m not going back.”

Kweku hints that life back in Ghana wasn’t great for his daughter, including living with her mother. About that, Biney says, “I don’t have a close relationship with my mom, so I can’t say

anything other than, ‘She’s my mom.’ ” It seems so much more could be said about the subject, but that would dampen the mood. And like Biney told CNN in 2018, “I love having people smile and laugh because if you’re smiling and laughing, then that means you’re happy, and being happy…is the best present you can ever give to anyone every single day.”

She’s right. A happy story elevates others. So, let’s return to her first year on the ice, just after she’d transitioned to speed skating. On her first day, her coach complimented her bright purple snow bibs. That made her happy. She wanted to come back.

At the time, the Bineys lived in Somerville, Virginia, an hour-long car ride from Washington, D.C. Youth ice hockey has a rabid following, and as a result, rink time is hard to get. The 5and 6-year-olds on Maame’s team had to arrive at 5:30 a.m., be ready to skate by 6. For Maame and Kweku that meant leaving home at 4:30 a.m. But Maame loved skating, and Kweku was committed. Never mind that he was a brand-new single parent navigating caring for a 5-year-old in a new country and staying financially afloat. One morning, he was so beat that when his alarm went off, he rolled over and hit snooze. But soon he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Maame, saying, “It’s time to go, Daddy, let’s go.”

Biney’s exuberant laugh has been an integral part of her personality since she was a toddler.

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Known for her preternatural speed and strength on the ice, Biney is readying herself for her second Winter Olympics.

“Okay, Maame, okay,” he replied, although he sure could have used some extra sleep.

The following is not confirmable; sometimes our psyches are working unbeknownst to us. But it could be that Anna Digger was already starting to emerge in Maame. What 5-year-old have you ever met who cares as much about one thing (except maybe candy) as Maame did about skating? What made her tiptoe across the carpet in the pre-dawn dark and wake her sleeping father? Fortunately, Kweku was up for it. He hauled himself out of bed and drove Maame to another practice.

A theme of their life would soon emerge: Kweku would do anything to make Maame happy. That meant taking her to DC-ICE and sitting in the chilly rink while she skated. Then he’d drive her back home and do it again the next week. His commitment paid off when the club organized a competition. It just so happened that the owners of a club THE RED BULLETIN

much closer to home were watching, and when they saw Maame skate, they asked Kweku if she could join them.

She skated with them for the next five years, and she was in the minority.

“You didn’t see many Black kids,” says Kweku. “Mainly it was white people and Koreans.” But soon, people were taking notice of Maame’s potential.

“I heard about Maame when she was an up-and-coming skater,” says Simon Cho, who raced in the same region, went to the Olympics in 2010 and won a gold medal in the 5,000-meter relay.

“People were saying she was a very talented athlete and an unconventional short track skater.” In 2009, the club attended a national competition in Midland, Michigan, and Kweku let his daughter go, figuring, “It was time for her try things out.”

But at the same time Biney was starting to find her place in the world, she was also encountering racism.

“It was hard,” says Kweku. “There are

certain things I don’t want to tell you.

But it got to a point where there were some young girls who wouldn’t even talk to her. It was bad. It was sad. I just encouraged her, ‘Hang in there.’ It was rough. But she did hang in, and I told her, ‘Don’t worry, just go do your skating. Just go home. When you get on the ice in the competition, you’ll beat them all.’ ” She did as Kweku told her, but something was forming in her subconscious. At age eight, she created her first email address and formed the alias “Anna Digger.”

“I did it because I was very suspicious of everyone, and I didn’t want people to know my real name,” Biney says. It was already getting harder for her to keep her head down, to “just skate,” so it would make sense that she’d want anonymity. It was a way to hide, to protect herself. And continue the formation of an alternate identity.

The ups and downs continued when she joined yet another team.

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“With Maame there’s no negativity, no moaning and groaning about the stuff she doesn’t want to do.”

Biney stayed positive. The Laugh was there. But no matter how much joy she poured into the world, the racists continued to hound her.

In one of the crueler examples that Kweku recounts to me, her club changed speed suits on the evening before a race, and no one told Kweku.

“We showed up at the rink on competition day and everyone was wearing a new suit while Maame wore an old suit,” he says. “It was heartbreaking. They should have told me. Let me make the decisions. They didn’t tell me. It’s all part of the racism.”

With Kweku’s deep commitment, God’s love, some amazing supporters and her innate athleticism, however, Biney’s star kept rising. But her habit became hiding it. “She wouldn’t tell nobody what she was doing. Even the school didn’t know. The only time they knew was the first time I went there to ask for permission to take her out to competition,” says Kweku.

She soldiered on, downplaying her successes as well as her struggles.

A

t this point, you know more about Maame Biney than most people— the hard parts as well as the happy ones. During our relatively brief interactions, we barely scratched the surface of her life, and then, just when I was starting to plumb the twists and turns of her life, poof! It was threequarters of the way through last October, and she was off to compete in the first World Cup speed skating event of the season. Understandably, it was tough to dig deeper after that because she was in China and then Japan and then France, and the results of the four total events and the U.S. Olympic Trials would determine who Team USA would send to Beijing.

But still, it’s obvious there’s genuine struggle lurking within this inspiring story. And aren’t the most impactful stories about the highest-achieving athletes the ones that show both their successes and their tribulations? Didn’t Simone Biles win over millions of new fans by boldly stating why she pulled out of most of her gymnastics events last summer in Tokyo? Those are pretty easy questions. Here’s a tougher one:

Should elite athletes bare their souls to draw in more fans?

Or maybe they should just focus on the positive. Let’s go with that for a while longer. Biney competed at a national level through junior high and high school, and other skaters admired her. Kamryn Lute, her current teammate, has known her for more than a decade. They competed on the same team, and Lute says, “Ever since I was young, I’ve known Maame as a great leader and an older sister. But when she really got my attention was when she was going to the Junior World Championships and making the national team. Even to this day, when I watch her at practice, it’s so impressive to see how much power she has and how much speed she can build so quickly in the 500 meters. And just being around her at practice is always super enjoyable.

She never has a bad attitude. She’s always fun, and she makes others want to enjoy their time there even though it’s hard.”

Competing at a higher level, though, meant getting to races was even harder.

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Speed skating is a wildly expensive sport and Kweku struggled to pay. “But throughout this whole process, God was with us,” he says, because somehow the money always materialized. Maame realized how lucky they were and gave back unbelievable skating. In 2016, she was racing to qualify for the Junior National Team and broke her ankle.

There was one other race that day, but Kweku encouraged her to sit it out: “You fell, that’s okay. You can do this next year,” he said. “But no, she wanted to skate. She came back the following morning and did two races and won first place in both. With a broken ankle,

she qualified to represent the U.S. Junior National Team. I was like, Oh my god. What is this girl?”

If that doesn’t blow you away, Simon Cho adds, “If I were to describe speed skating, it would be physical torture.

Someone at Maame’s level spends 15 to 17 hours a week on ice.” Their training grounds—ice arenas—don’t exactly excite the senses. Speed skaters travel in one direction only: counterclockwise.

Imagine the cold, the monotony. And when they stop, Cho says, the lactic acid buildup in their legs can burn like fire, and it can feel like they’re walking around with cement blocks on their

feet. “Yet with Maame there’s no negativity, no moaning and groaning about stuff she doesn’t want to do, even drills she doesn’t enjoy,” Cho says.

“She’s a very good listener and takes the hard work in stride. She always gives 110 percent of what she’s got.

That’s part of what makes her a champion.”

It’s also what won her a bronze at the World Junior Short Track Speed Skating Championships, on her 17th birthday, in 2017. And it earned her gold in the same event at the U.S. Speedskating Short Track World Cup Qualifier the same year. The latter brought a non-

In 2016, Biney qualified for the U.S. junior national team—while competing with a broken ankle.

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According to Team USA coach Stephen Gough, Biney is “a speed demon in the 500 meters.”

negotiable move to Salt Lake City, so she could train with the U.S. senior speed skating team at the Utah Olympic Oval ice skating rink.

Biney says that up until she started training in Utah, it had never clicked that she was something special. She might have missed it in her attempt at continuing to keep her head down, avoid sharing too much, turn her gaze outward. She was still the Maame of pure positivity and support for her fellow teammates, just as she was still blitzing off the starting line with her unbelievable speed and power.

But something else was about to reveal itself, too. It had been there all along; Biney had just never acknowledged it. Or rather her: Anna Digger. One day she told a teammate about her and how she’d conjured Anna Digger when she was 8. She was just a kid then, protecting herself from others. And it never occurred to her that Anna could somehow empower her. But her friend loved Anna’s existence and said, “She could be your alter ego!”

It was a joke at first, says Biney, but it caught on. “I guess it makes sense, too, because of how I am off the ice. When we’re not doing practice, I’m all chitchat. And before I do a race, I’m ‘Oh,

shit.’ I’m still scared, I’m trembling in my boots. But when I race, I’m not a happy, laughing Maame. My eyes go blank and I’m very serious. So we were talking about that before the Olympics, and [making Anna Digger my alter ego] became a thing.”

When Maame conjures Anna, she is not a human but a black panther out on the hunt. “The thing I imagine is the eyes, you know, how they look when they’re going out to catch their prey.

The prey is, like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m scared; oh, shit, I’m gonna die.’ ” On the ice, “Anna is fierce. She’s just going to do what she’s got to do to win.”

When you watch Biney race, you can see the transformation. Before she begins, she’s a bundle of nerves.

But when she gets to the starting line, her eyes fix not downward, like some of her competitors, but forward, in the direction of her target. When the gun goes off, she’s an explosion of kinetic power that barrels down the ice. Her Team USA coach, Stephen Gough, calls her “pure speed, a speed demon in the 500 meters,” and on her best days, she skates with a controlled ferocity not visible in her competition.

But once the race is over, the animal vanishes and the smiling, fist-pumping Maame is back.

“Anna is fierce. She’s just going to do what she’s got to do to win.”

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aybe because Anna was so newly realized, or maybe because Biney was so nervous about competing in Pyeongchang, she didn’t do well back in 2018. She skated with the pack for the first six laps of the quarterfinal of the 500 meters, but crashed and failed to finish.

Afterward, NBC host Megyn Kelly asked Biney about her life story, her relationship with Kweku, how she was learning to handle stress (meditation) and anxiety (breathing exercises), and about Anna Digger. Nervously, but with her smile on full display, Biney said, “Oh, she’s my alter ego. She’s the fierce one.

Unfortunately, yesterday she wasn’t out there because I was on the big stage. But hopefully on Saturday [during my next race], she’ll be there and just ready to kick some boootiiiiee!”

Her second race went just as poorly.

But in the face of the failures, Biney still charmed millions. Which is how it should have worked; Anna might have scared them. Eventually, the lights went down on the closing ceremonies, and Biney went back to Salt Lake City and to training. And Anna was about to show up in a whole new way.

In 2018, U.S. Speedskating hired a new short track coach, Wilma Boomstra, after the men’s and women’s teams had a disappointing showing in Pyeongchang.

Already known for her bold and brutally honest personality, “she quickly became a lightning rod,” reported The Washington Post. A total of eight skaters—one of them was Biney—related their experiences to 31

To help Biney train, Red Bull commissioned a custom suit and sensors that create an avatar of her body. The visual record of her movements helps her correct her position for optimal speed on the ice.

the newspaper in 2020; some said Boomstra was a disruptive force and often insulting. They alleged she used inappropriate language and dished out demanding practices in a punitive manner. In the end, U.S. Speedskating wound up fielding three complaints.

“In an athlete’s life, there are for sure ups and downs…but in the 15 or 16 years I’ve skated, I’ve never felt like actual shit, like this coach hates me,” Biney tells me. “Even if a [past] coach was 100 percent racist, they wanted me to be better. Not saying [Boomstra] was a racist—but I do think she didn’t have my best interest at heart. I dealt with it because I thought I was the only one feeling like that. [It went on for] three years until…I realized I wasn’t the only one and I should say something and try to communicate how I felt.”

To do that, she had to summon a stronger, more emotionally powerful and more unflinching version of herself.

“Honestly toward the end,” she says, “I think Anna came out and stood up for herself, and I stood up for myself— saying enough is enough.”

In March 2021, U.S. Speedskating fired Boomstra.

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N

ow, as Maame/Anna prepares to compete this February in China, she’s getting even more tools to help her unleash her full power, both mentally and physically.

In early October, Red Bull commissioned a custom suit and skates equipped with Batman-like tech. The skates have a pressure sensor in each heel, and the suit has sensors that go up both sides of Biney’s body. When she pushes down on a heel sensor, it activates lights on the body sensors, and a digital skeleton is created. The team who built it—from a design firm that specializes in large-scale art fabrication, architecture design build, and experience design—then assigns an avatar to the digital skeleton and records the movements. Biney can watch on a computer as her avatar skates exactly as she just did on the ice.

The goal, says creator James Barlow, is to help her see how certain body positions—a shoulder rotation, for instance—impact her speed. Barlow also put a sensor strip on the suit’s spine, so she could see how her torso was laying out in a turn (it should be as horizontal to the ice as possible). She could see her hip rotation, as well as how much pressure

she was applying to each skate. She did a counterclockwise lap, and the lights on her right side went immediately red—indicating substantial pressure— while the lights on her left side, which showed the pressure she was applying on her left skate, turned yellow and green (not as optimal).

Cho says Biney has “one of the strongest, if not the strongest right leg out of all the girls that are skating right now.”

Now the coach and she can see exactly where her strengths and weaknesses are.

There appears to be a new threshold for how strong Maame Biney can be.

The past 18 months haven’t been easy for Biney. She’s nursing a knee injury, Kweku’s health hasn’t been top-notch, and, with COVID-19, neither she nor the rest of the team has been able to train or race as much as they’d like to.

Nonetheless, Biney is feeling optimistic about the future (naturally). She’s more connected to Anna Digger than ever, which has led to her speaking out more on things like racism and Black Lives Matter. She’s becoming more attuned to her skating, in part thanks to the suit, but more so because of Stephen Gough’s coaching and new techniques she’s incorporating into her training.

She also recently helped the U.S. women’s 3,000-meter relay team shatter the American record by almost three seconds on the last day of the Short Track Speedskating World Cup in October. This February, she’ll go to Beijing and skate her heart out, drawing on the power of Anna Digger.

But even if she fails to bring home a medal in Beijing, Maame is still smiling Maame. Her tireless positivity keeps her going, win or lose. Maame and Anna are the same person. Full of optimism. Full of ferocity. Full of possibility.

THE RED BULLETIN

In October, Biney helped the U.S. women’s 3,000-meter relay team smash the American record.

She hopes to bring that energy to Beijing.

READY FOR LIFTOFF With one foot in China and the other in the U.S., freeskier and multihyphenate megatalent Eileen Gu is poised for greatness.

Words EVELYN SPENCE Photography CHRISTIAN ANWANDER

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“I’ve realized the impact that sports can have on diplomacy,” says Gu, who was shot in SaasFee, Switzerland, on October 21.

Gu has style and smarts—and she also has gold medals from the Winter X Games, World Championships and Winter Youth Olympics.

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he’s only 18, but Eileen Gu— Olympic freeskiing hopeful, twoevent 2021 X Games gold medalist, ambidextrous spinner, accomplished runner, high-end model, feminist, aspiring diplomat—is in a car in the heart of the Alps, making a rolling transition between a month of halfpipe training in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and several weeks of jumps camp on the Stubai Glacier in Austria. It’s late October. Gu is trying to describe how she fills her day—this, from an athlete who is one of the very few women in the world who excels at all three freeskiing disciplines (pipe, slopestyle and big air) in a sport where most elites find it grueling to train for just one. So far this fall, she’s taken classes on micro- and macroeconomics. She listens to astrophysics lectures. She reads quantum mechanics textbooks on set. “When I dropped into X Games last winter, everybody else’s announcement was like, ‘This is so-and-so, Olympic medalist!’ ‘This is the first person to land this trick!’ ” says Gu. “And my little bio was, ‘Eileen Gu! Got a 1580 on the SAT and was admitted to Stanford!’ ” If it isn’t already clear, Gu is a rarity in the world of freeskiing. Not because she’s book smart, or physically gifted, or what any sane person would characterize as busy—all things that she absolutely, indisputably is. It’s because she is a true student of every dimension of her skiing and her life: efficient, focused, diligent and impeccable. “She visualizes each trick extremely carefully, and she knows exactly what she is capable of and can execute,” says her coach, Misra Noto. Eight-time X Games

slopestyle champ Kaya Turski calls Gu’s skiing calculated—not sinister, not frosty, but clever and exquisitely honed. The same goes during off-snow training. “Every single rep, Eileen is trying to make it more perfect than the last one,” says Red Bull strength and conditioning coach Alex Bunt. “Most of us find stretching boring, but she wants to do the stretch better.”

In Saas-Fee, Gu was practicing a new pipe sequence with three new tricks and a new combination; she’s the only woman in the world who can put together a run where every trick is corked—tilted off-axis like a spinning top that’s about to fall over but somehow rights itself to keep flying downhill. Every day, she was on the mountain at 10 a.m., off by 3 p.m.—and while that may sound easygoing, not a single minute was wasted. Noto, a former pro who used to coach the Swiss slopestyle team, has overseen the development of dozens of athletes. And, he says, “Eileen is the hardestworking female skier I know.”

Gu is, to be fair, a little bit complicated. Not angsty—if she has any teenage torment, it has an analytical poise to it. Rather, she admits to living multiple lives, sometimes two (skier and student), sometimes four (those plus runner and model). And that’s not counting the fact that, although she was born in San Francisco and came up on the slopes of Northstar on Lake Tahoe, she chose, at age 15, to compete for China in international competition. Her mother, Yan, is from Beijing, and Gu has traveled there every summer since she was 2 years old. She’s fluent in Mandarin—no accent. She has gone to school in Beijing. She has friends there, a house.

“When I’m in America, I’m American,” she has said enough times that it sounds like a mantra. “When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”

Gu balances her life as an elite athlete and as a serious student with a highly successful modeling career, evinced by these recent magazine covers.

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When she was 10, Gu met the owner of a ski resort in China and convinced him to hold a freeskiing open—which became the first freeski contest in a country that’s just starting to embrace the sport. “Since the beginning, we’ve known the really small circle of people involved in the skiing community, and we’ve grown alongside them,” she says. In the two-plus years since she announced her allegiance, Gu—sometimes known in China as “snow princess,” sometimes as “genius skier girl”—is now recognized on the streets of Beijing, making a dazzling rise from ingenuous high schooler to the most prominent face of skiing in the most populous nation on earth. To say that the stars are aligning for Gu makes it sound like her trajectory has been shaped by mysterious forces, but the design is largely hers.

Still, the convergence is uncanny. “Eileen seems to be primed in the perfect position with age, talent and support,” says Turski. “She could well be the next Lindsey Vonn or Chloe Kim, transcending the sport.”

In China, it’s already happening. At the 100-day mark before the opening ceremonies, the Beijing Organizing Committee released a lavish short film, A Date with Snow and Ice, in which a young boy (mega-celeb Jackson Yee, one of the most popular singers in the country) meets a young girl (Gu), and they go to the Games together in a mash-up of pop culture and sport. As a parable, the message is

clear: Eileen Gu has already arrived, and yet she has barely begun.

At the end of the film, to the sound of dramatic music, there she is, running along the Great Wall in slow motion, carrying an Olympic torch.

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t’s hard to say, exactly, when Gu arrived. But one contest stands out: In the span of about 36 hours in late January 2021, she won two golds and a bronze at the X Games—becoming the first rookie to medal in three events and the first Chinese athlete in history to win a gold. She wasn’t an unknown; she’d already notched World Cup wins at Calgary 2020 and Seiser Alm, Italy, and two golds and a silver at the 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland.

But her journey to that moment was far from typical. Gu’s mother immigrated to the United States in her 20s, studied biochemistry at Rockefeller University, and skied for the first time at Hunter Mountain in New York—then moved to the Bay Area and earned an MBA at Stanford. When Gu was 3 years old, Yan put her in ski school in Tahoe so her daughter could keep up with her. At the age of 8, Gu joined Northstar’s freeskiing team—as the only girl—because Yan thought racing was too dangerous. Soon, she was winning USA Snowboard and Freeski Association contests consistently, including nationals at age 9.

Everywhere she went, her mother was by her side.

Turski first met Gu in New Zealand when “a little lady came up to me and said, ‘Hi, this is my daughter,’ and Eileen was just this 4-foot-tall excited mini-ripper,” she says. At home in San Francisco, Gu also lived—and still lives—with her grandmother, Guo Zhenseng, now 86. “My grandma is fierce, the most competitive person I know, which is saying a lot coming from me,” she says. “And my mom is very rational, overprepared and practical.” Her grandma taught her, when she was just a 4-yearold, three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication. The best thing her mom did for her, she says, was to give her a bunch of options: piano, ballet, soccer, basketball, horseback riding, archery, rock climbing, volleyball, tennis. But there was no pressure to excel.

“This isn’t a tiger mom situation,” she says. “It was more that it’s an inability to fail. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it well, because otherwise it’s a waste of my time. That was my grandma’s way of seeing things, and tangentially, my mom’s and my Gu, shown here going airborne at Mammoth Mountain last May, is a threat in all three freeskiing disciplines. way, too.”

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CHRISTIAN PONDELLA/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

“No matter what I’m doing, my body is my job.”

Born to an American father and a Chinese mother, Gu began representing China in competition in June 2019.

At first glance, what makes Gu’s X Games breakthrough especially surprising is that the 2020– 21 season was the first in which she wasn’t in school full-time. Until she graduated from high school in 2020—in only three years, the first student at her prestigious school ever to do so—she never skied more than 65 days a year, driving four hours up to Tahoe with Yan every weekend while doing homework in the car. (The average number of ski days for her competitors? More like 250.) It forced her to have an aggressive work ethic both on and off the slopes. And it allowed her to go back home for regular teenage experiences. “I had the most normal childhood compared to anybody else on the World Cup circuit,” she says. “A lot of people didn’t get to 40

go to prom—or feel excluded at the high school lunch table.

Nobody knew about my skiing, and nobody cared.” According to her sophomore-year history teacher, Chris Martin, she sat in the front row, diligently taking notes. When she traveled to Europe, she would give the other students lessons on Italian art and architecture that she learned in her Western Civ class. “She was remarkably humble for someone so accomplished, and extremely kind,” he says. “She presents as confident, which she should be, but not in a way that’s at all offputting.” Gu was such a fast crosscountry runner that she almost chose it over skiing—partly because it’s a college-recruitment sport—but when a World Cup was scheduled at the same time as a state championship meet, she bought a last-minute ticket to Austria.

For people who don’t ski—or people who ski but prefer to keep their bases on snow—it’s hard to appreciate how challenging it is to compete at a world-class level in pipe, slopestyle and big air.

In one, you might initiate a grab earlier or try to explode higher—a halfpipe cork 7 isn’t exactly a slopestyle cork 7. You can perform the same pipe run throughout the season, but every slopestyle course is different and requires different sequences.

“Not only is it logistically difficult, because the contests can be at different places, but it’s really taxing on your body,” says two-time Olympic medalist Nick Goepper. If you ask what sets Gu apart, you’ll get variations on a theme. For elite freestyle skier Bobby Brown, it’s her rails. “I’ve known her since she was 10 or 11, rockin’ her purple helmet, and her rail prowess was already crazy,” says the eight-time X Games medalist. For Noto, Gu’s amplitude in the pipe is the most impressive—11 feet above the lip, on average, at the X Games. For Turski, it’s her versatility—left and right spins, switch and forward skiing—no matter the discipline.

Whatever way you parse it, Gu has a gigantic range and a potential to match. “I can’t yet say that she will be the most successful skier ever,” says Noto, “but she has all the tools to do it.”

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Regarding the frequent questions about her nationality, Gu has a position statement: “When I’m in America, I’m American. When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”

Gu says that modeling is a lot like elite freeskiing: “It’s a creative way to show the world who you are while celebrating individuality.”

“In the U.S., I grew up with all these idols, and I wanted to be that for somebody else.”

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n 2015, when China was granted the 2022 Games, it announced plans to build 800 ski resorts. It’s projected to soon be the world’s largest winter-sports market, with 50 million participants by 2025 and 1,000 ski resorts by 2030.

“In the beginning, I knew every single person in the park because there were only 10 or 20 of us in the whole country,” says Gu. “Now it’s the trendiest place to be.” The rapid growth of skiing in China dovetailed with Gu’s own development, and she saw an opening that only she could fill. Even though the decision to compete for China was agonizing, she already knew, at 15, the ramifications. “In the U.S., I grew up with all these idols, and I wanted to be that for somebody else,” she says. Translation: The next generation of American freeskiers already has plenty of empowered, talented female athletes as role models.

They don’t need her the way China does, where she can elevate freeskiing into the national consciousness and, she says, inspire a new generation of women.

When I’m in America, I’m American. When I’m in China, I’m Chinese. For Gu, it seems, her duality is seamless and has become yet another asset: the ability to adapt to different circumstances, make subtle code-switches and read the room. “Being fluent in English and Mandarin, I was able to absorb the nuances of both societies from a really young age, appreciate them, and display them back,” she says. On a grander scale, she’s in a unique position to symbolize the unity and friendship that every Olympics hopes to glorify. And she understands her role. “I’ve realized the impacts that sports can have on diplomacy,” she says. “It can be shared regardless of language, regardless of culture, regardless of political affiliation.”

But first, there’s the preparation: Last summer, when Gu flew to China for a tour of sponsorship obligations throughout the country, she had to quarantine in a hotel room by herself—with only a treadmill, a yoga mat and some light weights—for five weeks. It was her chance to work on fitness and fitness alone, hammering out daily three- to fourhour Zoom sessions with Alex Bunt, who concentrated on upping her explosive power (for amplitude), moving through every rotational plane (for tricks), and building injury resiliency (this is an extreme sport we’re talking about). Even from afar, he was blown away by her coordination and body awareness. “I could tell Eileen to adjust her left pinkie toe during an exercise, and she’d get it right away,” he says. “She’s a movement expert. She knows exactly where she is in space.” Though it’s not common for skiers to double as distance runners, Bunt sees Gu’s baseline endurance as a huge asset. “She already has a really big gas tank,

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so she can handle the hurt of a high volume of training, both physically and mentally,” he says.

“But five weeks alone? That’s insane. Maybe that speaks to her character.”

After quarantine, Gu traveled to a different city every few days. Simply balancing skiing, running, piano and school—like she used to—seems almost quaint now. “The past two years I’ve gone in the most polar opposite direction that I can possibly go from a normal childhood,” she says. While skiing is what initially brought Gu attention, it’s modeling that has transformed her from a niche action-sport celebrity to something closer to mainstream idolatry.

At 15, she was invited to Paris Fashion Week by a Chinese brand, and has since been featured in Chinese editions of Elle and Vogue, picked up by high-end companies like Tiffany & Co. and Louis Vuitton, and joined the rebranding of Victoria’s Secret alongside Megan Rapinoe, Valentina Sampaio and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. “I get to represent a

Along with Megan Rapinoe and Suni Lee, Gu made her debut with Victoria’s Secret at the 2021 Met Gala at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in September.

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and guest-editing an upcoming edition—choosing photos, making creative decisions, casting.

If it sounds like Gu’s under a lot of pressure, she is—from sponsors, from her country, from herself.

But she seems hardwired to handle it with grace and perspective. She knows that no one can take away the things she has already achieved. She believes that she doesn’t have to validate herself every time she’s at the top of a run. And she recognizes that, given the uncertainty that goes into the sport—weather, course layout, fatigue, injuries—it’s not fair to expect one person to win all the time. “This past year and a half, my understanding of pressure has been really positive,” she says. “It has built my confidence rather than make me feel as though I have something to prove.”

What she wants to prove is how hard she has worked.

She knows she is being observed more, especially in China, and it will only intensify come February. “But I don’t think it has affected my skiing in any way,” she says. “If anything, it’s made me better.”

Above all, that’s what truly sets Gu apart—more than being a hyphenate with kick-ass standardized test scores: It’s her concentration and perspective, her mental game. Noto says as much, and so does Bunt: “The second I give her a task, she just locks in,” he says. “Her biggest strength is her focus, with everything, every moment, every day.” If you ask Gu how she does it—a sports psychologist? meditation?

—she mentions her mom, her grandma, her habit of journaling. Which, if you see her first and foremost as a student and an analyst, isn’t a surprise. Sometimes she writes about a meal she liked; sometimes it’s a “deep dissection of what adolescents need,” she says. “I can look back and see my growth, and it is really grounding—and also really motivating. I’m figuring out how my mind works.”

She hopes to publish her writing as a memoir someday. And when she does, the world might just be able to understand exactly how she rose to meet her moment —beyond and beneath all the obvious qualities that make her an impending superstar. “Eileen is smart, hardworking and she has incredible discipline. She’s beautiful, and she can already handle the demands. I mean, she’s got a really special package,” says Turski. “I’m excited to see not only what she does in skiing but what she does for skiing. If it all lines up for her in China, she’s going to rocket launch.”

Check out a new series on Gu’s frenetic life, Everyday Eileen, at Gu, representing China, competed in the women’s freeski halfpipe (as well as the freeski slopestyle) at the Land Rover U.S. Grand Prix World Cup at Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, Colorado last March. redbull.com/everydayeileen. biracial perspective, a crossover between sport and art, and a respect for your body,” she says. “Because no matter what I’m doing, my body is my job.”

For Gu, fashion is both a complement to—and a reprieve from—skiing. “It’s a creative way to show the world who you are while celebrating individuality that is difficult to find in other aspects of daily life,” she says. “It’s almost the same as skiing, where if you do tricks with individual style, it’s celebrated. It’s one of the criteria in contests.”

Not only that, she thrives off the adrenaline of photo shoots, just as she does at the top of a run— the attention, the striving for perfection, the outand-out challenge. (Here’s one: Gu, in a tank top, hair frozen, laying upside-down on a block of real ice for an hour and a half while it’s snowing on her.)

But she’s still able to put a trademark philosophical slant on it. “Fashion is an opportunity to show a different facet of yourself, especially as a young person discovering what kind of person you want to be,” she says. “It’s almost like playing dress-up, experimenting with different personas and seeing which one suits you best.” She’s always been interested in journalism, so, ever the student, she is writing and directing a short film for Vogue China

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“Her biggest strength is her focus, with everything, every day.”

If things go well at the 2022 Games, Gu is poised to become the kind of star athlete who transcends alpine sports.

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RELUCTANT AMBASSADOR

Climber Manoah Ainuu isn’t sending world-class routes.

He doesn’t want to be a symbol or a spokesperson.

But still, he’s changing how many people look at the outdoors.

Words MARK JENKINS Photography LUKE WEBSTER

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“I started realizing I bring something else to the outdoors,” says Ainuu, who was photographed on the flanks of Mount Rainier in June 2021.

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anoah Ainuu is bobbing his head, his dreads gently swaying. The cool, mellifluous rhythms of Mulatu Astatke, father of Ethiopian jazz, float around us.

Reefer is in the air. Ainuu is wearing his flowery green shorts and doing a little shuffle in his sandals. The sun is so intense that photographer Luke Webster has stripped down to his skivvies. Spokane alpinist Nick Sweeney has his hoodie up and a can of hazy IPA in his hand. Even I have my shirt off, unwisely burning my alabaster white body. We’re all wearing dark sunglasses like a blues band.

We could be at a concert, or on the beach, but we’re not even close. The four of us are at 11,300 feet on the eyesearingly white Emmons Glacier on the north face of Mount Rainier.

Ainuu bumps the soundtrack to the heavy beat of a reggae dub band.

Having climbed in Ethiopia and experienced the underground music scene in Addis Ababa, I ask Ainuu how he got into Ethiopian music.

“My mom is Ethiopian. She grew up north of Addis in a city called Dessie,” he answers. “So this music is part of my heritage.” Ainuu’s dad is Samoan. His parents met on a nondenominational mission in Kenya, got married, and moved to California in 1988.

“I was born in South L.A. in 1995, and we moved to Spokane, Washington, when I was 10. I went from being just another Black kid in the hood to the only person of color in my elementary school—180 degrees from L.A. Honestly, if we’d never moved to Spokane, I never would have gotten into the outdoors.”

Manoah Ainuu (pronounced a-newoo) is a Black ice climber. Now 26, he’s been on the cover of Alpinist magazine 48

and had a role in the documentary Black Ice. Yet he didn’t start ice climbing until 2015, when climber Conrad Anker took him under his wing and introduced him to the icefalls of Hyalite Canyon outside Bozeman, Montana.

“He was a soft-spoken, nonconfrontational kid passionate about climbing,” Anker tells me by phone.

“He was working two jobs and trying to go to school.”

“I couldn’t afford all that gear,” says Ainuu. “Ice axes, ice screws—Conrad gave me what I needed to get started.

I was hooked from the first time I sunk tools into ice.”

Anker became his mentor, spending days teaching him the craft, and soon enough Ainuu was sending steep ice around Bozeman. “We need to make space at the table for people of color—make space at the crag,” Anker says. “We need to

open the doors and take down the fences.

For a long time, I don’t think the outdoor community was really making an effort.”

Anker is right. He and I are the same age and have both been climbing around the world for four decades. When we started climbing, the folks at the crags were white and mostly unwoke. Hell, there were hardly any women. Lynn Hill, Annie Whitehouse, Catherine Destivelle, Alison Hargreaves, Wanda Rutkiewicz—a mere handful. Unlike in other sports—like track and field, basketball and football— in climbing the journey to become inclusive was a long time coming.

When Anker and I climbed Everest together in 2012, we finally had some representation, with three women climbers—Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, Emily Harrington and Hilaree Nelson—and one Black climber, Phil Henderson. But there still was a very long way to go.

Ainuu, who was born in South Los Angeles, moved to Spokane when he was 10 and then fell in love with ice climbing near his current home in Bozeman.

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Due to unseasonable avalanche danger, the team scuttled a plan to ascend Rainier’s highly technical Ptarmigan Ridge and instead climbed the Emmons Glacier.

“We need to make space at the table for people of color— make space at the crag.”

—Conrad Anker

With Conrad Anker’s help and mentorship, Ainuu tried ice climbing in 2015. Just four years later, he appeared on the cover of Alpinist magazine.

Ainuu and the rest of the crew ascended Rainier in conditions in which every other guided team was heading downhill.

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ebster, Sweeney, Ainuu and yours truly originally intended to climb the Ptarmigan Ridge of Rainier, but the rangers at White River dissuade us. “Two feet of fresh snow on the summit. The avalanche danger on that route will be extreme,” says one ranger with years of climbing experience.

Given how hard it had been for the four of us to get our schedules to match, we’re reluctant to bail on the big mountain. Instead, we decide to attempt the far easier Emmons Glacier, a trade route up the northeast side of the peak.

We hike up past the Inter Glacier in just a few hours, camp around 9,000 feet at Camp Curtis and continue onward the next morning to Camp Schurman, 9,500 feet, at the base of Steamboat Prow. On the way up, several dozen guided clients, all of whom had been turned back by the snow conditions, pass us as they head down.

“We dug a pit at 11,400 and found a weak layer at 6 centimeters and another weak layer at 65 centimeters,” one Rainier guide tells me. “We decided the avalanche danger was too high and turned around.”

When we reach Camp Schurman, multiple teams are retreating. There isn’t a single climber on the Emmons. Webster and Ainuu appeared to be swayed by the

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multiple reports of bad conditions, but Sweeney and I are less impressed.

“Let’s just go up and have a look for ourselves,” I suggest. Which is exactly what we do.

By noon the sun is blasting the glacier—turning the snow to oatmeal mush—so we find a perfect little campsite in a notch between old seracs, stomp it out with our crampons, set up our tiny tents and proceed to party. We lounge all afternoon, listening to jazz

and reggae on Ainuu’s portable speaker.

As soon as the sun drops over the summit and the air temperature plummets, we set out on a recon.

The avalanche pits dug by the guides are just 100 feet above us. We climb into them and examine the evidence.

The weak layer at 6 centimeters has consolidated due to the day’s high temperatures. The weak layer at 65 centimeters is real, but so deep as to be unaffected by the weight of humans.

During three days on Rainier, the author and Ainuu talked about food, music, racism—but not much about climbing or his new fame. “I’m just an ice climber, man, nothing special,” he says.

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This seems evident by the fact that we haven’t seen a single slide in any direction on any slope of any angle. In contrast to what the Rainier guides had said, I feel the avalanche risk is relatively low.

“Let’s climb a little further up and do more assessment,” I volunteer.

Not 300 feet higher we are on crunchy névé. I realize that the avalanche pits had been dug in a snow deposition zone that was unrepresentative of the rest of the route. In the end, we recon almost 1,000 feet above our 11,300-foot camp and find the snow solid and unscary.

Satisfied that the route is safe, we descend back to our tents, eat dinner, pack our packs and crawl into our sleeping bags.

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n the hike into Rainier, I tried to talk to Ainuu about what it was like to be a Black climber, but he seemed evasive and uncomfortable. He told me, “I’m just an ice climber, man, nothing special. There are hundreds of guys better than me.”

There was a reason I was trying to plumb Ainuu’s feelings about being an experienced Black outdoorsman. For the past decade, I had been heartened by the increase in the number of people of color climbing, kayaking, backpacking and just generally getting outside. But the numbers remained disproportionately small. I had just read a disturbing paper—“Diversity in the Great Outdoors: Is Everyone Welcome in America’s Parks and Lands?”—by Resources for the Future, an independent nonprofit research institute, that said: Data from the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service suggest deep inequality in the ethnic/racial mix of visitors to our public lands. While the most recent U.S. census shows that nonHispanic whites make up approximately 63 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise between 88 and 95 percent of all visitors to public lands.

African Americans comprise only 1 to 1.2 percent of all visitors and Hispanic/Latinos between 3.8 and 6.7 percent; both groups are underrepresented as visitors to public lands relative to their presence in the population at large.

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Why are there still so few people of color in the outdoors, especially in the world of climbing?

Ainuu and the author share a light moment as they topped 11,000 feet. Soon they would lean into the sunny conditions with reggae and beers.

“Listen to that quiet voice in the back of your head,” Ainuu wrote in a 2019 Instagram post. “Never be afraid to bail and turn around.”

Why, today in 2022, after Barack Obama was president for eight years, are there still so few people of color in the outdoors, and especially in the world of climbing? Ainuu clearly didn’t want to talk about it, so I did my own research.

Here’s what I found.

Some of it is socioeconomic. Compared with traditional American sports— running, basketball, football, even soccer—climbing is expensive. Just getting shoes, a harness, a rope and a rack will set you back $1,000. Want to ice climb? Boots, tools and screws will run you north of $1,000. This is beyond the means of so many young Americans. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate in the U.S. in 2019 was 10.5 percent, but the poverty rate for Blacks was 18.8 percent and 15.7 percent for Hispanics—which reflects an obvious divide but also shows that nationally more than 80 percent of Blacks and almost 85 percent of Hispanics were not in poverty. For both Black and Hispanic groups, these were the lowest 54

rates of poverty on record. That’s a positive trend, but it cannot mask the fact that across the country, the percent of Blacks living below the poverty line is roughly two to three times the percent of whites in poverty, depending on the state.

(Perhaps unsurprisingly, of the 10 states with the highest poverty rates, nine are socalled red states.) A report by the Center for American Progress states, “African Americans own approximately one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans.” In 2016, the median wealth of a white family was $171,000, compared with $17,600 for Black families and $20,700 for Hispanic families.

Some of it is access. There’s a free basketball court in practically every neighborhood in America, and there’s a football stadium even in Nowhere, Texas—you can just walk over and practice—but the crags, until the invention of climbing gyms (which almost always require an expensive membership), were always out there

beyond the city limits. According to a 2020 Conservation Science Partners study, 68 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. are nature-deprived—meaning they live in regions deprived of the benefits of nature, including “access to clean water, clean air and a diversity of wildlife.” Only 23 percent of white Americans have limited access to nature. This research also found that low-income families are more likely to be nature-deprived, especially non-white, low-income households. For example, a whopping 93 percent of people of color in Connecticut are naturedeprived, compared with only 10 percent of whites; in Wisconsin, a state wellknown for outdoor recreation, 78 percent of all people of color are nature-deprived, versus just 13 percent of whites.

And some of it is representation.

For the past century, the only faces of climbing—other than Sherpas—have been mayonnaise white. White males have dominated the sport from the THE RED BULLETIN

Manoah Ainuu doesn’t want to be the cause célèbre of climbing. He hates being the center of attention. beginning, Edward Whymper to George Mallory to Bill Tilman, Hamish MacInnes to Yvon Chouinard, John Long to Tommy Caldwell to Adam Ondra.

“Representation matters,” says Anker.

“People of color are underrepresented in the outdoor community. When they see someone who looks like they do, they feel empowered.”

Case in point: 21-year-old Memphis indoor climber Jarvis Dean met Ainuu at the Memphis Rox climbing gym and community center two and a half years ago. “He was the only one who looked like me,” effuses Dean by phone. “I was blown away. Here was this ice climber who was Black. I know it sounds crazy, and I might be exaggerating, but to me he was like the first man on the moon. I even asked him to take a picture with me.”

Memphis Rox is one of only two climbing gyms in the country that has a “pay what you can” policy. If you don’t have the money for a membership, you can volunteer in its community garden or with its lunch program or with its Community Closet, which provides basic household needs—such as toilet paper and clothes— at a reduced cost.

“Manoah really impressed our staff when he came here,” Jon Hawk, director of gym operations, tells me by phone.

“Sometimes climbers aren’t so stoked about getting to know novices in the gym, but Manoah was very approachable. He would talk to anybody and really listen.

It’s one of his strengths.”

Dean says that Ainuu’s love of climbing is contagious. “Manoah, Kai Lightner, all the people of color are representing.

They’re inspiring not just Black people, but all people. It’s like a rock being dropped into the reservoir of humanity.

It makes ripples. And the longer it goes on, the bigger the ripples get.”

But it didn’t appear that that was how Ainuu felt about himself. At our glacier camp on Rainier, I asked him how he felt about being a role model.

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“Honestly, I’ve been struggling with that a lot,” he says. “It feels like a heavy burden. I know I’m not the best ice climber around. I know so many climbers better than me. For the first couple years I had impostor syndrome real bad. But then I started realizing I bring something else to the outdoors.

Climbing isn’t the main priority in my life. My main priority is my wife, Rachel. Then my family and friends.”

Ainuu says that what drew him to climbing wasn’t so much the challenge as the social connection. “I grew up really shy, so the social aspect of climbing was a big draw for me,” he says.

“The climbing community mattered as much to me as the climbing itself.”

I ask Ainuu who his own heroes were growing up. I suspect he might say Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan or Serena Williams. Or maybe Martin Luther King Jr. or John Lewis.

“My family, especially my mom and dad,” he answers. “My mom started the only Ethiopian restaurant in Spokane; it’s called Queen of Sheba. And my dad.

My dad beat cancer. Chemo, all that, and he kept his head up and showed me how to be a brave human.”

This answer forces a realization on me. It’s me—along with the outdoor industry and outdoor media—who want Ainuu to be a hero, but that isn’t what he wants. He’s just a quiet guy who likes to

ice climb. The Black heroes of my life were not his. They were little different from other famous people of any color.

They were an abstraction. I was just some white guy mistakenly assuming that every Black athlete feels a duty to be a spokesperson for equality and equity. I was the one who wanted Ainuu to be a role model. By simply being silent, perhaps he was trying to tell me that he does not want this role. Despite what other people said, Ainuu has no apparent passion for “representing.”

When I ask him about his goals, they aren’t about climbing or representing or the BLM movement. They are ordinary, personal goals. “I want to start an Ethiopian restaurant in Bozeman. I grew up working in my mom’s restaurant.

I like the interaction with customers.

I like serving good food to people.”

Ainuu is a vegan, and during our climb up Rainier he is far more excited to talk about his convictions regarding the preciousness of all forms of life than about his latest send. Indeed, we never really talk about climbing.

I ask Ainuu, a Black man with dreads living in Bozeman, how often he had experienced racism. At first he says, “Hardly ever.” But he thinks about it and rephrases: “I guess there are microaggressions, but I have learned just to shrug them off.” A moment later he tells me a story that happened in

After two days of climbing, avalanche conditions never materialized, and the team reached Rainier’s summit. Ainuu is proof that ambassadors don’t have to defy death to be effective.

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Montana but could have happened to any Black person in any state in America.

He was driving too fast and a patrol car slid up behind him, lights flashing.

He was on a narrow bridge, so he had to continue to the end of the bridge before he could pull over. The cop got out of the car and stepped up behind his window.

“Boy. Driver’s license and proof of insurance.”

The cop had his hand on his holster and stood right behind Ainuu’s head.

The officer wrote him a $400 ticket for speeding, then wrote a $400 ticket for failing to pull over. The officer said he had to pay in cash, right there, on the road, or he would go to jail. Ainuu was too afraid to protest. He had just graduated from high school and had graduation money. Through his car window he gave the cop $800 in cash.

“He called me ‘boy.’ I’m usually pretty laid-back, but that really got to me,” says Ainuu.

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p on Rainier, our planned alpine start doesn’t happen. We sleep in.

Having abandoned a hard route for an easy one, we fully give in to vacation mode. None of us has ever climbed the Emmons, but the route through the crevasses and around the seracs turns out to be quite obvious. In an effort to go light—ever the alpinist’s dream—Ainuu brought aluminum crampons instead of steel, which was a rookie mistake. Fine for snow, they actually pop off when front-pointing on blue ice. He is constantly readjusting them and apologizing for his bad decision. He isn’t a mountaineer; he is an ice climber.

We wander our way to the 14,410foot summit in four and a half hours.

Other climbers came up the even easier Disappointment Cleaver route, so there are lots of folks about, but we don’t mind. We are taking our time, doing the chill tour. We spend an hour eating lunch just below the summit, descend to our camp in two hours and make it all the way back to the car and warm beers by late afternoon. It was just a romp in the mountains with friends— nothing death defying, nothing extreme—exactly the kind of thing Ainuu believes in.

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C

limbing with Ainuu forced me to rethink my understanding of people of color in the outdoors.

As a liberal white male, I marched in BLM protests. My wife, Martha, and I made posters of support and nailed them to the front of our house. We put the stickers on our cars. (Martha even went so far as to call out a guy who had a Confederate flag on his truck, getting into an hour-long argument and lucky not to get hurt.) I wrote op-eds about Black History Month, the 1619 Project and the meaning of Juneteenth.

Having worked as a journalist for more than three decades, writing stories not only about adventure, but also about repression, injustice and violence, I believe in being outspoken about the value of diversity in a democracy. But not everyone does.

Manoah Ainuu does not want to be the cause célèbre of climbing. He hates being the center of attention. He does not want to have to pretend to be somebody he is not. He’s not vocal and has no interest in fighting culture wars.

He’s a gentle guy who uses the word “love” a lot and likes nothing better than spending time with his wife. He admits that he hates social media and only occasionally posts.

But one Instagram post in April 2019 speaks volumes. “Since Rachel and I got married last August, I’ve been thinking a bunch about the duality of life and climbing,” he wrote. “A lot of us build our lives around climbing, which is one of the most awesome ways to live one’s life. Lots of great experiences and growth comes from this. Climbing, however, is not more important than life and the ones we love. Listen to that quiet voice in the back of your head—never be afraid to bail and turn around.”

I was hoping to reconnect with Ainuu after Rainier, but, perhaps because I was a journalist with questions, he didn’t respond to any of my texts, phone calls or emails. He made it quite clear—he just wants to be left alone. He just wants to pursue his passion for ice and rock like any white climber.

But think about it. What are political activism and social justice about, if not to create a world where all people can live the life they want, not the life we want them to live.

Ainuu, who has more experience as an ice climber than as a mountaineer, leads the way on the upper slopes of the ascent.

THE PIONEER Phil Henderson is a groundbreaking adventurer.

And this spring, he’ll be leading the first all-Black team on Everest. He’s not seeking glory or redemption—he’s looking to share a dream.

Words MARK JENKINS Photography GREG MIONSKE

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“This expedition is not just about the summit,” says Henderson, who was photographed in Cortez, Colorado, on November 1.

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Henderson will lead the Full Circle Everest Expedition, tackling the world’s tallest mountain this spring.

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P

hil Henderson and I were alone together at Camp 1—up around 20,000 feet—on Mount Everest. It was May 2012. We were scooched deep inside our fat sleeping bags inside a two-person tent staked to the ice. Crevasses, cracks in the glacier large enough to swallow a freight train, surrounded us. To get up here we had climbed through the Khumbu Icefall, the deadliest jumble of apartment-size ice blocks in the world. Two years later, 16 Sherpas would die when a portion of the Khumbu Icefall collapsed.

We were high enough to be in the clouds, and wind was rushing snow over our diminutive nylon dome.

“Sounds lovely, like a waterfall, doesn’t it?” asked Henderson, making me imagine a warm waterfall in Hawaii, the diametric opposite of our ice-encrusted home on the edge of oblivion. For the next 12 hours, throughout the night, we would periodically bang the tent walls to keep the snow from burying us alive.

Henderson saw the bright side of every situation. It’s part of his character and what drew me to him on Everest. He and I were tentmates, climbing partners and confidantes.

Camp 1 did not have Sherpas, so we took turns cooking for each other in the flapping vestibule. Graupel blew into our tent as we melted chunks of snow into water. Rice and a few fresh eggs carried up from base camp, hot Gatorade, a Swiss chocolate bar split in half for dessert. We

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were comfortable and content, both of us having spent big chunks of our lives in small tents in cold, inclement conditions.

At that point, Henderson had been an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), for almost 20 years, spent months training Sherpas how to climb at the Khumbu Climbing Center in Nepal and led expeditions from Africa to Alaska. He had played football in college before an injury put him out of the game and he shifted to outdoor sports. He was the only Black climber on our team, the 50th anniversary expedition of the first American ascent of Everest.

We lay back in our bags and talked.

There’s one thing that most people don’t realize: More time is spent talking than climbing on a typical two-month, highaltitude expedition. You can only acclimatize so fast; the weather frequently causes you to be tent-bound, and nights are long. So you talk. Share stories.

Often we talked about our families.

Henderson’s wife, Brenda, is from Kenya, and their daughter, Bahati (“luck” in Swahili), was 4 years old. I had two daughters in college. It is not easy to leave those you love for a grandiose act of selfindulgence. We mountain climbers always feel guilty, but then we always leave anyway. We are called. Drawn. Mountains are that magnetic.

That night, however, we were on a different subject: the Black experience in America. Although I had spent years

reporting from Africa, I was a white male from the white-bread state of Wyoming.

Henderson was from California but at that time lived in Vernal, Utah, a state nearly as white as Wyoming. This was years before the murder of George Floyd and the BLM movement finally woke up many white Americans to the systemic racism in our country—but all we really had to do was listen. It wasn’t like cops weren’t beating or killing Blacks over a century ago—we just didn’t have smartphones to bear witness.

Almost 100 years ago, the 1928 Illinois Crime Survey found that although Blacks made up only 5 percent of the population, they constituted 30 percent of police killings. The late great representative John Lewis was severely beaten by police while leading the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights on what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

“I grew up in San Diego, practically the only Black kid in a white neighborhood,” said Henderson. “John-John and I were always getting hassled by the police.”

John Williams Jr. was Henderson’s boyhood best friend. They did everything together, including getting into trouble.

“It was either jail, or getting out,” said Henderson. “I got out.”

But when I asked what he meant, he pulled his red and black Rastafarian bandanna down over his eyes, withdrew a yo-yo-size speaker from inside his sleeping bag—he’d been keeping it warm—and placed it between us on the icy tent floor.

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In 2012, Henderson was on an Everest expedition; here he traverses the notoriously perilous Khumbu Icefall.

We listened to the big-band jazz of Ghanaian Ebo Taylor on his Love and Death album. We listened to the cool jazz of Nigerian Fela Kuti’s Water No Get Enemy, then the dark Sorrow, Tears and Blood. Before the speaker died from the cold, we fell asleep to the loping reggae of Jamaican Bunny Wailer’s Liberation and its lead track “Rise and Shine”: We’ve been down in the valley much too long.

We’ve been down in captivity oh so long.

We’ve been down in humility much too long.

We’ve been down in slavery oh so long.

But we’re gonna rise and shine!

And win our liberation, For now is the time When all nations must be free.

So rise and shine!

Restore your strength and power, Waste no more time, Remember your history.

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early 10 years later, Henderson is leading the first all-Black expedition to Everest this spring. Called the Full Circle Everest Expedition, it already has big equipment sponsors and more than $100,000 raised via GoFundMe. “Philip is a natural leader,” says Larry Berger, a colleague and close friend of Henderson’s. They both worked at NOLS for years. Now they live near each other in Cortez, Colorado. Whereas they used to climb together, now they go fishing.

“Philip didn’t have it easy at NOLS,” says Berger. “Back then, the school was run by white entitled people, for white entitled kids. Philip tried to change that, but he was largely ignored. He was ahead of his time.”

As I had witnessed on Everest, Henderson has fine-tuned leadership skills. He’s thoughtful but decisive, driven but not egotistical. He’s a good listener but always speaks his mind, often in a quiet yet profound way.

“Philip inspires people because he believes in making a positive difference

in the world,” Berger says. “That’s just who he is. I can’t imagine anyone else leading this expedition.”

The Full Circle Everest Expedition is comprised of an eclectic team of Black climbers, men and women from across the U.S. Their goal, as it says on their website, is to “showcase the tenacity and strength of these climbers, and highlight the barriers that continue to exist for Black communities in accessing the outdoors.”

When you look at the résumés of the climbers on the Full Circle Everest Expedition, they are not loaded with first ascents or cutting-edge alpinism. Instead, team members reveal a deep commitment to their respective communities. Abby Dione founded the Coral Cliffs Climbing Gym in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and has taught climbing clinics at Color the Crag and at Flash Foxy’s Women’s Climbing Festival. James “KG” Kagambi of Kenya— the first Black African to summit both Denali and Aconcagua—has been a teacher his whole life and trains Kenyan THE RED BULLETIN

I don’t ask him why he’s going back to Everest. Only nonclimbers ask such stupid questions. mountain rescue teams. Eddie Taylor, who has climbed El Capitan in a day, is a high school chemistry teacher. Fred Campbell, a data scientist with a PhD in statistics, teaches free climbing classes for beginners. Demond “Dom” Mullins, a sociology PhD and an Iraq War veteran, researches the benefits of outdoor recreation to combat vets. What distinguishes this Everest team from most others is its desire to give back to the Black and Brown community, rather than just tag the summit and start bragging.

“This expedition is not just about the mountain,” says team member Rosemary Saal. “It’s about building community, about building relationships, most

At Camp 2 in 2012, Henderson fell acutely sick and had to descend the mountain.

importantly about changing the narrative about Black people and the outdoors.”

Saal is a NOLS instructor, primarily focused on backpacking, and a mentee of Henderson, who took her under his wing while climbing Kilimanjaro. “Phil doesn’t just make suggestions—he actively looks for opportunities for young people of color,” she says. “Our expedition is about showing that Black people do climb, Black people do camp, Black people do ski!”

When I speak to Saal, she is driving across Utah to teach a NOLS course. We keep getting cut off, but she keeps calling back. When I ask her what she hopes to communicate to the Black community about climbing Mount Everest, she doesn’t

MARK JENKINS

Back in 2012, Henderson waits out bad weather at Everest’s Camp 1 at roughly 20,000 feet of elevation.

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mention the conventional tropes of challenging yourself and conquering fear.

“Joy!” she exclaims. “The joy that comes from being in the outdoors. Many people of color have never been given the opportunity to experience the joy of mountain climbing. It’s a feeling of liberation. I want to share this with the Black community, a community that has historically been excluded from the outdoor experience. I see practicing joy as an act of political resistance.”

When I call Henderson to congratulate him on putting together the Full Circle expedition, we don’t talk about climbing.

Not a word about crampons skittering on blue ice or blizzards or altitude sickness; we talk about giving Black people a different perspective of what they can be, what they can achieve.

“Do I want to see someone on our team summit, damn right I do!”

Henderson says. “But this expedition is not just about the summit. It’s about sharing a dream with a community that has been held back, and sometimes held themselves back.”

Henderson reminds me that the first American team to summit Everest did so in 1963, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. “Were any Black Americans dreaming of climbing Everest back then?” he asks. “That was during the civil rights movement. That’s when things were finally starting to change. That movement never ended.

Black people are still fighting.”

It occurs to me that Black people in America have been climbing their own Everest, battling dangerous conditions for uncertain results, for centuries. I remember the conversations about race and equality Henderson and I had on Everest back in 2012.

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To learn more about Henderson and the Full Circle Everest Expedition­—and possibly donate—visit fullcircleeverest.com.

“[This expedition] is about sharing a dream with a community that has been held back.”

We reminisce for a few minutes about that bittersweet expedition. Henderson had gotten deathly ill at Camp 2, his lungs filling with fluid. His oxygen levels had dropped to 60 percent by the time we got him on an oxygen tank. That night in the tent together I listened to him struggling to breathe through his oxygen mask. He was gurgling, choking. The next morning the expedition was over for him. He had to go down, and I lost my wingman.

“That was hard, man,” says Henderson.

“But you were so calm about it,” I reply.

I can see Henderson shrug and smile right through the phone.

I don’t ask him why he’s going back to Everest. Only non-climbers ask such stupid questions.

“Bahati must be 13 now,” I say.

“She is,” says Henderson. “And she’s growing up in a different world than I grew up in.”

As I did years earlier, I ask him about his own childhood, but he again demurs.

“You’d have to talk to John-John,” Henderson says.

So that’s what I do.

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hilip was the best athlete I’d ever seen,” says John Williams, now an electrician and pastor in California. “As a running back he would just run right over the defense. He could have gone pro if he hadn’t been injured.”

Williams acknowledges that they drank and smoked pot in high school.

“Phil knew his limits, but I ended up taking it way too far.” Williams has been clean and sober now for 14 years, but back then, it was a different story.

One night somebody started a fight with Henderson.

“Philip was not aggressive,” Williams says. “But he was a damn good fighter.

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He knocked this guy out.”

Later that night, after Henderson had gone home, Williams encountered the same guy again, got into another fight, and stabbed him. Both Henderson and Williams went to jail.

“I know that really got to him,” says Williams. “He couldn’t be cooped up like that.”

Henderson’s football coach got him out of jail, but Williams went to juvie for a year.

A similar incident happened again a few years later. “Phil was always protecting me,” says Williams. “But he saw where this was all going and got out.”

Williams ended up in and out of prison for the next two decades. “I spent a total

of 12 years behind bars,” says Williams.

“I think I was Philip’s cautionary tale.

He wrote me many letters while I was in prison. I think he felt like he’d abandoned me, but my life was my fault.”

Williams believes this is why Henderson has focused on mentoring Black youth for his entire life.

“He saw what happens,” says Williams, pausing for a moment. “I used to put the pictures he sent me up on my cell walls.

Pictures of him climbing mountains. He was outside, I was inside, and he knew I needed hope.”

This spring Phil Henderson and his Full Circle team will be attempting Everest, giving hope to a new generation of climbers along the way.

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NAME CALLING

How climbers are changing the culture, one route at a time.

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o celebrate his 34th birthday in 2020, DJ Grant made the three-hour drive from his home in Pittsburgh to Fayetteville, West Virginia, for a long weekend of rock climbing in the New River Gorge. “The New” is a large climbing area, with more than 3,000 established routes on soaring, bullet-hard sandstone cliffs. It’s where Grant fell in love with outdoor climbing.

The sport holds huge significance for him.

“Climbing saved my life,” he says. “It changed my path, changed my outlook.”

It pulled him from depression, propelling him through rebuilding and rediscovery.

“Climbing has been a therapy, a way to center. It’s more than just rocks and routes. It’s trusting your partner with your life. It’s understanding that some challenges you might not overcome immediately.”

On this trip, though, something ate at him: the names of some of the routes.

Slave Fingers. Tarbaby. Kool Krux Klimbing.

Another Tigger in the Morgue.

Grant, a Jamaican immigrant, is Black.

It wasn’t the first time he noticed names that seemed to carry racial overtones, but this time, it felt like they were everywhere.

He had been thrilled to introduce his son, now 11, to climbing. But how could he feel good about bringing him into this?

“A friend put it best,” Grant says. “How can we go through the South to someplace called Slave Fingers and feel safe camping at night?” It was so disheartening, he felt like quitting climbing. After all, what could he do about it? Did anyone even have the power to change names that were accepted by local climbers for decades? Did it even bother them?

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here are hundreds of thousands of climbing routes in the United States, and most of them have innocuous names.

Some, like the Nose on El Capitan, are named for rock features, or for the person who first climbed them, like the (Fred) Beckey Route. Others involve wordplay.

U.S. routes are typically named by the person who climbed it first—the first ascensionist. Being first requires vision, technical skill, hard work and, often, guts.

Name tags aren’t pasted on the rock, of course. Instead, route names are published in heavily used guidebooks and on major crowdsourced aggregator sites, such as Mountain Project.

Offensive route names aren’t confined to the New. Thousands of route names are, at the very least, questionable.

(Mountain Project users have flagged more than 6,000.) Some are clearly derogatory, misogynistic, anti-gay or

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racist. Marginalized groups of climbers have been talking about this problem for years. To many, it’s tied in with a larger problem: the lack of inclusivity in many outdoor sports. Many people of color and other marginalized groups just don’t feel welcome. Most first ascensionists have been white males—so far, anyway. At crags today, most of the climbers are still white.

Which is perhaps why there hadn’t been a lot of serious mainstream attention paid to the issue. People who complained were dismissed.

Then, in June 2020, came the reaction to George Floyd’s death, says Taimur Ahmad, who works on policy issues at the Access Fund, a national climbing organization. “It was a huge kick in the pants for a lot of companies and grassroots climbing organizations,” he says. His job involves working to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, which remains a “big, difficult, problem,” Ahmad says. Route names seemed “more tangible” and a lot easier to fix. Easier, perhaps, but not simple.

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n the months after Grant’s birthday, he and his girlfriend, Natalie Sauerwald, along with friends, came up with a plan.

They contacted the New River Alliance of Climbers (NRAC), a nonprofit that acts as steward of the climbing area, organizing trail maintenance, replacing worn anchors and working with land managers.

Initially, NRAC told Grant it had no control over route names. After George Floyd’s death, NRAC had begun to question its role in creating—or impeding—inclusivity. The alliance changed direction, seeking input from the climbing community, including climbers of color and others who explained how they’ve felt excluded trying to enjoy a day outdoors while surrounded by routes that demeaned them.

Local climber Elena Fouch-Watson says until then, she hadn’t given it much thought. But upon hearing from these climbers, her eyes were opened. “Can you imagine,” she asks, “being a Black climber in the rural West Virginia backwoods, and you drive by a bunch of Dixie flags, and you open the guidebook, and the route you want to get on is named the Racist?”

She joined the NRAC board to help work on these issues.

There are some climbers, at the New and elsewhere, who liken any change to “erasing history.” Others argue that the names weren’t intentionally hurtful and that these new climbers just don’t understand the context. For example, there are several

“Tigger” routes that seem to be a play on the n-word, but, in fact, “Tigger” was the first ascensionist’s nickname.

NRAC held fast. By the end of the summer, it became the first climbing organization in the country to develop a process for addressing this problem at its local crag, according to Ahmad. Other organizations, including the San Luis Valley Climbers Alliance, have since followed. Mountain Project also instituted a process for flagging and redacting toxic route names. (It was a turnaround from a few years earlier when, under different ownership, Mountain Project rebuffed the efforts of a climber of color, Melissa Utomo, who had developed a flagging process.)

Under NRAC’s process, climbers submit offensive names for the board’s consideration. A name that’s simply juvenile or obnoxious gets left alone. For the derogatory names, a representative of the board contacts the first ascensionist, explains the issue, and asks if he’d like to come up with a new name.

“A lot of them were psyched,” FouchWatson says. In some cases, something that may have seemed acceptable in the 1980s has taken on new meaning. In other cases, the first ascensionist admitted to some youthful insensitivity.

In speaking with first ascensionists, Grant realized something. The main hurdle wasn’t about “erasing history. My perception is they thought that by changing the names, they were acknowledging that they at some point in time were racist.” He says he took pains to avoid sounding accusatory and believes that those who agreed to rename their routes “made it more welcoming to people who look like me and my child.”

So far, more than 100 route names have been changed. The new names are reflected on Mountain Project. That company, in fact, has begun to take on the issue more broadly. So far, of the 6,000plus route names (out of more than 253,000 nationwide) that have been flagged as offensive by users, 563 have been redacted, and 163 have been renamed by first ascensionists.

NRAC also convinced the guidebook publisher to reflect the changes in its new edition. The book has other new features, as well.

“There are photos of LGBTQ+ climbers, men, women, BIPOC climbers,” Grant says.

“I’ve gone through all the other climbing guidebooks in my house. I haven’t ever seen a photo of a Black climber before.”

—Maureen O’Hagan

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Picture Perfect Red Bull Illume is a photo contest that honors the world’s best action and adventure images. Here are this year’s winners.

Words ANDREAS WOLLINGER and NORA O’DONNELL

Rod Hill, New Zealand

Splash Down

Winner: “Energy by Red Bull” category “This shot was not supposed to happen,” says Hill, who had already packed up his gear when kayaker River Mutton decided to take one more trip over the Huka Falls in New Zealand. “I didn’t have time to get to my normal spot,” adds Hill.

“Then all of a sudden the light popped like I had never seen before.” Instagram: @rod_coffee

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THE COMPETITION

RED BULL ILLUME

In 2006, photographer and former Red Bull athlete Ulrich Grill made two keen observations while teaching a photo workshop. First, technological advances in equipment had opened up totally new opportunities for action and adventure photographers, and second, there was no competition that celebrated this burgeoning genre. So Grill simply invented one: Red Bull Illume. Today, with tens of thousands of submissions, the contest is the largest of its kind in the world, with winners chosen by a 50-person jury of experts. It’s a complex process with high standards, so the competition deliberately takes place only every two or three years. redbullillume.com 68

Dirtbag Superhero

Winner: Overall and “Masterpiece by SanDisk” category

Will Saunders, United States

“I’ve shot whippers many a time, but this time I wanted to try something a little different,” says Saunders of this shot in Indian Creek, Utah. Saunders convinced climber Jake Talley to form a more powerful stance instead of a classic falling position. The final result reminded him of a superhero. Instagram: @willsaundersphoto

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“Whenever I go out to make some images, I do my best to come back with something that I haven’t done before.”

—Will Saunders

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“The artist’s world is limitless. I love to show people around and let them dive deeper into different worlds that they’ve never been to before.”

—Carolin Unrath

Carolin Unrath, Germany

Subway Surfer

Winner: “Lifestyle by COOPH” category In Munich, there’s a man-made wave on the Eisbach River that’s popular among local surfers. To get this shot, Unrath followed surfer Andreas Müllner on the subway as he readied himself for one of his first sessions after the 2020 lockdown. Instagram: @carounrath

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Thomas Monsorno, Italy

Black Ice

Winner: “Innovation

by EyeEm” category

In February 2020, Monsorno traveled to Siberia with Swiss alpinist Dani Arnold for a bonechilling expedition above the deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal. In this shot, Monsorno used a hovercraft to find the perfect location while Arnold climbed a vertical ice wall above the frozen lake. Instagram: @thomas.monsorno

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“I find joy capturing people in moments of vulnerability on and off the wall. My work strives to capture the meaningful connections forged between the people and the landscapes I encounter.”

—Victoria Kohner-Flanagan

Bouncing Off Dust

Winner: “RAW by Leica” category

Bruno Long, Canada

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“Playing with dust and light has always been one of my favorite ways to shoot mountain biking,” says Long, who captured local rider Dylan Siggers in Fernie, British Columbia. “I had figured out exactly where he would be in the frame and captured the moment as he emerged from the dust perfectly.” Instagram: @eye_b_long

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The Heartbreak Kid

Winner: “Emerging by Black Diamond“ category

Victoria KohnerFlanagan, United States

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“Before tying into the sharp end, Jack was clearly nervous,” says Kohner-Flanagan of climber Jack Nugent, who was tackling the Queen of the Heartbreaks route near Bishop, California. “Questing up the blank face, Jack found a cheeky no-hands rest. Doubt cleared from his face as I snapped the shot.” Instagram: @vickyvicti

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“I strive to put my heart and soul into projects and love the teamwork aspect of a shoot.”

—Markus Berger

Markus Berger, Austria

Waking the Glacier

Winner: “Playground by WhiteWall” category

A underground lake in Austria served up fantastically frigid conditions for Berger and athlete Dominik Hernler: “I didn’t feel anything below my waist,” Berger says of the challenge. “Right after this shot, my camera shut down and didn’t work for three days.” Instagram: @markus_berger_photography

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“It doesn’t matter if we’re on vacation, on a shoot or just going on a random walk through a city— our imagination recreates interesting pieces of architecture into an action sports playground.”

—Jan Kasl

Moon Shot

Winner: “Best of Instagram by Lenovo” category

Yhabril Moro, Spain

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Photographer Moro spent a week planning this shot with athletes Jaime Rico and Javi Diaz at Pico Malacara, Spain.

“You just have to wait for the moment, pray for a bluebird sky,” Moro says. “What’s amazing is that we took the shot on the second try.” Instagram: @yhabril

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Master of Illusion

Winner: “Creative by Skylum” category

Jan Kasl, Czech Republic

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“Our imagination recreates interesting pieces of architecture into an action sports playground,” Kasl says of this image of skateboarder Fanda Šesták in Prague. “With a tool like forced perspective, I felt like I could push it a little further, bending reality to bring the athlete into an absolutely surreal environment.” Instagram: @jankaslphoto

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guide

ARAPAHOE BASIN

Get it. Do it. See it.

Arapahoe Basin, known for highaltitude expert terrain, gets a sweet new spot for food and drinks at 12,456 feet.

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SLOPE STYLE

From the longest run in the U.S. to luxurious new lodges, these nine ski areas upped their snowsports game for this season.

Words JOE LINDSEY

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G U I D E

Do it A new high-speed six-rider lift will speed trips to Mount Snow’s summit.

right to pick up Alpine, the narrow intermediate run that leads to Government Camp base and your shuttle ride back to Timberline. Make sure to stop now and then to marvel at the transition from Palmer’s treeless alpine tundra to temperate forest, an experience unlike almost any other in the U.S. Because of the massive elevation difference from peak to base, it’s best to wait until January to ensure all runs are open.

Arapahoe Basin COLORADO

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or snowboarders and skiers, the past two winters had more bumps than a black-diamond mogul run. The pandemic shut down many areas right before Spring Break 2020 and then forced reduced capacities and services last season. The good news? Resorts adapted and learned how to safely operate. And they used the time to upgrade everything from lifts to lodges. Here are nine areas with new amenities on and off the mountain.

Mount Snow VERMONT

New and upgraded lifts are common at ski areas, but replacing a quarter of your lifts in one season? That’s what’s happening at Mount Snow with owner Vail Resorts’ big 15-year revitalization plan.

This year’s first phase sees a new high-speed quad on the Sunbrook face—home to a host of intermediate runs and glades—that cuts ride time by 30 percent for shorter lines and faster laps. On the main face, old triples Tumbleweed and Sundance get swapped for a new high-speed, six-rider chair. In the past, Tumbleweed

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took riders partway up the mountain, where they had to get off and ride Sundance to the summit. The resort’s Carinthia area, a 100-acre expanse devoted to terrain park and halfpipe skiing and riding, also gets reconfigured with new features that provide a more progressive flow for beginner and intermediate riders to practice.

Timberline Summit OREGON

Hardcore skiers and riders have been doing the run from the top of Timberline ski area to the Summit Pass base area for years. It is, after all, the biggest vertical drop of any ski run in the U.S., at 4,500 feet.

But Timberline’s merger with Summit Pass means it’s now entirely in-bounds, with dedicated trails. From historic Timberline Lodge, take the Magic Mile chairlift and then a snowcat ride to the 8,540-foot top of Palmer Snowfield, tucked under the crumbling peak of Mount Hood. Click into your bindings for a rollercoaster descent starting on Palmer’s expert, ungroomed terrain before dropping into Timberline proper. Bear skier’s

For Colorado’s hard-charging locals, the Basin is known for three things: high-altitude expert terrain, the longest ski season in the state and the legendary “Beach” party scene in spring. Add one more: the new Steilhang Hut, sure to be a lunchtime favorite. Perched like an aerie high above the tree line at 12,456 feet, the cozy Steilhang (“steep slope” in German) features a huge wraparound deck and stunning views of the East

Wall and Continental Divide.

Chilled and tired from ripping laps in Montezuma Bowl?

Warm up with German-style cuisine like locally made specialty sausages (elkjalapeño, anyone?), soft pretzels and pastries, and beer from New Belgium and Prost, a Denver-based craft brewery that abides by Austria’s famed 1516 Reinheitsgebot beer purity law. In summer, after lifts stop turning (as late as July 4 some years), the Steilhang will stay open as an operating base for the area’s new guided via ferrata route.

Mountain High CALIFORNIA

Most of California’s ski glory goes to the big Tahoe resorts or Mammoth, so it’s easy to forget Mountain High, only 90 minutes from downtown Los Angeles (on a good day).

Despite a base elevation of 6,600 feet, Mountain High is trying to decrease its reliance on natural snowfall, so for 2021 the resort invested $350,000 in high-efficiency

Mountain High’s terrain parks have more than 60 new and refurbished features.

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Upgraded Ski Resorts A Fast Tracks system will let skiers who pony up extra cash bypass lift lines at Snowbird.

snowmaking to build its base snowpack. The new snow guns sit 35 feet above the runs for more uniform coverage. That snow will cover the 290-acre area’s bounty of terrain parks, which get 10 new and more than 50 revitalized features like rails, jumps and boxes. The final piece of Mountain High’s million-dollar splurge is a new Rossignol Experience Center, a state-of-the-art rentals and tuning facility packed with $200,000 worth of the latest ski and snowboard gear.

Boyne Mountain MICHIGAN

MOUNT SNOW, MOUNTAIN HIGH, JAY DASH

Arguably the Midwest’s most complete winter resort, Boyne Mountain offers pretty much every snowsport you could want, from fat biking to tubing, not to mention 415 acres of lift-served terrain that averages 140 inches of snowfall per year. For this season, it also has freshly renovated lodging. The Chalet Edelweiss remodel transforms the 35-room Swiss-style lodge into a four-star luxury retreat, with spacious guest rooms appointed with “modern mountain” furnishings and rainfall-style showers, a new cozy lounge and a Nordic sauna. Tucked right under the Mountain Express lift, it’s as ski-in/ski-out as you can get, with easy access to the village’s plentiful dining options. This refresh is the first phase of an ambitious 10year renovation plan that will see the Midwest’s first eightperson chairlift next season.

Copper Mountain COLORADO

One of the quirks that makes Copper fantastic for novice skiers and snowboarders is terrain that naturally gets steeper from west to east.

That not only helps keep lessexperienced folks from unwittingly dropping into expert terrain, it means no

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one’s straight-lining the section of the resort that is best for lessons and learning.

That zone gets bigger with the first phase of Copper’s Western Territory expansion, a multiyear project to revamp the west side of the 2,500-acre area. For ’21/’22, that includes two new “adventure zones” for skill building and two new beginner trails. Future plans include a lift replacement and updated snowmaking.

Snowbird UTAH

Ever been in a long lift line and wished you could just… slide right to the front like a VIP? POWDR’s new Fast Tracks program, debuting at four of its resorts including Snowbird, does just that, with speedy access to dedicated lines at certain lifts. The dynamic pricing starts at $69 per day (additional to lift tickets or passes), but expect to spend more on weekends, holidays and powder days, of which Snowbird has a ton, thanks to its 500 inches of average annual snowfall.

The program is not without controversy; critics say allowing people to pay extra

to skip lines makes an already exclusive sport even more elitist. But POWDR hasn’t changed its plans and is betting (probably correctly) that those who follow the mantra “no friends on a powder day” will pony up extra cash for a chance to turn hot laps in Little Cloud’s bowls or the steeps off Gad lift.

Mount Hood Meadows OREGON

Hood Meadows’ Sahale Lodge was technically finished before last season, but the pandemic meant access was limited to takeaway food, rentals and outdoor seating.

This year, the area hopes to throw open the 24,000-squarefoot lodge to all comers. The first floor features Meadows’ expanded lesson and rental center, while one flight up you’ll find multiple dining options, including the Sahale Grill’s imported Italian pizza oven. With tables for 230 guests and a spacious patio, there’s plenty of room to spread out, and floor-to-ceiling windows offer expansive views. Need a warm-up? Go curl up by the fireplace in the Bullwheel Bar and order

a Sahale Mocha (bourbon, Kahlua and hot chocolate) or refuel with a beer from pFriem Family Brewers, Ninkasi and other local favorites.

Sugarbush VERMONT

Vermont Adaptive has been teaching snowsports at resorts like Sugarbush to kids and adults with physical, cognitive and developmental disabilities since 1987. This year, the nonprofit gets a new 4,000-square-foot lodge of its own at the resort’s Mount Ellen base, where clients can access three lifts serving everything from beginner runs to double-diamond pitches and airy glades. Ten times the size of the old facility, it offers room for a full suite of services for 100 athletes, staff and instructors on any given day: lockers, a load of specialized adaptive skis and boards, plus indoor space for yoga classes, even a soundproof room to decompress from sensory overstimulation. In summer, the facility will help Vermont Adaptive expand its other programs in the area, like hiking and mountain biking.

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G U I D E

Do it

“When I put my helmet on, it’s all up to me,” Barcia says. “I always seem to perform better when I have more pressure on my shoulders.”

TRAIN LIKE A PRO

“IT’S ALL UP TO ME”

Justin Barcia reveals how he prepares for the extreme demands of motocross racing.

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icknamed “Bam Bam” for his full-throttle style, Justin Barcia, 29, races motocross and supercross for the Troy Lee Designs/GASGAS team. That approach means his body takes a beating during high-intensity races. “If I’m going full-out, my heart rate is at 185 or 190 for the full 20 minutes,” he says.

Muscling a 200-pound bike through corners and over jumps requires strength, endurance and flexibility.

Growing up, Barcia wasn’t interested in team sports. “My parents wanted to sign me up for soccer, and I got freaked out,” he says. The individualism of motocross appealed to him. Barcia

turned pro at age 16 and promptly won the AMA’s Rookie of the Year award.

Since then, he’s amassed an impressive haul of results, including multiple wins at Supercross de Paris. In 2021, racing his first season with Troy Lee Designs/ GASGAS, he won two supercross races in the 450s. Despite such successes, Barcia is surprised at how far he’s progressed: “I just started racing locally and got better and better.”

On that front, he’s always looking for new ways to pursue victory. “I feel like our sport is a big puzzle, and I’m putting all these pieces together to be the best I can be,” he says. “I’m always trying to figure out the next step.”

THE RED BULLETIN

Fitness

S PE E D

TEC H N I Q U E

“It’s not possible to go easy on the bike”

“It’s not just hammering laps”

“On a normal day at the track, I go out for a 15- or 20-minute warm-up. I want to get comfortable with the track and find the right lines. Then I do a specific workout. The other day, I did 12-lap motos, where I do a start and 12 laps. A lap is around a minute, so it’s about 12 minutes. So I did three motos total. After each one, I take a break while the mechanic looks over the bike. Then I go out and do another moto. No matter what I do, the intensity will be high.”

STR E N GTH

GARTH MILAN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, CHRIS TEDESCO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

JEN SEE

“You have to be really strong to handle the bike” “I race a 450, and the bikes nowadays are so fast that you have to be really strong to handle the bike. I have to do so many exercises to make my whole body strong.

I go to the gym twice each week to lift. Pretty much, our weight workouts are always circuits.

Obviously, my legs have to be really strong. You can’t go wrong with squats. I’ve had some lower-back issues over the years, so I try to make my core as strong as possible.

I always go on YouTube because I can find so many core workouts.

I’m always switching it up.”

THE RED BULLETIN

“If you’re not learning or adapting to the next level, you probably shouldn’t race anymore. It’s not just going out there and hammering laps. You gotta work on your technique. Being in a better position on the bike or using less clutch in a corner or getting on the throttle earlier—that’s where I can always try to be faster. Sometimes I’ll pick a couple sections on the track and break it up. I’m always practicing starts. When I’m on the starting gate, I try to visualize getting the holeshot, and I go through the track in my head.”

CAR D I O

“Running makes you tough” “When you get on the motorcycle, you can’t really control the intensity. If I wanted to get my training just on the motorbike, I would probably only be able to do two days—it’s just way too intense.

I use my road bicycle to train all the heart-rate zones that I hit on my dirt bike. Sometimes, I do an indoor ride on Zwift because I can control the power and work specific zones. On weekends, I usually go on a longer bike ride, maybe twoand-a-half hours. I love trail running, too. I don’t like to go for more than 40 minutes. It’s just brutal.”

“I LIKE TO EAT GLUTENAND DAIRY-FREE” “I always make pancakes before a race. That’s my thing. All the guys laugh at me on the team because at 7 a.m. I’m out in the kitchen, making pancakes. I’ve done a bunch of different diets over the years, and what I’ve found is best for me, is to eat gluten-free and dairy-free.

I definitely love snacks, all kinds of trail mixes and gluten-free toast with almond butter. I love going into Whole Foods and finding new snacks.”

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See it

Available Now ANNA GASSER– THE SPARK WITHIN

20 January SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL After a successful pivot to a largely virtual experience in 2021, the Sundance Film Festival is back IRL in Park City, Utah, with new safety protocols: All attendees must be vaccinated and wear masks when indoors. But thanks to last year’s online success, those who can’t make it to the mountains can still watch movies from home—or attend one of seven satellite screenings throughout the U.S. Two of last year’s documentary winners, the animated refugee tale Flee and Questlove’s crowd-pleasing directorial debut, Summer of Soul, are both front-runners in this year’s Oscar race. Thru January 30; sundance.org

At the age of 15, Anna Gasser decided she’d had enough of her sport.

That sport was gymnastics, and she hasn’t looked back.

Today, the Austrian athlete is better known as a pro snowboarder who won four Winter X Games golds and the 2017 Snowboard World Championships, took the inaugural big air gold at the 2018 Winter Olympics, and became the first woman to score a cab double cork 900 and a cab triple underflip. Now, at 30, Gasser is expanding her horizons once again, this time with backcountry riding. This film tracks the legend and shows her amazing ability to succeed. redbull.com

SUNDANCE, NATE LAWRENCE/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Available Now RECKLESS ISOLATION What to do when you’ve been preparing to achieve perfect scores in the upcoming World Surf League Championship Tour only to find the season canceled due to a pandemic?

For Californian pro surfer Kolohe Andino and his friends in 2020, the solution was to score perfect waves of a different kind, heading to remote Indonesia to ride gorgeously empty swells and reconnect with the essence of what surfing is all about. redbull.com

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THE RED BULLETIN

Calendar

21

January X GAMES Since she was six years old, snowboarder Maddie Mastro (pictured) has been hot on the tail of her halfpipe rival, Chloe Kim, in competition. The results at last year’s X Games were no different, with Mastro coming in second after Kim. But Mastro has always had a few tricks up her sleeve, including being the first woman to master a double crippler in competition. Watch the excitement unfold in Aspen thru January 23; xgames.com

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TOM MONTEROSSO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

January NATURAL SELECTION TOUR Last year, pro snowboarder Travis Rice set out to create a new kind of competition, where hand-picked athletes battle for the title of world’s best allaround snowboarder.

“Snowboarding has been heading in this direction for nearly 50 years,” Rice said of his series, which combines freestyle tricks and freeriding artistry.

This year’s first stop is Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on January 24, followed by Baldface Lodge in British Columbia (February 21) and Alaska's Tordrillo Mountains (March 21).

For updates on where to watch, visit natural selectiontour.com

THE RED BULLETIN

Available Now LONG DAYS The beauty and elegance of freeskiing has been perfectly captured through countless highproduction snow films. Sometimes perhaps too perfectly. For this one, Austrian director Fabi Hyden wanted something more real; the title references the intensive hours that go into making one of these films. “Some days, the crew starts touring at 1 a.m. to ski lines at sunrise,” Hyden says, “or stays out till dark to shoot sunset sessions.” Long Days features pro riders from the Legs of Steel ski collective, including American Ahmet Dadali, with each athlete individually mic’d up, and the real-time 4K footage includes zero slo-mo. The result, says the filmmaker, is “raw and back to the roots of freeskiing.” redbull.com

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The breathable Candide C1 Jacket 3L is ready to keep you warm and dry in the backcountry.

ADVENTURE IS IN THE AIR

Resort chairlifts aren’t the only routes to winter fun. Self-propelled rambles via boots, cross-country skis or snowshoes let you appreciate nature’s starkest season—without the crowds. Equip yourself for DIY adventure with these snow-day must-haves.

Words KELLY BASTONE

G U I D E

W I N T E R

CANDIDE C1 JACKET 3L

Pro freeskier Candide Thovex designed the three-layer C1 for backcountry hiking and ski touring: An innovative, breathable membrane made of bio-based and recycled polyester delivers a 20k/20k waterproofing rating, meaning that stormwater won’t seep through.

Even smartphones ride in style, thanks to an insulated and padded media pocket. The fit is roomy yet efficient enough for the backcountry. $649; candide.co

SPY HELM TECH

These sunnies’ side shields protect your eyes by blocking retina-searing light on snowfields and alpine lakes. Gullies in the rubber nose pads dissipate sweat, and SPY’s proprietary Happy lens tint heightens contrast. Après adventure, you can snap off the side shields for a more urban look, without impacting the optical quality: These tapered polycarbonate lenses imitate the eye’s own curvature to deliver sharp clarity. $190; spyoptic.com

G E A R

STIO SKILLET STRETCH DOWN HOODED JACKET

ARTILECT BOULDER 125 CREW

Sewn baffles often are rigid and confining, but the stretchy Skillet uses stitchless channels and doubleweave nylon with spandex to give wearers freedom of movement when hoisting a backpack or reaching for bootlaces. Responsibly sourced 650-fill goose down is treated with a bluesignapproved water-repellent finish. And the cozy hood integrates a high collar to seal in heat on windy ridges or frigid sidewalks. $399; stio.com

Merino wool is a marvel, with two caveats: It’s easily abraded and slow to dry. Artilect solves both problems with Nuyarn fabric, made by spinning superfine merino around a core of bluesign-approved nylon. That backbone improves dry times and durability, while the wool stretches and breathes. It also foils odor: Here’s a shirt you can wear on long flights and snowshoe treks. Flatlock seams mean no chafing under a backpack. $95; artilect.studio

NIXON REGULUS EXPEDITION

KINCO HYDROFLECTOR SKYLINER

Yes, it tells the time. This updated favorite also displays altitude, compass directions and ambient temperature; in “camp mode,” it issues weather alerts while you’re off-grid, so you you’ll never again be fooled by the sunny sucker hole.

It’s simpler to use than cloud-based trackers, and you don’t have to charge it pre-trip (the battery lasts two years). It’s also comfy, with a soft silicone band and free-range hinge that adapts to wrists big and small. $250; nixon.com

Stretchy soft-shell fabric around the wrists reduces bulk and helps these waterproofed grain buffalo leather do-it-all gloves play nicely with virtually any jacket sleeve, from wide cuffs to snug fleeces. Thin foam padding protects the knuckles during chores, and synthetic insulation laminated to the lining delivers both warmth and dexterity: It’s cozy enough for midwinter hikes but supple enough to adjust bindings or open zippers. $74; ski.kinco.com

The Nixon Regulus Expedition watch is a sophisticated (and comfy) weather-tracking tool.

THE RED BULLETIN

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G U I D E

BLACK DIAMOND ACCESS SPIKE

Where crampons are overkill, slip on these microspikes. Their soft rubber uppers conform to running shoes and hiking boots. Underfoot, 14 heat-treated stainless steel teeth distribute the pressure of each step and allow for a natural stride. The 8-mm-long spikes cling to rock, ice and compacted snow, making them ideal for running routes and trails where hiker traffic polishes the snow into a treacherously slick bobsled chute. $75; blackdiamondequipment.com

FISCHER OUTBACK 68 CROWN SKIS Wide enough for off-trail exploring but not so wide that they feel clunky when striding, these waxless cross-country skis feature Fischer’s new trail sidecut, which improves flotation and preserves tracking on straightaways. Steel edges offer security on hard-packed snow, and graduated scales on the bases maximize grip without compromising glide. On steeps, clip the optional Easy Skins to the bases for more traction. $299; fischersports.com

ATLAS HELIUM-MTN SNOWSHOES

Clawing at buckled bindings can be a pain, so Atlas fitted these lightweight snowshoes with Boa’s closure: Just turn the knob to tighten, or pull on it to loosen the foot-wrapping silicone.

The deck features a composite material that’s light but rigid enough for sidehilling, and aluminum traction teeth bite into packed snow and ice. A heel lifter supports the foot (and rests calves) on steep slopes, making this ideal for summit bids. $220; atlassnowshoe.com

LOWA RENEGADE EVO ICE

Winter tweaks the requirements for hiking boots: You need a higher cuff to keep out snow, insulation to keep feet warm (but not sweaty) and an outsole that’s optimized (like snow tires) for traction on ice. This boot delivers on all counts, with Vibram’s Arctic Grip Trac for traction on ice and Gore-Tex Partelana, which backs the waterproof/breathable membrane with a cozy insulating layer. Result? A boot that’s warm but sporty. $300; lowaboots.com

The Atlas Helium-MTN snowshoes use a Boa closure so you don’t have to fiddle with buckles.

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THE RED BULLETIN

FARM TO FEET PORTLAND CREW

Optimized for high-output winter sports, these socks limit the padding so feet maintain sensitivity and a precise connection with your boots. The forefoot is made of thin, arch-hugging merino that’s U.S.-grown (and blended with 39 percent nylon and 3 percent spandex). Moderate cushioning under the toes and heels provides insulation, and seamless construction heads off blisters. Ventilation channels wick sweat toward the cuff. $21; farmtofeet.com

The Deuter Freescape Lite is built for serious multisport winter adventure.

DEUTER FREESCAPE LITE 26

This lightweight daypack doesn’t discriminate between modes of winter transport: It smartly carries a snowboard, skis, snowshoes or crampons, while shedding snow and ice; the water-repelling finish on the recycled fabric is PFC-free. Avalanche gear can ride in a dedicated compartment. A helmet sling stows your brain bucket away from the pack’s openings for easy access, and the sunglass holder on one shoulder strap is ultra-convenient. $175; deuter.com

UNCHARTED SUPPLY CO. ATHENA

Cold is like kryptonite to your car battery, but this brick-sized power bank saves the day if your adventure ends at a car that won’t start.

Athena can jump-start a car 15 times on one charge and prevents sparking if you mismatch the cables and battery terminals. Three built-in LED bulbs let you use it as a flashlight to brighten a hatchback or engine compartment, and yes—it can charge your smartphone and laptop. $139; unchartedsupplyco.com

G U I D E

RAISING THE BAR Elevate your cocktail game with these quality tools.

Words PETER FLAX

OXO STEEL ANGLED JIGGER

A jigger is a simple but critical tool for a bartender—an easy way to measure liquor into a shaker or mixing glass. This striking piece is hardly fancy, but many seasoned bartenders swear by it. The nontraditional shape makes it easy to read measurements from the top or from an angle, and it’s more stable than most jiggers.

Measurements are marked for ounces and tablespoons; a clear plastic version, which is less stylish to leave out on your bar, also measures milliliters. $8; oxo.com

MOFADO CLASSIC CRYSTAL WHISKEY GLASSES

If you have serious interest in quality whiskey— or any cocktail at home in a rocks glass—you owe it to yourself to have serious glassware.

These ultra-clear, handblown glasses have heft—each one holds 12 ounces, weighs more than a pound and is extra wide to hold oversize ice balls. And the design oozes timelessness; don’t blame us if you find yourself dressing up for a living-room nightcap. $25 (set of two); mofado.com

CHEF’N FRESHFORCE CITRUS JUICER

HELLA COCKTAIL FIVE-FLAVOR BITTERS BAR SET

KORIKO COPPER-PLATED SHAKING TINS

W&P CLEAR ICE MOLD

The world of bitters (botanical preparations that balance out the sweet and sour of many drinks) is big these days, so getting a variety pack is smart—and less expensive than buying a bunch of larger bottles. This set—which includes 1.7-ounce bottles of small-batch aromatic, citrus, orange, smoked chili and ginger bitters—is good enough for pro bartenders but packaged for aspiring cocktail hobbyists. $35; hellacocktail.co 92

Experts say that if you want to make drinks like a pro, use a two-piece Boston shaker like this beauty from Cocktail Kingdom. Bartenders say this set—which is weighted so it’s unlikely to fall over—seals perfectly every time, releases easily and has the right balance when you’re shaking a cocktail. We like the classic vibe of the copper finish, but you can also buy the tins in a goldplated, black matte or stainless steel finish. $36; cocktailkingdom.com

Ask any good bartender: Fresh-squeezed juice is essential to making perfect cocktails.

And this citrus tool is beloved by the pros.

It has an innovative gear mechanism at the hinge that reduces hand strain and is perfectly sized for lemons and limes. The unit is made of heavy-duty plastic—it weighs more than a pound—and has an unpainted metal cup that presses down on the fruit. Available in three cheery colors. $28; chefn.com

Purists know that a perfect ice cube can elevate a great cocktail to an extraordinary one. If you’re truly ready to pursue transcendence, consider this single-cube mold from W&P. It’s not small (almost 6 inches tall) and requires 24 hours to make a single cube, but the steel-based silicone mold will freeze a showstopping 2-inch cube from the top down in a manner that captures any bubbles or impurities in the base. $35; wandpdesign.com THE RED BULLETIN

Nude says its Big Top line is inspired by the aesthetic of the circus. We say the ultra-thin glassware is fun to hold.

NUDE BIG TOP HIGHBALL SET

Are these ultra-thin highball glasses from contemporary cult-favorite glassware brand NUDE modern or traditional—or both? That’s a question to ponder as you sip your special handmade cocktail and mull over the pleasant tactile feel of the raised linear pattern on each glass. NUDE says the aesthetic of its Big Top line is inspired by the artistry of the circus; we say the shape of the inward-sloped base is pretty playful. $59 (four 11.5-oz glasses); us.nudeglass.com

A N ATO M Y O F G E A R Don’t let the throwback design fool you—this mirrorless camera has plenty of new-school tech under the hood. Words PETER FLAX

NIKON Z FC $960 body only; from $1,100 with lens nikonusa.com

RETRO CHIC

The styling evokes Nikon’s iconic FE and FM film cameras, with mechanical controls, engraved and precision-carved aluminum dials, and a circular viewfinder.

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TRUE COLORS If the classic black leatherette body doesn’t excite you, for an extra $100 you can get the Z fc in mint green, pink, white, gray, beige or amber brown.

THE RED BULLETIN

G U I D E

WIDER MOUNT

The revolutionary Z mount is wider than options from any comparable camera system. Nikon claims this translates into better performance and image quality in low light.

LEGIT PERFORMANCE

O N -T H E - G O POWER

The Z fc can handle burst shooting up to 11 frames per second with full autofocus.

And the 20.9 MP sensor allows you to shoot highresolution pictures and video in low light.

The Z fc has a USB socket on its side to charge the battery or power the camera directly. And when paired with a smartphone, the camera can seamlessly install firmware.

MOVING PICTURES

The Z fc shoots oversampled 4K video with no crop and fulltime eye-detection autofocus. In other words, your videos will have excellent color and resolution.

SCREEN TIME

The vari-angle touch screen can flip forward for vlogging or selfies, rotate halfway for lowangle shots, or fold away so the camera looks screenless.

THE RED BULLETIN

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GLOBAL TEAM Head of The Red Bulletin Alexander Müller-Macheck, Sara Car-Varming (deputy) Editors-in-Chief Andreas Rottenschlager, Andreas Wollinger (deputy) Creative Directors Erik Turek, Kasimir Reimann (deputy) Art Directors Marion Bernert-Thomann, Miles English, Tara Thompson Designers Martina de ­Carvalho-Hutter, Kevin Faustmann-Goll, Cornelia Gleichweit Photo Editors Eva Kerschbaum (manager), Marion Batty (deputy), Susie Forman, Tahira Mirza, Rudi Übelhör Digital Editors Christian Eberle-Abasolo (manager), Marie-Maxime Dricot, Melissa Gordon, Lisa Hechenberger, Elena Rodriguez Angelina Head of Audio Florian Obkircher Special Projects Arkadiusz Piatek Managing Editors Ulrich Corazza, Marion Lukas-Wildmann Publishing Management Ivona Glibusic, Bernhard Schmied, Melissa Stutz, Anna Wilczek Managing Director Stefan Ebner Head of Media Sales & Partnerships Lukas Scharmbacher Head of Co-Publishing Susanne Degn-Pfleger Project Management Co-Publishing, B2B Marketing & Communication Katrin Sigl (manager), Mathias Blaha, Katrin Dollenz, Thomas Hammerschmied, Teresa Kronreif (B2B), Eva Pech, Valentina Pierer, Stefan Portenkirchner (communication), Jennifer Silberschneider Creative Services Verena Schörkhuber-Zöhrer (manager), Sara Wonka, Julia Bianca Zmek, Edith Zöchling-Marchart Commercial Management Co-Publishing Alexandra Ita Editorial Co-Publishing Raffael Fritz (manager), Gundi Bittermann, Mariella Reithoffer, Wolfgang Wieser Executive Creative Director Markus Kietreiber Senior Manager Creative Elisabeth Kopanz Art Direction Commercial & Co-Publishing Peter Knehtl (manager), Erwin Edtmayer, Simone Fischer, Martina Maier, Andreea Parvu, Carina Schaittenberger, Alexandra Schendl, Julia Schinzel, Florian Solly, Dominik Uhl, Sophie Weidinger, Stephan Zenz Subscriptions and Distribution Peter Schiffer (manager), Marija Althajm, Nicole Glaser, Victoria Schwärzler, Yoldaş Yarar Advertising Manuela Brandstätter, Monika Spitaler Production Veronika Felder (manager), Friedrich Indich, Walter O. Sádaba, Sabine Wessig Repro Clemens Ragotzky (manager), Claudia Heis, Nenad Isailović, Sandra Maiko Krutz, Josef Mühlbacher Finance Mariia Gerutska (manager), Simone Kratochwil, Klaus Pleninger MIT Christoph Kocsisek, Michael Thaler IT Service Desk Maximilian Auerbach Operations Alice Gafitanu, Melanie Grasserbauer, Alexander Peham, Thomas Platzer Assistant to General Management Sandra Artacker Project Management Dominik Debriacher, Gabriela-Teresa Humer Editor and CEO Andreas Kornhofer Editorial office Am Grünen Prater 3, A-1020 Vienna Phone +43 1 90221-0 Web redbulletin.com Published by Red Bull Media House GmbH, Oberst-Lepperdinger-Straße 11–15, A-5071 Wals bei Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700 Executive Directors Dkfm. Dietrich Mateschitz, Dietmar Otti, Christopher Reindl, Marcus Weber

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On October 15, 2021, 30-year-old Canadian mountain biker Brandon Semenuk became the first person to nab back-to-back wins at Red Bull Rampage in Virgin, Utah. As if that weren’t enough of an accomplishment, he also become the first person to win the prestigious freeriding event four times. After a crash during his first run, Semenuk pulled out all the stops for round two, where he landed a flat drop tail-whip—another first in Rampage history—and stunned viewers with a flawless run bursting with technical prowess and airborne artistry. Rampage, meet your GOAT.

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The next issue of THE RED BULLETIN is out on February 15.

THE RED BULLETIN

BARTOSZ WOLINSKI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

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