The Red Bulletin_0511_ROI by Red Bull Media House

Bootsy Collins / Brian Cross / Ryan Doyle / Björn Dunkerbeck / Bob Dylan / Ivan Lendl / Lisi Osl

EUR 3,50

May 2011

an almost independent monthly magazine

wild west

ireland's extreme surfing scene

STATUESQUE!

Red bull cLIFF DIVING ON EASTER ISLAND

PLANE INSANE

DUBLIN GOES CRAZY FOR RED BULL FLUGTAG

Available with

The Irish Times

BROGAN DREAMS The footballer of the year is stirring Dublin's sleeping giants

Bullhorn

Walk on the Wild Side

Cover Photography: Chris Floyd. Photography: Carlos Serrao

Spider-Man knows how it feels. Batman, too, and Superman, Catwoman… pretty much any super-hero you care to mention, in fact, knows what it’s like to scurry at will across the rooftops of a city, leaping from chimneystack to window-ledge and look down at the hoi-polloi. How small and distant their little lives must feel. How routine, how ordinary. Such are the privileges of superherodom. But they’re gifted, too, to the freerunning likes of Tim ‘Livewire’ Shieff, Ryan Doyle, Luci ’Steel’ Romberg and Pamela Obiniana, who, it might be argued, are the real-life equivalents of comic book legends. How so? Well they can perform single-arm handstands from roof-top edges. They can backflip from 4.5m-high concrete wall, to pavement, with balletic ease (most of the time – freerunners do occasionally ‘eat’ floor); they can run forward, on flat ground, then straight up the vertical block in front, Buster Keaton-style. It’s almost enough to make a mortal feel, well, beyond human and Shieff, unofficial freerunning world champion, admits as much in our fascinating reportage of the Red Bull Art of Motion event at London’s South Bank: “I’m not Superman,” he says, “but it can feel like it. It’s about freeing your mind, so there’s no right or wrong, no rules. Whether you’re jumping between rooftops or leaping park railings, you get to live in the moment. Time slows and you don’t care about anything else.” And if that’s not enough to make you feel a little bit heroic, what is?

Parkour life: Ryan Doyle led the charge at Red Bull Art of Motion at London’s South Bank, the spiritual home of freerunning. See page 30

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welcome to the world of Red Bull

Inside your all-action Red Bulletin this month

Bullevard 16 HERE IS THE NEWS Recent history and crystal balls 19 ME AND MY BODY Björn Dunkerbeck, multiple windsurfing world champ, despite harpooning his foot 20 Brian Cross The man with the ‘B+’ handle is really more of an A* artist, now big in the USA 22 KIT BAG Back in the day, NASCAR race cars looked even faster than they went. They were wild 24 WINNING FORMULA Flyweight mountain-biker Lisi Osl knows it’s about what you do leave in the locker 26 THE BROTHERS POU No ropes, just grip and technique for these two mountain masters

27 where’s your head at? Bob Dylan, perhaps a man with more ideas than hairs upstairs 28 Lucky numbers The Cannes Film Festival: where you won’t find ‘movies by numbers’

Action 30 red bull aRT OF MOTION The city reimagined. Modern-day urban superheroes run free in London 42 BERNARD BROGAN Our cover star is the man with Dublin’s football hopes locked into his lace-ups 50 RED BULL CLIFF DIVING Easter Island is the spectacular setting for the opening round of the 2011 world series 56 old balls, please Arthritis be damned: tennis masters of yore show the young bucks a few tricks 64 MICKEY SMITH One man’s obsession with the deadly beauty of Ireland’s west coast surf 72 sprays of our lives The new generation of street artists and their mural masterworks 06

contents

More Body & Mind 84 travel: Hicksville Hidden away in California’s Mojave Desert is a caravan park with a difference

Photography: Chris Floyd, Red Bull Content Pool, RUtger Pauw, RV Photo, Peter Sutherland, Imago Sportfoto

86 GET THE GEAR From sky wing to bombproof sunnies. All you’ll need to fly (and run) the Alps 87 pro tips Max Nagl reveals the training secrets he hopes will bring him a Moto-X ‘1’ this year 88 kitchen drama Presenting not only a world-acclaimed chef, but a curio of a dish from Ghana 90 world’s best clubs To the Bosporus, for exclusive after-hours Istanbul. Followed by tripe soup… 91 wild beaSts A band who recommend chocolate and red wine with their smooch-tastic tunes 92 take 5 Everything Everything tell us, well, almost everything about their musical inspiration 94 THE LIST Because we know that you can’t do everything, this is our guide to the global essentials 96 save the date Out and about this month? Ink these into your diary right now The usual 08 Kainrath’s calendar 10 pictures of the month 98 mind’s eye

out now Our second strike

the Red Bulletin’s NEW iPad app with

Loads of Videos! From May 12 on redbulletin.com/iPad

illustration: dietmar kainrath

K a i n r at h

sprints into action. and keeps on going. fits i n s

port you s sh r orts

When you’re working out, it’s good to have extra gas in your tank. Which is where a Red Bull Energy Shot comes in. Its compact size and 60ml volume means you can easily tuck it into a shorts pocket or training jacket. And with no carbonation and no need to chill you

can carry, and use it, just about anywhere. Red Bull Energy Shots aren’t designed for re-hydration, but they deliver energy in just a few sips, helping you all the way to your warm down. It’s concentrated energy from Red Bull.

the only shot that gives you wings.

haugastøl , Norway

hard day’s kite Q: What’s the hardest thing about snow kiting? A: There’s something easy about snow kiting? At Red Bull Ragnarok, more than 100 brave souls – some on skis, others on snowboards, all with kites more traditionally used on water – went through a truly demanding day on the slopes. The winning kiter, local boy Bjørn Kaupang, posted a time of two hours 57 minutes, which seems pretty good for five laps of an 8.7-mile course. But the actual distance he and the other finishers covered was closer to 100 miles because a snow kiter has to tack back and forth to travel upwind, in the same way that a sailor keeps his boat moving. Many entrants were caught out at the start by unexpected high winds, which meant their kites were too large for the conditions. The going got rough, but the tough got going. Watch footage for this race at en.redbulletin.com/ragnarok

Photography: dan vojtech/Red Bull Content Pool

Alanganallur , INDIA

pink bull

We’re not unused to a few brightly coloured bulls around these parts, but the pretty pastels and happy faces in this picture are a little misleading. This is jallikattu, an Indian bull-taming sport that takes place in festivals held annually throughout the Tamil Nadu state from January to July. Tradition holds that ‘matadors’ must quell the specially reared pulikulam bulls – noted for their innate aggression – without weapons or bloodshed, although events don’t always turn out like that either for the animals or their putative tamers. Jallikattu is said to be one of the world’s oldest surviving ‘ancient sports’ (cave paintings depicting it date back at least 1,500 years) and despite protests from animal rights lobbyists, it continues to this day. And the bright colours? Purely for show. The bulls’ sharpened horns are rather less decorative… More sacred cows at www.palanimohan.com

Photography: Palani Mohan/getty images

Photography: Luke Aikins/Red Bull Content Pool

Las vegas , USA

live and let Dive For someone hurtling backwards through the air at around 120mph, Mike Swanson looks pretty relaxed. But then it’s an average day in the troposphere for the American, a Red Bull Airforce skydiver and one of the world’s leading freeflyers. Freeflying is an extreme form of skydiving, in which the plucky plummeter travels faster by changing positions during descent. Swanson is on his way to giving more than 140,000 NASCAR fans something more to cheer during the opening ceremony of the Sam’s Town 300 race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Fellow Airforce member Luke Aikins was on camera duty and the record shows that Swanson popped both smoke canisters and chute at the correct moments, and executed a perfect landing. Videos and more at www.redbullairforce.com

Bullevard Sporting endeavours and cultural excellence from around the world

Uberacers

Two wheels or four, off-road or on track: these are the multitaskers of motorsport

Kimi Räikkönen The 2007 F1 champ rallies and is now going to the US of A. F1

WRC

NASCAR

John surtees Still the only winner of world titles in both bikes and cars. Bike F1 Touring Car

Johnny Cecotto Six years’ grands prix on the bikes; three in F2; two in F1. Bike

Touring Car

For the sake of funk Bootsy Collins is back, still sporting the best eyewear in music, with a new album featuring Snoop Dogg and Jimi Hendrix James Brown’s bassist as a teenager, Willam ‘Bootsy’ Collins later put the bounce in George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic beat, while also forging his own star billing with Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Though never quiet – recent odd projects have including a Christmas album – he’s back in the groove with star-packed Tha Funk Capitol Of The World. On the track Freedumb, you say we’re ‘living in the world of freedumb cos intelligence is so expensive’. That’s about us having all these smartphones but still making dumb decisions concerning peace, loving, sharing. Today you get all these killings, gangs. They just stopped making Guitar Hero ’cos all these killing games make more money. Who would play you in Bootsy: The Movie? Snoop. He’d have to learn some basslines, some moves, but he’s got the personality. He’s already got done up in my gear we’re gonna release a video of that. www.bootsycollins.com

Juan-pablo Montoya Race wins across five classes: IndyCar, Grand-AM and... CART

NASCAR

dieter Quester Still driving touring cars aged 70; has also raced on water. Boats

Touring Car

PICTURES OF THE MONTH

every shot on target

Email your pictures with a Red Bull flavour to letters@redbulletin.com. Every one we print wins a pair of adidas Sennheiser PMX 680 Sports headphones. With fully sweat- and water-resistant parts, they’re perfect for sports. www.sennheiser.co.uk

Doha No sand in the gears of the 60 quads racing in the Red Bull Qaher El Tou3ouss in Qatar. Jonathan Le Marchand

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the little questions

Arttu Pihlainen Red Bull Crashed Ice World Champion

Red Bull Flugtags to date. The 100th is at Dún Laoghaire, south of Dublin, at 1pm on May 22. Full details: page 96

The Finnish gym teacher, 29, beat 522 other ice cross downhill racers to become the leading man of 2011

Words: Steve Yates, Ulrich Corazza, Werner Jessner. photography: Action Images (2), Getty Images (3), Sutton Images (1), New York Red Bulls (1), Red Bull Content Pool (7), Daniel Kolodin/Red Bull Crashed Ice (2)

So Lionel Messi came to the U18 training... When Sean Davis, a midfielder for the New York Red Bulls’ Under-18 side, watched FC Barcelona playing Getafe on TV, he couldn’t have foreseen that four days later he would be on the same pitch as Lionel Messi himself. To prepare for their friendly against the USA, the Argentinian national team invited the U18s to the New York Giants’ Timex Performance Centre for a joint training session. “You see it on TV and you see how they do it and they make it look easy,” Davis says. “And then you play against them and it’s just incredible how fast they move, how simple they keep it and how they can just dominate us so easily. I tried to be as professional as I could, but I was in awe.” Bryan Gallego, Davis’s captain, also (of course) impressed by Messi’s speed and reading of the game, was not expecting the 2009 and 2010 world player of the year to be so gracious. “He’s quiet, very humble, just a soccer player. What he’s like on the field is just him.” And did he pass advice, as well as the ball? “A little,” Gallego continues. “Mainly that playing quick is the best way to play the game.” www.redbulls.com

Havanna No bat required at Red Bull 4Skinas, a version of street baseball. Sergio Gonzalez Ferrer

Sign a lot of autographs? I gave up counting after a while: awesome fun. Feeling the burn? It gets tougher every year. The older I get, the more I have to train, too. What skates do you use? They’re called BandyBlades. Longer and fatter than you might think, but they keep me steady and are great over jumps.

Your dream opponents? Ice-hockey legend Teemu Selänne, ski-jumper Thomas Morgenstern and the sprinter Usain Bolt. What’s missing from Red Bull Crashed Ice? We need more training courses and more races. But in general, I think that the sport is moving forward in the right way. The best place for it? I love Quebec. It’s steeper and longer than any other course. The fans are crazy, they really get into it. www.redbullcrashedice.com

Big Finnish: Arttu Pihlainen wins ahead of Canadian brothers Kyle and Scott Croxall

London Mark Ronson (centre) gives As to the Qs at a Red Bull Music Academy Info Session. Steve Howse

Pelion Only in Greece: the ass leg of the Red Bull Donkey Cross race (enduro bikes followed). Samo Vidic 17

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Can ROI continue in the manner that saw Wales beaten 3-0?

Alastair Seeley (34) at 2010’s North West 200

The historic North West 200 is no longer held in the northwest, or even run over 200 miles (the longest category race is run over 54 miles: six laps of a nine-mile course), but on May 21, more than 100,000 fans will line public roads to watch Ireland’s largest outdoor sporting event. The name isn’t all wrong, though: some of the bikes can reach speeds of up to 200mph. The last Irish winner was Raymond Porter, in the 600cc class event in 2005. www.northwest200.org

The hills are alive

The West Wicklow Roar is a multisport race that attracts former Olympians and amateur athletes alike to the striking scenery of Ireland’s east coast. But there’s no time for sightseeing. Hundreds of competitors battle it out by kayaking, cycling and off-road running their way to the finish, with expert entrants covering more than 50km in just three hours. The action unfolds on May 28. www.roar.ie

Moscow Rustam Gelmanov demonstrates a smashing grab during a climbing exhibtion. Daniel Kolodin

The Biggest Match Irelands clash in the Carling Nations Cup

If, for all Irish soccer fans, there is one game in the Carling Nations Cup that ranks above all others, that’s understandable. The match between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland on May 24 is only the 10th soccer match between the countries, and the first since a friendly at Lansdowne Road in 1999, which the away side won 1-0. The south leads the north 3-2 overall, with four draws. Euro 2012 qualifying results suggest that it’s Giovanni Trapattoni who will be commiserating with Nigel Worthington at the final whistle handshake. Regardless, the match is keenly anticipated. “It’s something the fans are connecting with,” says Fran Whearty, spokesman for the FAI. “The tournament has a ‘home nations’ feel. We’re expecting good crowds for these next games.” Wales play Scotland on May 25, the day after the Irelands match. If Wales and Northern Ireland lose those respective games, then their match on May 27 will be for the wooden spoon. The last game of the tournament, then, could well be the decider: Republic of Ireland vs Scotland on May 29. Tickets and more: www.fai.ie

Melbourne When it was said a new Red Bull Racing car would be unveiled, it was sort of true. Chris Polack

Edinburgh Danny MacAskill placed big trust in this fellow bike trickster – and his helmet, wisely. Richard Bisset

Words: Ruth Morgan, Paul Wilson. Photography: PACEMAKER/CLIFFORD MCLEAN (1), INPHO (1), www.actionphotography.ie (2), www.ahoganphoto.com (1)

Wheels of fire

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me and my body

Björn Dunkerbeck This man is 41 years old and a windsurfing world champion 40 times over. Who says shooting yourself in the foot is a bad thing?

Fit Across The Board

There’s no one part of the body that’s more impor tant than others when it comes to windsurfing; it’s a complete body workout. Your legs take the strain when you control the board; you train your arms and upper body so that you can control the sail. The good thing is, the stronger you are, the better you can surf. But I don’t go to the gym very often.

Heav y Metal For The Brain

Windsurfing is the best mental training there is. You’re out there on the water alone, just you and the waves – a wonderful experience every time. Before a competition I try to limber up well and concentrate. I only listen to music once the contest’s over. It’s no longer a secret that my preference is for AC/DC and Metallica.

Heav y Drin ki ng On Th e Plan e

Mountains Of Variety

When I’m not on my board, I go cycling and mountain biking. Also, Piz Corvatsch, my local mountain in Switzerland, is a great place to go snowboarding in winter: it’s a great workout for the legs. But for those who can’t bear to be away from the water, I’d recommend stand-up paddle boarding. It’s good for your sense of balance.

Words: Andreas Rottenschlager. Photography: marco rossi

Slap In The Face

Minor injuries every windsurfer has to put up with include sprained ligaments (because you’ve always got your feet stuck in the straps on the board), bruises from getting hit by the wishbone boom (I’ve had those everywhere: the nose; the eye; the chin) and little cuts from the fins. But hey, a surfer’s got to put up with it.

not ready, bad aim , do

As someone who’s been going round the world for years, I’ve amassed a few travel tips. Number one: drink a lot of water, including during the flight. Number two: try to sleep on the pla ne. Set yourself to local time when you arr ive and don’t go straight to bed. Number three: eat healthily. It may sound ban al, but it’s incredibly important for long journeys.

Meat Me After Wo rk

within I take care to keep my weight stable, and 6ft a range of 5lb. Right now I’m 16st 2lb on I eat 2in tall. During the competitive seas Once light food: fish, vegetables and rice. a into tuck will I way, the of the season’s out st good T-bone steak. I’ve got nothing again you buy chocolate, either: it’s fine as long as of it. the quality stuff and don’t eat too much

n’t fire

do with windsurfing. My worst injury had nothing to when I was out foot I shot a harpoon into my left ft of the harpoon sha the tied We’d 2. fishing in 200 y was hit by a big buo to a buoy with a rope, but the the trigger and, on er fing my had wave while I still se, though. wor n wham! Things could have bee e I might rwis othe , foot my hit I was lucky it only the wound feel still I . have ended up as shark food e quickly mor h muc tired gets foot today. My left n. ofte e and needs to be massaged mor

Low Back Rolls Roll Back Years As you get older, your body gets stiffer. To those over 30, I can’t recommend yoga strongly enough. I don’t go to classes, but I have done yoga exercises frequently for the last 15 years. Yoga helps you stay flexible and speeds up recovery times. I also spend quite a lot of time stretching before a competition. It’s true that you can never do too much yoga, but you can do it wrong. Björn again: www.dunkerbeck.com

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Freestyle Framed

Brian Cross

From Mos Def to Madlib, they all said ‘cheeeese’ to Brian Cross, AKA B+. Even if not all of them smiled, the Irish photographer got most of the west coast’s hip-hop heroes in front of his camera

Picture this: B+ lives in LA and runs production company Mochilla (Spanish for ‘backpack’) with business partner Eric Coleman

“Some things you simply can’t find out from buying records on eBay. So get off the damn internet, get away from the blogs and engage with the people who make the music”

With all your recent video projects, would it be fair to say that change in technology had an impact on you? Definitely. But also the internet was a big informing part of the process. It was like, ‘OK, we can make this movie 10 minutes long and now we can put it somewhere so that everybody can check it out.’ That was the original idea for Keepintime in 2001. In the end, the fact that its running time was around 13 minutes at that time seemed far too long for the internet – streaming technology wasn’t that advanced yet. So we ended up taking it to film festivals instead, and doing that launched our careers. What cameras do you use these days? At the moment it’s the Canon 5D. I used it on the short films I made on the Distant Relatives project [Nas & Damian Marley] in Jamaica, for instance. For stills I still use the Hasselblad 500C. You go on all these trips that you turn into movies afterwards, such as travelling to São Paulo with DJs to meet Brazilian drummers. How do you prepare for these kinds of adventures? The most important thing is to let go. Experience the place, get rid of all the preconceptions. Some things you simply can’t find out from buying records on eBay. So get off the damn internet, get away from the blogs. Use them for research, fine, but save up some money and engage with the people who make the music. Type in ‘B+’ at www.redbullmusicacademy.com for exclusive interviews, videos and more

Words: Florian Obkircher. Photography: B+ (4), Paul McCarthy (1)

Among B+’s iconic record covers are Welcome To Jamrock (Damian Marley), Quality Control (Jurassic 5), Shades Of Blue (Madlib) and Endtroducing (DJ Shadow)

In 1990 a Limerick-born boy went to Los Angeles to study photography. But instead of spending the money he had saved on equipment, Brian Cross spent it on hiphop records. The young artist explored the nightlife with his camera and met the key players of the west coast scene at that time – from N.W.A to Blackalicious. In 1993 Cross’s first book was published. It’s Not About A Salary: Rap, Race And Resistance In Los Angeles is now considered a milestone in hip-hop photography and made him a protagonist in the business, known by the name of B+. He went on to shoot DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing record cover alongside many other now legendary hip-hop portraits. In the last few years, moving image has become his other passion, focusing on “finding a way to talk about the past through music of the present”, as B+ puts it. And considering his projects such as Keepintime, a live video in which legendary funk drummers and LA’s most talented turntablists collaborate, or his recent three-part concert movie series, Timeless, which documents an orchestra reinterpreting the music of Mulatu Astatke, J Dilla and Arthur Verocai, B+ is doing quite well shining lights in places that otherwise wouldn’t get a glance. Do you plan your shoots? Not really, I do some research and prepare a few ideas in case the vibe is stiff. But generally I’m the person who leaves it up to improvisation. So your legendary Endtroducing cover was a product of coincidence, too? Partially. Josh [DJ Shadow] had pretty much sketched it out, and he had picked the location. My contribution was the panorama thing. It was a mistake that the foreground was out of focus though, and once we got the film back it was obvious which picture was the winner. Did you ever feel weird trying to capture music with stills? Yeah, there’ve been many times over the years where we’ve been standing there with a still camera and thought, ‘If I had a video camera now I’d be doing so much better.’ But the point was it took a long time for the technology to catch up.

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Hard & fast

Top performers and winning ways from around the globe

Words: Ruth Morgan. Photography: Dean Treml/Red Bull Cliff Diving (1), Bob McCaffrey (1), Getty images (2), Ian Cross/Halo BDS (1). Illustration: Dietmar Kainrath

Polyeshchuk Colombia’s Orlando Duque beat Slave stop two on the of Ukraine (left) and GB’s Gary Hunt at an, Mexico. Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in Yucat

sonar so GOOD

The Spanish music festival among world’s best It’s the music festival that’s also a city break, giving fans the chance to enjoy some of the world’s best electronica with no need for wellies. “Sonar has become the pinnacle of progressive electronic music across the board,” says UK DJ and producer Gerard Roberts, aka Kidkanevil, who’s on this year’s bill. “And Barcelona’s such an amazing place: you can’t go wrong.” Underworld, M.I.A. and Aphex Twin headline this year, but the festival also gives a platform to the headliners of tomorrow on its Red Bull Music Academy Presents Sonar Dome stage. “The Academy is like Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory for musicians,” says Kidkanevil, “and the stage represents that, with lots of up-and-coming different sounds.” He will be joined by south London singer-songwriter of the moment Katy B, on a roll after two top-10 singles in the UK, and French house/techno duo Discodeine.

Three-time Dakar champ Marc Coma of Spain won the motorcycling at the 2011 Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge.

From June 16-18. Ticket and full line-up info: 2011.sonar.es/en

After his victory at the Mal aysian Grand Prix, Red Bull Racing’s Sebast ian Vettel had four consecutive wins (tw o each in 2010 and 2011). The all-time reco rd is seven.

Katy B is just one of the acts playing the Red Bull Music Academy Presents Sonar Dome stage

family at the Halo A good day for mountain biking’s first . Gee Atherton Wales fre, Moel at s British Downhill Serie ned after injury. (centre) finished first; elder bro Dan retur

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Kit evolution

Dream Machines

Stock car racing is the ultimate American expression of motorsport. The cars have always been spectacularly fast… but they were once even speedier than they are now

1970

THE KING’S BIRD PLYMOUTH SUPERBIRD Richard Petty, known as ‘The King’, won seven NASCAR championships and 200 races from 1964-79. His star shone so bright that Plymouth built the Superbird especially to win him back from Ford. The car is a flipped-out variation of the Roadrunner, named for the cartoon critter. While the best thing about the Roadrunner might have been the horn (meep meep, like the cartoon), the Superbird brought out the big guns. The nose was aerodynamically extended, and there was an enormous spoiler, because under stock car racing rules, the boot had to be operable. Its power matched its looks: 700hp V8 engines produced during the ’70s made cars incredibly fast. The average speed during the pole position lap at Daytona in 1970 was 194mph. www.rpmuseum.com

words: werner jessner photography: Thomas Hoeffgen

2011

KASEY’S COT TOYOTA CAMRY Under current NASCAR rules, cars from all four competing manufacturers (Dodge, Ford, Chevrolet and Toyota) have to adhere to strict guidelines. The plan is called ‘Car Of Tomorrow’, technical leeway is limited, and that guarantees a thrilling race. The 5.7-litre V8 engines recall those in the cars of 40 years ago (performance: around 820hp). As is the American way, no one would question whether a racing car needs rear-wheel drive. The standard stock car silhouette conceals a tubular frame. The transmission, aerodynamics and chassis geometry might benefit from technical touch-ups, but it’s the driver who makes the difference (in this car, Kasey Kahne). And the pole average from Daytona in 2011? It’s 186mph. www.kaseykahne.com

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Winning Formula

Upper Limits

There’s downhill mountain biking, but think of the riders who do the opposite. One champ tells us how it feels; our be-spoke scientist explains how it works pedal power “From the point of view of physical exertion,” says Lisi Osl, the 25-year-old Austrian mountain biker who was overall World Cup cross-country champ in 2009, “the more difficult the terrain, the harder it is technically to convert your strength into forward propulsion. When you’re ascending, you’ve got to have correct bike position and vary it according to the type of terrain. “It’s harder to keep pedalling on climbs, too; we go 90rpm on the flat but that drops to 55-60rpm when we’re toiling up steep slopes. The old adage that you feel every gram when you’re on the mountain is absolutely true when it comes to the bike, especially the wheels, but it’s not necessarily the case for the biker. If you’re too light, you’re going to be lacking in strength. “I’m a natural mountain animal and really enjoy ascents, and no mountain is anything like as bad as headwinds on the flat.”

FTOTAL = FR + FA + FD = cR . m.g.cos + 0.5. .cD .Av² + m.g.sin “The rolling friction coefficient, cR , is determined by tyres and surface, and can range from 0.004 on asphalt to 0.4 on loose sand. For our purposes, we’ll take the value for asphalt, a value of 90kg for the mass (m) of rider plus bike, and 1.2kgm3 for air density, . A realistic value for the drag coefficient (cD) when riding is 1 and the reference area (A) is around 0.4m2 in this case. The gravitational acceleration (g) is 9.81m/s2. “When the rider is on the flat ( = 0), only rolling friction and air resistance play a role. Power (P) is force (F) times speed (v). If we plug in 32kph (20mph, 8.9m/s) for speed when it’s flat, then we get a value of 200W for power. That seems a lot, but it’s feasible to keep this output up for a while. “Now we send our biker up a hill. Generally we use a percentage value to denote how steep an incline is: 10 per cent means for 100m of horizontal travelled distance, we have risen 10m above the starting point. That isn’t easy biking. For our calculation we use degrees; the conversion is: = arctan (x %/100). “We assume that our rider bikes at a constant 200W. The greater the incline, the greater the downslope force becomes, thus he has to invest an increasing part of his output into overcoming the incline and his speed will dwindle. With an incline of only four per cent, the rider’s speed drops by half to 16kph (9.9mph, fig. 1). On a steep incline of 16 per cent, he can only go at 5kph (3mph). “Proportion of the different kinds of power is interesting, (fig. 2). When flat, output is used mainly to combat air resistance. Lifting work dominates with the increase of the incline. With an incline of 10 per cent, the biker uses 95 per cent of power output to overcome the downslope force, which stems from gravity.” Keep track of mountain biking’s World Cup at www.uci.ch

words: dr martin apolin, Werner Jessner. photography: Marius Maasewerd/Ego Promotion. Illustration: mandy fischer

brain power “When going uphill, a biker has to overcome three forces,” says Dr Martin Apolin, of Vienna’s Institute of Physics. “Rolling friction (FR), air resistance (FA) and downslope force (FD). The formula looks like this:

Uphill challenge: Although climbing a slope on a bike is tough, 2009 champ Lisi Osl says headwinds are worse, and at least every slope eventually comes to an end

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Mountain Men

pou brothers

They reach parts other climbers cannot with only their bare hands and the wisdom of peaks scaled before they were born

Names Eneko and Iker Pou Dates of birth Eneko: March 17, 1974 Iker: February 5, 1977 Famed for Taking on the world’s toughest free climbing routes and opening new ones, using next to no equipment Coming down When not high up in the mountains, the brothers love to surf, but admit their boards “rarely see the light of day” Web www.pouanaiak.com

Spanish brothers Eneko and Iker Pou are at the forefront of free climbing, undertaking daring and explorative climbs without the assistance of equipment, pushing boundaries and setting records everywhere from the Alps to the Andes. The two men have climbing in their blood: their mountaineering parents met while exploring the Pyrenees near the brothers’ hometown of VitoriaGasteiz in Spain’s Basque country, and introduced the boys to the heights even before they were born. “We scaled our first mountains when we were still in the womb,” says Eneko, 37. “After that, our father would take us up mountains in a baby carrier. We started exploring 10,000ft mountains in the Pyrenees by ourselves when Iker was five years old.” “We’ve been roped together since we started climbing,” says Iker, 34. “We know each other very well. Together our projects flow. There’s no rivalry.” The Pou brothers’ greatest achievement to date is Seven Walls: Seven Continents, which saw them conquer routes up the world’s most testing big walls. A big wall is a sheer face of rock or ice, from 500m to 1,500m high. Eneko and Iker can spend anything

from half a day to three days free climbing these seemingly impossible impasses. In free climbing, progression can only be made using hands and feet; bolts and a rope are used for safety purposes only. On their seven-stop world tour, los hermanos Pou (pronounced like the Nou of FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou) coped with 1,000m of sheer granite in Yosemite Valley in California and the heat of Madagascar, where they completed the first free ascent of Africa’s most challenging route, known as Bravo Les Filles. But they saved the toughest for last, in Antarctica in 2007. “We climbed a new route we called Azken Paradisua,” says Iker. “But the descent was probably one of the worst moments I’ve lived through.” Staying true to their ethics of ‘clean’ climbing, the brothers placed pitons and nuts into natural crevices, rather than drive bolts into the ice, to abseil down in extreme weather conditions, having had little sleep. “The pitons were just falling back into our hands,” says Iker. “The weather was getting worse. We were scared, but it’s fear keeps you alive.” After 24 hours, on Christmas Day, they got down unscathed. since Seven Walls, they have climbed the hardest route in the Alps, and this year went to Brazil for the country’s first free climbing contest, Red Bull Psicobloc. The two are as passionate about free climbing as ever. “The secret is excitement,” says Eneko, “feeling that same thrill I did when I was 15. If we lived to be 500 we wouldn’t have time to climb all the peaks we want to. It’s all we think about when we’re awake, and all we dream about when we’re sleeping.” www.thenorthfacejournal.com

Words: Ruth Morgan. Photography: Tim Kemple/Red Bull Content Pool

The rope and bolts are for safety only: Iker (left) and Eneko Pou climb with just their hands and feet

b u l l e va r d

where’s your head at?

Bob Dylan

The number of birthday candles on the cake, they are a-changin’: a true living legend of music is 70 this month. The ideal moment, then, to reflect on his genius, his secrets and… his rapping? Th e Cr as h of

’66 Dylanolgists love to divide his life: pre- and post-electric instruments (1965); before and after rediscovering religio n (1979). However, his biggest turning point may be a motorbike crash in 1966. Before, a strung-out, high Dylan toured relentlessly. After, with space to breathe, he and his music sof tened and he didn’t hit the road again until 1974.

He Shall Be Released

Rober t Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. His family moved to nearby Hibbing when he was six, a town he said was “so cold that you couldn’t be bad”. Not that young Bobby was criminal, but he did feel rebellious – apart somehow. Aged 10, his father bought a house in which a guitar and a radio/record player had been left, and his otherness gained a focus.

Steal This Music

Dylan fans love a bootleg. In the ’60s and ’70s, unauthorised Dylan recordings were traded at gigs, played on the radio and even sold in record shops. Something had to give. As Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2006, “…my record company said, ‘Well, everybody else is buying these records, we might as well put them out.’” The ninth Bootleg Series album was released last year, 20 years after the first.

In The End Was The Wo rds

Dylan is a great song writer deeply versed in poetry, so no surprise his 2004 memoir Chronicles was an unghosted triumph. Earlier this year, he signed a six-book deal, to include the rest of the Chronicles trilog y. Good luck writing them between all the gigs.

Hey, Mr Jam-With-Me Man He began as one man with a guitar and a harmonica, but went on to acquire backing bands (one of which became The Band) and collaborators including Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead and George Harrison. Some alliances set milestones in music history, such as his Nashville sessions with Johnny Cash. Some, like his rap that opens Kurtis Blow’s 1986 Street Rock, did not.

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

Poss ibly Hom esic k Blue s

Since 1988, Dylan has been on what has become known as the Never Ending Tour, a commitment to live performance that has seen him play over 2,300 gigs, including a first-ever concert in Vietnam last month. Around 100 shows a year is not bad, but 78-year-old Willie Nelson managed 161 last year – two more than Lady Gaga.

I Do, But Don ’t Tell

d artists, Despite being one of the most scrutinise t for secre a – ly fami and – iage Dylan kept a marr biographer 15 years. It wasn’t until 2001, after a child were dug deep, that a second wife and sixth in 1986; revealed. Both wedding and birth were m so schtu kept ) 1992 (div. n Mr and Mrs Dyla their daughter could have a normal life.

Fo rever Youn g

It Ain’t Me, Babe Robert Allen Zimmerman became Bob Dylan accidentally on purpose. While playing in bands as a teen, Dylan called himself Elston Gunn. In 1959, when he left home for college, he wanted to be Robert Allen. He read an article about a sax player called David Allyn, liked that, thought about Robert Allyn; Allyn merged in his mind with Dylan, because of the poet Dylan Thomas.

Critics say he has rarely, if ever , matched his creative peak of 196 4-1969. A tad harsh – of all singer-song writers, maybe only Prince or Bowie has had such a run – and increasingly unfair. Bob’s last two albums (Modern Times, 2006; Together Through Life , 2009) were critical and commercial successe s. Classic act, good new stuf f: not like the Roll ing Stones.

Albums, artwork, tours and more: all on www.bobdylan.com

B u l l e va r d

Lucky Numbers

Cannes Film Festival

The Festival’s main award, the Palme d’Or, is given to the director of the best film, as chosen by a jury of nine film industry professionals. The jury changes every year, and being selected as its president ranks as one of cinema’s great honours. Robert De Niro is in charge for 2011 – a solid choice, given that he’s been running his Tribeca Film Festival in New York since 2002, founded Qatar’s Doha Tribeca Film Festival, and starred in the Palme d’Or winners of 1976 ( Taxi Driver) and 1986 (The Mission). Plus, because ‘De’ means ‘of’ in French, he’s one-third native.

A hearty “bravo” is a common sound at the ballet. A music festival crowd is dotted with slogan signs and topless fans. The Cannes audience is world cinema’s most emotional. If a film is bad, there will be booing. Conversely, when the room says je t’aime en masse, standing ovations result. In 2004, the crowd rose after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and applauded for 20 minutes, the longest tribute in Cannes history. The film went on to win the Palme d’Or; those who saw it just got red-raw palms.

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2,300

The festival was created by the French government in opposition to the influence of Fascist regimes at other European film festivals – then World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, leading to the postponement of the first Cannes, due to begin that very day. The festival got underway in 1946. This year’s opening film is Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, to be screened at the Grand Roberto Théâtre Lumière to a full house of 2,300.

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It would have been impossible for a film festival held on the French Riviera not to develop into a two-week jolly for its attendees. Nightclubs like the VIP Room and Baoli host lavish parties thrown by film companies, luxury brands and A-listers. The harbour fills with yachts and superyachts. The fashion designer Robert Cavalli likes Woody to do Cannes from Woody Allen Allen his 134ft boat, named after himself (worth ¤34m), and who can blame him?

Michael Moore

Cavalli Roberto Cavalli

Since 1959, the festival has also been home to the Marché du Film, the world’s largest commercial movie market. While Clooney and co sip in the sunshine, about 10,000 film industry grunts take up every bit of dingy desk space in the town, selling straight-to-DVD features and the sort of no-budget movies only shown on TV on a Tuesday at 3.30am. It’s big business. On average, about 20 films are selected and screened for the Palme d’Or each year. At the market in 2010, 876 movies were up for grabs.

Robert De Niro Robert De Niro Soon-Yi Previn

Despite contrasting French opinions on the impact of Hollywood on the fabric of le cinéma, US films have been awarded the top prize at Cannes jointly or outright, 17 times, Pulp Fiction, MASH and Apocalypse Now among them. There has been a home win on nine occasions. In 1946, 11 films, including a French and US picture, were jointly awarded the Grand Prix du Festival, the forerunner of the Palme d’Or, which today is a 24-carat gold palm leaf. Oscars are just gold-plated. www.festival-cannes.com

words: Paul Wilson. Photography: Rex Features (5), Getty Images (1)

Is the glamorous fortnight an excuse for celebrities to get a Cote d’Azur tan, or is it one of the last remaining true celebrations of world cinema? It’s both – and much more

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Tim Shieff

Age: 23 Born: In the US, but raised in Derby, UK Nickname: Livewire Growing up mimicking moves from Michael Jacksonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Billie Jean video, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not surprising Shieff got into breakdancing in his early teens. Then, after watching British freerunning documentaries Jump London and Jump Britain, Shieff was hooked. Now world freerunning champion, he has had a second and third place finish at Red Bull Art of Motion events in recent years.

s he weaves his way through the throngs of weekend shoppers and theatre-goers ambling along London’s South Bank, Tim ‘Livewire’ Shieff is in Clark Kent mode, just one of the crowd. Dressed in a casual combo of tracksuit bottoms and trainers, he squints into the unseasonably warm March sun, an indistinguishable part of the snake of tourists squeezed onto the riverside pathway. But the lad from Derby is traversing the centre of a movement that has freed him and others like him from the masses. This is hallowed ground. Thanks to inspiration from a documentary filmed here eight years ago, Shieff is World Freerunning Champion and has for years inhabited a rooftop world, treading paths invisible to the uninitiated. When freerunning, Shieff seems part-superhero, his 13st body apparently defying gravity as he scales 4m walls, jumps 3m gaps, or balances his body weight on one hand while his legs dangle perilously over the edge of a building: freerunning has made the world his playground. But this

Tim Shieff

morning he’s happy to be a pedestrian, saving his energy for freerunning competition, Red Bull Art of Motion, which is being held in a few hours’ time. Not that Shieff is fazed. At 23 years old, the man dubbed ‘Livewire’ as a child because of his boundless energy, is used to performing. The abilities he’s honed through years of practice take him around the globe, as companies buy into one of the fastest-growing freesports in the world. Though many of the South Bank crowd won’t yet know the terms ‘freerunning’ or ‘parkour’, as the discipline is also known, most will have seen it. Parkour’s fluid flips, leaps and cat-crawls became ubiquitous in the noughties; used in numerous films including Casino Royale and Luc Besson’s District B13; to advertise everything from cars to phones; in music videos such as Madonna’s Jump and as a basis for character movement in computer games such as Assassin’s Creed. The media demand for freerunners meant Shieff chose to decline an offer to study mathematics and physics at Loughborough University and instead turn pro at 18 – a decision which didn’t go down well with his parents. But five years on, the former breakdancer has appeared in adverts and live shows on almost every continent, filmed a freerunning series for MTV in LA and presented Samuel L Jackson with an award in Las Vegas. And if his black Audi A3 with personalised ‘L1VWR’ number plate is anything to go by, the flips and spins are paying off. But there’s a lot more to freerunning than media hype. Freerunning’s founders and practitioners see it as a way to live that’s open to all. “I do this professionally so I’m able to freerun, not the other way around,” says , his soft voice a contrast to the hard-man image given off by his muscular frame and cropped hair. “Freerunning to me is real happiness, a way of stepping away from the social conditioning that says you have to walk up stairs or follow a set path. I’m not Superman, but it can feel like it after you realise that. It’s about freeing your mind. Everyone is different, mixing in anything from gymnastics to capeoira, or in my case breakdancing, so there’s no right or wrong, no rules. Whether you’re jumping between rooftops or leaping park railings, you get to live in the moment. Time slows and you don’t care about anything else.” It’s a way of thinking that’s spread quickly. People have started freerunning on rooftops, in forests and across cities in countries as far afield as Nicaragua,

Photography: Rutger Pauw, Richie Hopson

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“I’m not Superman, but it can feel like it”

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Ryan Doyle

Age: 26 Born: Liverpool, UK

Photography: Rutger Pauw (2)

He wasn’t the athletic type at school, but Doyle first found a love of movement away from the playground, taking up martial arts. He’s now a four-time national tricking champion, and brings his martial arts-inspired moves to his freerunning. Doyle won the first Red Bull Art of Motion contest in Vienna in 2007 and runs a freerunning academy in Liverpool with his brother, with the aim of helping more children take up the discipline.

China and Russia, becoming part of a tight-knit online community sharing information and footage of their exploits. Just over 15 years since its humble beginnings, freerunning has become a global phenomenon. The internet, and especially the arrival of YouTube in 2005, has ignited a huge popularity explosion in the relatively young pastime, something that took older action sports such as skateboarding and snowboarding much longer to achieve. According to London training company Parkour Generations, it’s the fastest-growing freesport in the world, and the most uploaded and viewed sport on YouTube, with some 20 million more hits in one year than its nearest rival, skateboarding. Official academies have sprung up around the world, with most based in the UK, which has emerged as the global centre for freerunning. This is in large part thanks to 2003 British documentary, Jump London, filmed around London’s South Bank, which inspired a new generation of freerunners including Shieff, and helped a small, dedicated UK following grow to the 15,000 practitioners here today. The birthplace of freerunning is the Paris suburb of Lisses, where in the early ’90s a small group of men in their 20s began developing the practice, calling themselves the Yamakasi, a Congolese word meaning ‘strong man, strong spirit’. Already interested in martial arts and gymnastics, they were heavily influenced by the teachings of Georges Hébert, a French Navy officer who developed ‘the natural method’ in the early 20th century, a type of physical education adopted by the French military. It emphasised combining physical strength with courage and altruism, summed up in Hébert’s motto ‘etre fort pour etre utile’ – ‘be strong to be useful’. He advocated training in the natural environment, finding ways to overcome obstacles. The Yamakasi took this theory and adapted it to create ‘parkour’, from ‘parcours’ meaning ‘the path’, concerned with travelling the most efficient route from A to B. Jump London, made with members of the Yamakasi, then translated ‘parkour’ as ‘freerunning’ for its English-speaking audience. “There was then this inevitable confusion between the two terms,” says Dan Edwardes, director of Parkour Generations and ParkourUK, the first national governing body for the discipline. “Parkour was associated with efficiency of movement, and freerunning with the tricks and flips, but there was never any

Ryan Doyle

“i think This is an exhibition of styles” intention of them being separate arts and there is still no difference between them. We’re all part of one community.” As the world’s first and largest freerunning contest, Red Bull Art of Motion has brought some of the most well-known members of that global community to London. The area outside the National Theatre has been transformed for the occasion: a purposebuilt course of drops, rails and bars at various heights have been erected, from ground level up to the 9m-high start. It’s a wooden wonderland of every obstacle a freerunner might hope to encounter on the street and the athletes’ anticipation is tangible. Upstairs their area is abuzz with excited chatter in many languages and accents, as 25 freerunners from 12 countries discuss tonight’s contest. All adhere to the unofficial freerunner dress code of jogging bottoms and T-shirt, most bearing the name of their crew. But the physical similarity ends there. There are bodies of all shapes and sizes, from the tall and slight to the squat and muscular and pretty much everything in between. Jermold Compton, a toned and softly spoken graphic designer from Trinidad and Tobago, is soaking up every second. It’s the first time he’s left the Caribbean, 35

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he sun drops down behind Waterloo Bridge, and more than 7,000 people have gathered, keen to see some of the world’s most talented freerunners in action. The loud hum of the crowd fuels the atmosphere of tense excitement as the athletes make their way outside to the start more than 9m above, compounded by the high-tempo music now ringing out. Each athlete will have 60 seconds to complete a run, watched by four judges marking on creativity,

Georges Hébert Born: April 27, 1875, Paris, France In 1902, French naval officer Hébert was stationed in the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique when a volcano erupted. With the nearby Mount Pelée erupting so much that it would later go down as one the worst volcanic disasters of the 20th century, Hérbert heroically helped orchestrate the rescue of hundreds of people from the disaster. He left with the conviction that physical strength and ability must be combined with altruism and mettle, summed up in what became his motto: etre fort pour etre utile – ‘be strong to be useful’. He travelled extensively in Africa during his military career, and observed how the indigenous communities maintained perfect physical fitness with no specific training due to their physical dayto-day routine, something lost in the post-industrial western world. On his return to France, he created his ‘natural method’, based on training using the human body in the natural environment, through activities such as throwing, climbing, running, jumping and swimming, to maintain all-round fitness and develop a sound moral code. The French military adopted Hébert’s programme, and in this way it was passed on to one of the founders of parkour, David Belle. Photography: musée national de la Marine, Rutger Pauw

and his first time in a competition. “I’ve been following Red Bull Art of Motion since it started,” he grins, “so I idolise a lot of the guys here. I started freerunning looking at David Belle and Sébastien Foucan from the Yamakasi, so being here on the South Bank is incredible. I know my way around better than some of the guys from the UK from watching Jump London so many times. It’s amazing.” Tim Shieff stands at the end of the room talking to fellow British professional freerunner and martial arts tricking champion Ryan Doyle from Liverpool. Together they represent two of the most recognisable faces in freerunning, as winner of the now-defunct World Freerun Championships of 2009, and Red Bull Art of Motion champion 2007 respectively. But despite, and perhaps because of, the notoriety such victories bring, the idea of competition has become a bone of contention, with many freerunners believing that picking a winner from styles that are inherently unique and individual is mising the point. Most of the competitors here would agree, but see this contest in a different light. “ I think this is an exhibition of styles more than a traditional contest,” says Doyle, who has been working to develop Red Bull Art of Motion since it began in Vienna in 2007. “It’s not 25 athletes against each other, it’s man versus the course. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with one piece missing, and we’re all bringing our piece of the jigsaw to see if it fits – if it doesn’t we’re not wrong, ours just fits a different puzzle.” This is also a rare opportunity for athletes to meet. One of the three female participants, Pamela Obiniana, a petite former gymnast from Austria, is in London for the first time. “I don’t really care about winning,” she says. “For me this is to teach people that freerunning exists, and that girls can do it too. These freerunners are like a second family to me, everyone’s so welcoming and encouraging.”

it’s the most uploaded sport on youtube

UK Freerunning Though freerunning began in a Paris suburb, in recent years the UK has emerged as its global centre. There are now around 15,000 freerunners in the UK, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home to the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first officially recognised national governing body, ParkourUK. London-based training company Parkour Generations work with London boroughs delivering training to children, while open classes run daily for people of all ages. It also offers the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first qualification in parkour, developed with founding fathers, the Yamakasi, so freerunners from around the world now travel to the UK to become recognised instructors. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games has awarded funding to Parkour Generations project, Jump London, which aims to train up 500 new parkour coaches by the time of the 2012 Games.

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Jermold Compton Compton is a graphic designer and business studies student in his home of Trinidad and Tobago, but always finds time to freerun in his local area with friends. If he could freerun full-time he would give up his job â&#x20AC;&#x153;in a heartbeatâ&#x20AC;?, but thinks gaining a business studies qualification will help him achieve his dream of one day opening a freerunning training academy to help expand what is still a very small scene.

Photography: Getty images

Age: 25 Born: Trinidad Nickname: Spyder

Marcus Gustafsson

Age: 22 Born: Helsingborg, Sweden Nickname: Zyrken

Photography: Scott Bass

Gustafsson discovered freerunning through watching online footage five years ago. Before that he spent 10 years as a gymnast. Having grown tired of the strict gymnastic discipline, freerunning gave him the freedom and excitement heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been craving. He came fourth in the 2009 World Freerun Championships and third in the Red Bull Art of Motion contest of the same year held in Boston, USA, making his second place finish at Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Red Bull Art of Motion 2011 his best freerunning result so far.

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Luci Romberg

execution, difficulty and flow – the fluidity of movement from trick to trick. Amid cheers from the crowd, the contest gets underway and the freerunners form a supportive crowd of their own. Illuminated against the darkness of the theatre behind, they follow every move, shouting their encouragement. No two runs are alike, as each individual brings their own style to the stage. But the standard is high, and they all know they have to push to be in with a chance. In this high-pressure environment, no move is foolproof. In the first round Swiss freerunner Christian Harmat faceplants onto the wooden platform coming off a 3m-high set of bars. Then Frenchman and former Red Bull Art of Motion winner, Yoann Zephyr Leroux, under-rotates off the same bars while attempting a move known as a ‘double gainer’, a backflip executed while rotating forwards, landing on his back 2.4m below. Neither is badly hurt, but it’s a reminder of the risks involved. Only 12 go through to the second and final round, Compton and Obiniana not among them. But, after strong performances, Shieff and Doyle progress. Both spend a brief break inside, mentally preparing for their performance, playing out their moves in the quiet before they go back out to the vocal masses. Some of the most accomplished freerunners from Russia, Sweden, and America have made the cut, and no one seems to be making mistakes this time around. Of the pair, Doyle is the first to take his run, and it’s a slick performance. His martial arts-influenced tricks are big and breathtaking, as he flips and rotates over gaps, off walls and on bars more than 6m from the ground, barely pausing for breath. He finishes with a trick never seen in competition before, which he has christened a ‘reverse roundoff wallspring’, running straight up a shallow slope at ground level to propel himself into a rotating mid-air flip. If Shieff is feeling the pressure, you wouldn’t know it. His face gives nothing away as he prepares for his final run. When the first bars of a bass-heavy

Age: 29 Born: Colorado, USA Nickname: Steel

Photography: LUKASZ BASZKO

The former gymnast and sports allrounder is one of the world’s most prominent female freerunners, travelling the globe to compete and perform. She can also be found working as a stuntwoman in Hollywood on numerous film and TV projects. She has both physical ability and steely determination, which sees her regularly finish in the top 10 of freerunning competitions alongside the men. She was one of three women competing at Red Bull Art of Motion 2011, the highest number yet, and deservedly took the award for Best Female Performance, an accolade introduced for the 2011 contest.

each brings their own style to the stage

dubstep track play out, Shieff lifts himself into a controlled handstand on the railing over the start, holding himself perfectly still, until, in a flash of sudden movement, he’s flipped out of it and onto the first level. His breakdancing style is heavier and more solid than the more slender Doyle’s, and no less impressive. After a dive roll over a 3m drop that induces gasps from the crowd, Shieff goes into a breakdancing move called the ‘hollowback’, a take on the handstand in which his legs hang all the way over behind him above 6m of air, requiring guts to match his upper body strength. Next he leaps to the bars, locking his arms to hold himself upside down, before swinging himself over the top to perform a gainer to the last level down. He finishes with another move adapted from breakdancing, the ‘windmill to cork’, followed by a succession of front and back handsprings across the front of the stage. His minute in the spotlight is up. The podium is soon brought onto the stage. American Luci Romberg is awarded the trophy for best female performance, and fearless Russian Erik Mukhametshin gets the trophy for best trick. The freerunners lean forward from the second-floor balcony, straining to hear the results over the noise of the crowd. Ryan Doyle gets third place, and lets out a cheer, and respected Swede Marcus Gustafsson comes second. With only one place left and so many strong contenders, the athletes stand still for the first time since the contest began, awaiting the final name. The voice sounds over the microphone, echoing around the speakers: “And the winner, all the way from Derby UK, it’s Tim, Livewire, Shieff!” For a moment he’s motionless before a smile spreads across his face. Propelled by well-wishing hands, he jumps the railing to make his way to the top step. Though the trophy may not have been his motivation for taking part, winning Red Bull Art of Motion has inspired a grin that won’t leave his face. Perhaps his smile has something to do with the fact his parents have been in the crowd watching his skills for the first time. When Shieff leaves the National Theatre to toast his victory with family and freerunning friends, he is a pedestrian on the South Bank once again. Though now the daytime crowds are long gone, replaced by groups of young freerunners hopping up and down kerbs and off small walls, inspired to one day join him on the rooftops. Highlights at www.redbullartofmotion.com

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â&#x20AC;&#x153; Some people might be nervous to take that last shot, but I thrive on itâ&#x20AC;? 42

the sharp shooter

Bernard Brogan is the man Dublin fans believe will bring the club a major trophy – maybe even the biggest of all – for the first time in over a decade. He’d love nothing more than to do that, time (and knees and everything else) permitting Words: Paul Wilson Photography: Chris Floyd

â&#x20AC;&#x153; I wanted to follow my dad and brother. When I watched Alan playing at Croke Park, I wanted to be out there with himâ&#x20AC;?

It’s two days before match day and Bernard Brogan is signing arms, and an ankle. It’s to be hoped that the Gaelic Footballer of The Year has good handwriting, because an autograph on a body part can these days be a template for a tattoo. However, none of the swarm of boys around Brogan, at twilight on a training pitch at St Oliver Plunkett’s/ Eoghan Ruadh football club, can be more than eight years old, so there’s little danger of anything being inked in permanently. More likely, these boys will be beaming next morning in

school, asking their pals to guess who they saw last night, and then rolling up their sleeves to prove who it was. It was supposed to be a solitary training session, kicking a few frees, but it’s hard to get alone time when you’re Dublin’s star forward (not least when one of the kids training on an adjacent pitch catches sight of you and turns Pied Piper, yelling your name at the head of a growing line of followers). There’s training and games of course, and a day job, but that day job, as a trainee accountant, requires study and exams

Local hero: Bernard Brogan was once a junior at the St Oliver Plunkett’s club, and still plays for the senior team when he can. The current crop of youngsters worship him

on top of the 9-5. Bernard Brogan is 27, and he’d love that many hours in the day. There are breaks in his punishing schedule. Two weeks prior to the impromptu signing session, he was shaking hands with Barack Obama in the White House on St Patrick’s Day. “I got the phone call a couple of weeks before,” says Brogan of the US President’s summons, “and I thought it was one of my mates playing a prank, so I didn’t take much notice until the invite from the White House came to my house. I was thrilled to go over there and meet the big man himself. After he made his speeches, he came down to shake hands, and there were old women elbowing Eoin Kelly and me, trying to get to him. We didn’t want to start a fight with any of them, so we just said, ‘How are you doing, Mr President’ – shook his hand, ‘nice to meet you’, that was it – and he moved on to the next woman with the elbows.” Brogan and Kelly, captain of current All-Ireland hurling champions Tipperary, were invited to represent the GAA on the prompting of Dan Rooney, US Ambassador to Ireland, sports fan and owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Brogan also did some ambassadorial work of his own while he was in America. “I flew to New York first,” he says, “and I met 45

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Bernard Brogan capped a phenomenal season last year by being named Gaelic Footballer of the Year. This season, he is hoping to kick on and get Dubs to the All-Ireland final for the first time in 16 years

a lot of GAA people there, some of the New York team, who play in Connacht.” Meeting people comes easy to Brogan. He’s charming and friendly, in the right amounts. When he speaks, he’s not always quoting from the sportsman’s book of clichés, and he says “we” a lot, which, as a team sportsman from a Dublin footballing dynasty, you’d expect him to say. Brogan’s father, also Bernard, won two All-Irelands for Dublin, in 1976 and 1977. Uncle Jim also won his in ’77. Older brother Alan, 29, has been a senior panellist since 2002; younger brother Paul, 24, is just breaking into the senior side. If cousin James hadn’t done his cruciate ligament in March, there could be four Brogan boys in blue this season. “The Brogans are renowned for bad knees,” says Bernard. “Paul has done his cruciate twice, I’ve done it once, Alan’s had keyhole surgery, my dad and my uncle had similar problems. Playing football, though, is all I wanted to do. Growing up, people would tell me stories about my dad, and that great Dublin team, and that just made me want to be where he was. We could see the joys it brought him, his family, his brothers. He never made us play football; we made our own decisions. I played soccer to a decent level, and there was talk of trying to 46

crack that, but I wanted to follow my dad and my brother. When I watched Alan playing at Croke Park, I wanted to be out there with him, so I left soccer behind. “My little brother was a serious golfer, playing off five when he was 14, and he had to think about making decisions. There was an article about the family – my dad, Alan coming up with Dublin minors, I was a promising young player and the last line was, ‘The other brother, Paul, also plays golf.’ That was the day Paul decided to be a footballer.” It’s the day before match day and Bernard Brogan is telling us that his grandfather is dying. “He wasn’t a player himself, but he shot out a few good footballers, didn’t he?” he says, with a grin. Jim Brogan was a superintendent in the Garda, and also worked behind the scenes at St Oliver Plunkett’s, and

“ this year it’s a bit different: because I’m a marked man, lads are getting tighter to me”

is now in hospital, after an illness. His grandson speaks fondly of him, and, in the measured approach he applies to every aspect of his life, suggests that, at 87, with a long happy marriage, nine children and the extended family that brings, Jim’s innings was a good one. Brogan is still building his life’s foundations. He saw his father’s Dublin team-mates who were doctors and lawyers and other professionals – his father is an engineer – and chose accountancy as a career to follow in their footsteps accordingly. He has a master’s degree and is studying for his final accountancy exams this summer, after which he can swap his ‘trainee tax consultant’ business cards for ones that say he’s a qualified accountant. He has worked at financial advisory firm FGS for three years, and its understanding of his sporting commitments is as vital to his well-being as anything else. “A couple of lads in the GAA I know find it very hard to get time off,” says Brogan. “That drains you because you’re being pulled from both sides, and it becomes hard to give 100 per cent to both work and football, which you have to do if you want to do well in both.” It’s a two-way relationship: loyalty begets loyalty, and a famous footballer brings

prestige and contacts to a company that a regular employee simply cannot. Brogan is also looking forward to travelling abroad with his job, something the commitments of football do not allow. A regular employee would be asleep at 5.30am on a January morning, which is when Brogan’s alarm was going off. “At the start of the year,” he says, “we were doing two training sessions and a gym session in the mornings. An hour and a bit training; shower; into work from nine to five, or maybe six, then some days evening training. It was: Monday morning in the gym, Tuesday morning, Tuesday evening on the pitch, Thursday morning, Thursday evening on the pitch, Saturday afternoon on the pitch, match on Sunday. You have to get used to it. We said we’d put the work in early in the year, get a base behind us for the rest of the year.” Brogan has always worked hard. As a boy, he noticed that not many of the forwards he watched could kick with both feet, so he put the hours in kicking, frees and open, with his weaker left foot, until it wasn’t weaker any more. Years before he was watching Michael Jordan documentaries and reading Jonny Wilkinson’s books, mining for nuggets that could help his performance. Now, when he plays, it’s hard for a man to

“ it’s hard to give 100 per cent to work and football, but to do well in both, you have to” defend against him because he can turn on, and score with, either foot. As the boys at St Plunkett’s noticed, Brogan practises kicking on his own. It gives him the confidence to score points and goals for Dublin, the thing he has loved doing since making his senior debut against Offaly in the second round of the Leinster Championship in 2007. “I like the responsibility of being the last link in the chain,” says Brogan. “If we have a game plan, where I am the striker, I’m happy to be that. I enjoy it – I perform better when I’m under a bit of pressure. This year it’s a bit different: because I’m a marked man, lads are tighter to me, but it’s what I’m there for. If it’s the last couple of minutes of a game and we need a score, I’m trying to get the ball. Some people might be nervous to take that last shot, but I thrive on it.” On his rare evenings off, Brogan likes to squeeze in a trip to the cinema with

his girlfriend. He loves going to the movies: he says the last film he saw was Limitless, which has only been on release for a few days, and he was planning to maybe see another film that night. Limitless is about a man who takes a pill that makes him superhuman. On his way out of the cinema, Brogan wrote on Twitter, “I wonder would that pill pass the doping test with the GAA!!!” Over lunch, he says he’s never even heard of anyone in football using performanceenhancing drugs, not least because of the GAA’s rigorous testing programme. It’s the day of the match and Bernard Brogan is on the bench. Since taking charge in 2008, Dubs coach Pat Gilroy has emphasised the team over the individual, and not putting his star man straight back into the team after missing the round five league game against Mayo, as a result of his American trip, is evidence of this collective thinking. Gilroy has also supported his players turning out for their club sides when the inter-county schedule permits. It’s an important part of maintaining the loyal community that is the GAA, and it could be argued that nothing keeps a player match-fit more than playing 47

“Last year we started with four wins out of four in the league but didn’t win it. We have to keep our heads and know what works for us”

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matches. There’s also nothing quite like playing against the lads who’ve been looking forward all year to being on the same pitch as a Dubs senior panellist. “The way I look at it, a lot of the lads you play against you grew up with, most of them are Dubs, and there are one or two who have no problem taking a scalp out of you. They’ll try to beat you hard and fair for the ball, they wouldn’t intentionally nail you. I’ve had a couple of days when I’ve been marking lads, and they’ll pull me, drag me, throw me to the ground; hit me, punch me, then come up to me after the game and shake my hand and say, ‘Sorry about that, that was all I could do, I couldn’t play football against you. Best of luck on the weekend.’ I have to respect them for that.” Almost 36,000 people show their respect in the minute’s silence before the throw-in at tonight’s Dubs game. Brogan’s grandfather died the night before, and his three grandsons have made themselves available for selection. The minute’s silence is just one of the unusual occurrences at Croke Park this evening. A freak hailstorm begins during half-time of the Dublin-Kilkenny hurling game preceding the Dubs-Down football match, and the batter of the stones on the stadium roof nearly drowns out the sound of the Artane Boys Band. The poor guy on tuba might have a lot of ice pellets to carry back to the changing room. And then there is – there are – Jedward, providing the intra-game entertainment. If the cheering for the brothers isn’t louder than what comes during the games before of after, it is certainly more high-pitched. Their show ends with one of them cartwheeling half the length of the pitch and diving through the mud in the goalmouth. The hurling finishes in a flurry of activity after a game on which neither side could stamp its authority, with Dublin snatching an injury-time equaliser. The hailstorm is finished by the time the footballers come out to warm up, but in the corner of Hill 16 next to the Cusack Stand, the giant Dubs shirt strung over empty terracing has an inwardly bulging bellyful of ice. The game, like the hurling before it, is a tight-scoring match, despite Down’s dominance of possession. Brogan comes onto the field seven minutes into the second half, and for the first time in toplevel football, Bernard and his brothers are on the field together playing for Dublin. (“I remember we played an O’Byrne Cup game together once, against Carlow, and my uncle framed

The history books will say that Bernard Brogan scored one point in the dramatic victory over Down, but it was his cross that set up his brother Alan to score Dubs’s winning injury-time goal

the programme for us,” says Brogan, “but this is our first major game together.”) Dubs snatch victory in injury-time, their sixth win out of six in Allianz Football League Division 1, to qualify for the league final for the first time since 1999. They last won the league final in 1993, which itself was two years before their last All-Ireland championships. For a club of this size, with the largest fanbase and catchment area in Ireland, this has been a long time coming. “We know what we have to do to be successful, and what hasn’t worked in the past,” says Brogan. “Last year we started with four wins out of four in the league, but we didn’t win it. So we have to keep our heads and know what works for us – you lose that when you think you’re better than you are. Dublin fans put a lot of pressure on us, but we have the biggest pick of players, the biggest population, so they have a right to think like that. And it’s our responsibility to play at the highest level. We’re trying to do that now, and we’re moving in the right direction.” The stats will tell you that Brogan only scored one point tonight, but without him Dublin wouldn’t have won. His appearance on the pitch brought the biggest cheer of the evening (Jedward included). Every time he gets the ball, the crowd and the

Down defence are up on their toes. He doesn’t get much of the ball, but he makes things happen when he does. Flat on his backside, he squeezes a hand pass through a clutter of defenders’ legs, like a felled prop forward, to set up a Dubs point. Then, half a minute into the four added on at the end, spinning on his left foot with his back to goal around 30m out, he arcs the ball perfectly off his right foot down the middle of the posts, for the equalising score. The winning goal is the last significant move of the match. Paul Brogan has the ball close to his own endline, and starts a succession of passes and a kick that gives his brother Bernard the ball, close to the left sideline, around 25m out. He takes on his man and gets round him and crosses with his left foot, looking for his brother Alan at the far post. Down’s Kalum King, running back from midfield, looks like he’s going to catch the ball, but these are the frantic last seconds of a tight game on a greasy pitch, in front of the roaring home fans, and King parries. Alan stabs home the fumbled ball, celebrates with Bernard and blows a kiss up to someone who, if ever there was a night to be looking down, might well be watching over. www.gaa.ie

The Flight Of Tangata Manu The third Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series got underway on Easter Island this year. A return to the most elementary form of diving in the homeland of the birdman Words: Katrin Strobl

photography: Alfredo Escobar/Red Bull Cliff Diving (1), Dean Treml/Red Bull Cliff Diving (1)

ima Airport, Peru, shortly before midnight one night in March. The 12 names on the sheet of paper have all been ticked off. Relief: we have a complete team for flight LA 848 – a dozen sportsmen who’ve flown from across the world for the first event in this year’s Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. There’s a slight, excited buzz of holiday atmosphere in the departure lounge, despite the late hour and the cold neon lighting. Must be all the colourful flip-flops and baggy pants on view. Or maybe the tanned faces of men who work and live in sunny climates? Or the playful atmosphere between divers and teams here at Gate 21 of the Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chávez? More likely, however, it’s the prospect of the first stop of the new season, 2,500 miles west of Lima: Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, as the locals call it. It’s a fivehour flight across the Pacific, which I spend hoping the pilot will manage to find the tiny island located somewhere between South America and Tahiti. If the world was flat, you’d probably be able to look over the edge from Rapa Nui. So why Easter Island? Because along with the other venues on the 2011 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series calendar – Athens, Boston, Yucatán (Mexico),

The moai are Easter Island’s landmark. No, they’re the volcanic rock giants at the back, the figures in front are Red Bull cliff diver squad

La Rochelle (France), Malcesine (Italy), Yalta (Ukraine) – it adds to the stunning mix of locations that makes the series unique. Tradition and modernity, exoticism and nature: perfect backdrops for breathtaking sport in which 12 of the world’s best divers go head to head for the title, as they dive from a height of 27m and have their performances scrutinised by a jury. The series has also come to Rapa Nui because it has been home to a wonderful custom for hundreds of years: the first man to bring a sooty tern egg from the offshore island of Moto Nui to the Rano Kau crater was venerated like a king for the rest of the year as Tangata Manu, the birdman. It was a swashbuckling achievement: diving into the sea, swimming against the tides and the

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waves, making a triumphant return with the fragile goods. All behaviour befitting a modern-day cliff diver. When our heroes meet in Lima, it’s the first time they have seen each other since their last competition in Hawaii, in September 2010, when the UK’s Gary Hunt took the title. The mood is jolly from the off. These guys might need to warm up for training and competition, but they’re straight into well-rehearsed banter with each other. “Over the course of the year, we spend more time with each other than we do with our families,” says France’s Cyrille Oumedjkane, who’s been part of the diving scene for 11 years. “It’s like school kids seeing each other again for the first time after the summer holidays. Everyone says what he’s been doing and everyone wants to know what everyone else has been up to.” Three well-known names are not on the passenger list for flight LA 848. Australia’s Steve Black, the 2008 World Champion, will be out of action for months as a result of a lower leg injury. Ukraine’s Andrey Ignatenko – the oldest competitor to date at 46 – tore his Achilles tendon two days before he was due to fly out. And Colombia’s 52

Eber Pava missed the qualifying mark by 0.15 of a point in January in Australia, which is particularly sad news for his compatriot, nine-time World Champion Orlando Duque. “We’ve known each other ever since we first competed on the 1m board. We’ve been looking out for each other for 23 years. This will be my first season without him.” Their absence gives three up-andcoming talents their chance: Steven Lobue, 25, sprightly, mischievous and all-American; Oleksandr Kutsenko, from Ukraine, who prefers to be called Sasha and is admired for his good technique; and Mexico’s Jorge Ferzuli, who’s known for his trademark broad grin and is a man for whom fate has something special in store.

t’s still dark when the plane lands on Rapa Nui at 6.30am. The island is uncharted territory for all but one of the divers. Thanks to years of success, 36-year-old Orlando Duque has become this special group’s unofficial spokesman and he was here last year to scout the location. Duque has briefed the others on what to expect: its unspoilt wildness, its friendly

The moai are Easter Island’s patron saints carved from volcanic lava

photography: Dean Treml/Red Bull Cliff Diving (1), Romina Amato/Red Bull Cliff Diving (3)

Easter Island was all peace and tranquillity until the boisterous Red Bull Cliff Diving brigade turned up for the first stop on this year’s world tour

photography: Dean Treml/Red Bull Cliff Diving (3), Romina Amato/Red Bull Cliff Diving (2)

people and their simple way of life with its ancient Polynesian customs. The few roads on the island – a full tour would be just a day’s brisk hike – are shared by a few pick-up trucks, lots of motorbikes and horses, horses, horses. There are no forests on Rapa Nui, neither are there any supermarkets, but little shops sell fruit and vegetables direct from the fields and the restaurants serve wonderful fish dishes. Only on days when a plane flies in from the capital, Santiago de Chile – Rapa Nui and its 4,000 inhabitants are Chilean – will “fresh meat today” signs be hung in the windows a little later. Rapa Nui, of course, is home to the moai, the famous sculptures hewn out of the island’s volcanic rock and which can weigh anything up to 80 tonnes. The giants are about one-third head – normally facing the sea – and come to an end right under the belly button. The moai, which represent dead chiefs, once formed part of a ceremonial system. They’re intended to protect the island, as intermediaries between this world and the hereafter. They are also concrete motivation for the cliff divers who, on their very first outing, get to see the most imposing group of moai, those at Ahu Tongariki, where there are 15 in a row. One of them is even wearing a hat.

he first training session is at Mataveri Otay Bay, close to the island’s capital of Hanga Roa. For many of the participants, it’s the first chance they’ve had in months to get back to something close to the competitive diving height of 27m. “My last dive from this height was seven months ago in Hawaii,” explains Hassan Mouti from Strasbourg, who admits to being slightly overawed at the start of a new season. But the island does provide one good omen, at least. While the divers are training, a manutara, or bird of fortune, as the locals call it, circles over the diving platform. The sooty tern is a rare sight here. It nests on the offshore island of Moto Nui, where they wanted to hold the cliff diving originally. “But as the island is where the manutara hatches its eggs, it is a conservation site,” explains Niki Stajković, Red Bull Cliff Diving

Kent De Mond (USA, above) trampoline training on dry land for a lessthan-interested audience. Right: At 27m above the sea Slava Polyeshchuk (UKR) is as high as he can go

Artem Silchenko (RUS, left) is in second place at this early stage in the season. Right: There are always divers on stand-by to intervene in case of problems. They practise using Michal Navrátil (CZE) as their guinea-pig. Below: Has he forgotten his Speedos? Steven Lobue (USA, below) tries out the board for size

World Series sporting director. “And as we couldn’t go to him, he has clearly decided to come to us.” In spite of the difficulties they have training in the off-season, the divers still manage to combine their twists and somersaults into ever-more-complex routines. Their intricate manoeuvres require ever greater levels of physical fitness. When you dive from a height of 27m, you enter the water at about 53mph and it feels rock hard. The water will punish even the tiniest mistake. Orlando Duque discovered that for himself three weeks before the season was due to begin. He hit the water hard from one dive in his hometown of Cali in Colombia, where he’d extended a 10m board up to 27m for training purposes. He barely had the strength to make it to the side of the pool. A raft of hospital tests thankfully found no harm done. Duque has therefore come to Rapa Nui with acute pain to contend with, though none of the divers would speak of such a thing. Only patched up body-parts – chiefly the feet, ankles, fingers and wrists – and protectors on their knees, thighs and arms are testament to the minor injuries caused by diving from eight floors up. Mother Nature sets the agenda on what should be the second day of training. The rain had already pattered against the window-panes for hours during the night – unusual for a place that gets only 111mm of precipitation a year. We understand why the next morning: Japan has been struck by a huge earthquake overnight and a tsunami warning has been issued to the whole Pacific. The wave was due to reach Rapa Nui by about 5.45pm. That meant no training but a demand from officials to pack a rucksack with essentials – passport, mobile phone, long trousers and sturdy shoes – and follow the evacuation procedure. Suddenly, free time to relax and switch off, which the divers would normally kill for, has been replaced by preparations for a swift exit. No one is afraid, but the agitation is palpable. Is the wave going to hit? And if so, how hard? Even though there are more important things to think about at the moment, Steven Lobue is thinking about diving. “We hope that it won’t be too bad and that the platform will survive the tsunami,” he says. The weather station at the airport eventually gives the all-clear. The tsunami has spared the island. Relieved, the divers wander off to bed earlier than usual after dinner. 54

Served by priests, curanto chicken is prepared according to ancient tradition

Everyone is given a piece of chicken after diving. That’s the local custom

Between rounds, the spectators discuss the dives they’ve just seen while the masseurs tend to the divers

photography: Dean Treml/Red Bull Cliff Diving (3), Romina Amato/Red Bull Cliff Diving

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Title-holder Gary Hunt (left) managed to get his hands on the winner’s trophy for a moment. The Englishman ended the first round in third place

photography: Romina Amato/Red Bull Cliff Diving (2), Dean Treml/Red Bull Cliff Diving (2)

What a great start to the season: Orlando Duque (COL), ninetime World Champion takes victory

ife on the island comes to a standstill for a second time on Saturday, though this time for jollier reasons. It looks as if all the island’s residents have descended on Mataveri Otay Bay. The cliffs around the diving platform are well-attended, but the best view of the action is to be had from a boat out on the water. Local priests bless the divers while, as is tradition, a chicken is cooked over an open flame in a hole in the ground. Each of the divers is given his piece of ‘curanto’ after the presentation ceremony has taken place. Jorge Ferzuli, the new boy, has drawn start number one and gets the season underway. He launches into the deep with his arms spread wide. He has barely had time to emerge from the water before being roundly applauded by the spectators who then make their feelings loudly known when they see the judges’ scores. The diving format is simple: each dive in the first two rounds has a degree of difficulty of 3.6 points so the preliminary score is determined purely by how the divers execute them. Scores for the third and fourth rounds depend on degree of difficulty and

execution. Ukraine’s Slava Polyeshchuk is in the lead after the first dive thanks to his clean technique. Gary Hunt is third after a nervy jump and Orlando Duque is down in seventh. The leaderboard looks a little more as you’d expect it to after round two: Duque takes the top spot with his absent friend Eber Pava’s trademark dive. ‘Brilliant Brit’ Gary Hunt is missing some of the resolve which so marked him out in 2010. He’s concentrated more on the mental side of things this year, but he’s lacking training in the water. His trump card – the triple somersault with four twists – isn’t incisive enough on this occasion. The body language exhibited by Duque, who Hunt beat in 2010, on the other hand is absolutely brimming with confidence, even before his final dive – a double backwards somersault with four twists. One of the judges awards him the only full-score ‘10’ of the event. Duque carries the day and takes the overall lead. “I got out of the water, saw the scores and I thought to myself, ‘It felt like that too!’” he says afterwards. “I want to get the title back. That’s my stated goal for the season.” As the newly anointed birdman of Rapa Nui, the Duke might well achieve it. For all event and diver info, go to: www.redbullcliffdiving.com

The first 10 of the season: and the winner sensed it as soon as he surfaced 55

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EIGHT MEN WHO'VE ACHIEVED EVERYTHING. EIGHT BOYS FOR WHOM IT’S ALL STILL A DREAM. A WEEK WHERE PAST AND FUTURE OUTSHINE THE PRESENT Words: Stefan Wagner Photography: Gian Paul Lozza

The Shoulders of Giants Legends: Pete Sampras (right rear) and Henri Leconte, (right front) get together with young talents (Oliver Golding, left rear, and Jiri Vesely, left front) at the BNP Paribas Open in Zurich, the tennis tournament where generations meet

A Gift. Two matches in two days are no longer an option for the 39-year-old thighs of Pete Sampras. The spine of Henri Leconte, 47, has two discs that have been screwed together ever since they slipped. Ivan Lendl, 51, wears reading glasses and would rather be interviewed standing because his back plays up when he sits. Tim Henman, 36, can be seen massaging his right shoulder between rallies when it’s his serve. The operation scars that cover 43-year-old Thomas Muster’s knees look like something straight out of a sewing manual. And a thick abdominal belt warms the back of Goran Ivanisevic, 39, who talks about all the weight training he has to do to take the strain off the damaged cartilage in his knee. Michael Stich, 42, wears a knee bandage. Mark Philippoussis, 34, already wears two – and talks about the extraordinary success of his recent knee surgery. It was his sixth. In early March, Zurich played host to players with a total of 25 World Grand Slam tennis titles, US$132 million in prize money and who’d together spent 562 weeks at the top of the men’s world rankings. The ATP Champions Tour was in town, and it was a cheerful travelling circus, despite its protagonists’ signs of wear and tear. This series reliably satisfies tennis fans’ 56

nostalgic longings; all over the world, the good old days are yesterday. Just a few days prior to Zurich, an exhibition match between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi saw 19,000 spectators packed into New York’s Madison Square Garden. And now, at the Zurich press centre, a poster instructs accredited journalists to curb any personal enthusiasm they might have, with the instruction: “Absolutely no autograph requests in the media centre.” As long as the whole thing stays entertaining, players’ athletic ambitions on the Champions Tour are more or less a matter of personal preference: Philippoussis and Muster steadfastly oppose time’s relentless march and define their matches as preparation for the real ATP Tour (Muster still clenches his fist with just as much determination as he did back in the 1990s, while Philippoussis can still boast a faster serve

Four of the eight ‘Champions’ at this very special tournament in Zurich: the golden years may have taken their toll, but these legends still play great tennis

Michael Stich, 42

Thomas Muster, 43

Henri Leconte, 47

Pete Sampras, 39

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“AT THE FIRST MATCH THERE WERE AT LEAST 1,000 SPECTATORS IN THE HALL. NORMALLY, THE ONLY PEOPLE WE PLAY IN FRONT OF ARE EITHER RELATED TO US OR OUR COACHES” than Nadal, Federer or Djokovic). Crowd-pleaser Henri Leconte and the somewhat more reserved Michael Stich guarantee that the event doesn’t run too much risk of turning into just another of those vile points-counting exercises. These two, long since free of any lingering pretensions to athleticism, prove that a certain combination of charm and genius can still be enough to harness the considerable will of a tennis ball. The audience likes this mix, and the sponsors like it too (the Zurich event’s lead sponsor, BNP Paribas, is also the world’s largest tennis sponsor). The media are all over it, and the venue’s VIP area is sold out far in advance. The only really difficult thing about making money on a star-studded tournament like this is obtaining one of its few available ATP licenses. Even so, the folks behind the Zurich event decided to go the extra mile and add a twist which is something of a first for the sport: the week-long event bears the motto “Where champions meet talents” and weaves an invitation tournament of eight upand-coming juniors into the competition between the legends. The invitees are eight of the world’s best – the next and nextnext generation of challengers to Nadal, Djokovic and del Potro, and in just a few years they might even be serious contenders for a Grand Slam title. Presently, their names are known only to insiders, at best. The favourite to win this tournament is Jiri Vesely, 17, from the Czech Republic, who is the world’s number one in the 18-and-under category. At the start of the year, Vesely won the junior championships at the Australian Open in Melbourne – in both singles and doubles. Not one of today’s generation of top players managed that during their junior career. ... “Zee Cohrd.” The first encounter between the ‘Champions’ and the ‘Talents’ is an informal affair, the day before the tournament is to begin, with the sounds of last-minute hammering and drilling echoing around the hall. One side of the practice court is occupied by Henri Leconte, the world’s former number five, and he stands opposite England’s Oliver Golding and Croatia’s Mate Pavic, currently numbers four and five respectively in the world junior ranking. Both of them were born in 1993, during Leconte’s final year as a professional player and during the reign of Tina Turner and Cher in the UK album charts. Golding and Pavic propel the ball towards the net with an obviously casual air, perhaps either because of some youthful misconceptions about coolness or in clumsily exaggerated respect for the legend on the other side of the net. Leconte’s face darkens; he shouts at them something about “training” and “properly”, and starts playing harder. “Hit the ball!” he shouts again and again. “Hit it!” Before long, the voice of the man heralded in Zurich as the “tennis clown” begins to crack: “Hit… the… ball!!” The two boys actually are beginning to hit harder now, but the ball keeps landing either way down in the net or way out of bounds. Leconte is practically roaring now: 58

“…OVER the net, INTO the court!” With his high-pitched voice and French accent (“...zee nett … zee cohrd”), it sounds perhaps a bit less insistent than it should. Shortly thereafter, as if to underline the seriousness of his concern, Leconte grimaces, rolls his eyes and stomps off the court in self-righteous exasperation. One couldn’t be blamed for thinking that weeks billed as “Where champions meet talents” call for a different kind of Monday afternoon. New World. For the tournament’s first two days, the juniors seem sloppy and pale in direct comparison with the legends. It’s all just too much for them – too many Grand Slam titles, too much attention… even a half-filled hall designed for 3,000 spectators is too big an audience. “I wasn’t thinking about my game at all,” says Alexander Ritschard, a 16-year-old Swiss who spends half the year training in the US, following his first match. “I was just afraid of making a fool of myself.” These teenagers come from a world where there are neither autograph seekers nor journalists; nor are they used to seeing prize money, line-umpires or ball-kids. The sum of between €50,000 and €100,000 per season they need to cover coaching, equipment and travel will buy a chance at starting an international career and the guarantee that they’ll not get soft. Even during the junior tournament at Wimbledon, they’re housed in a youth hostel that seeks to do little more than protect its inmates from the elements. In Zurich, the juniors get their first taste of what it could be like if their big career dreams come true. They hear that one of Pete Sampras’ conditions for participating was being flown in from the States by private jet. For one week, they get the superstar treatment and stay at the Dolder Grand, the best place in town with five stars and a €500-a-night price-tag for the cheapest room. They experience a chauffeuring service with uniformed drivers, a players’ lounge with muted lighting, waitresses who might as well be models, and Michelin-starred food. “We even got brand new balls for our training sessions,” says Liam Broady, 17, a lefty from Manchester who’s number 27 in the junior ranking, “and there were like a thousand people watching my first match. Normally, the only people we play in front of are either related to us or coaching us.” The encounter between the generations here in Zurich is meant not as just a nice metaphor, but as something very

Four of the eight invited ‘Talents’: Jiri Vesely kicked off 2011 by winning both the singles and doubles titles at the Australian Open junior championships, something none of today’s top players can claim

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Jiri Vesely, 17

Oliver Golding, 17

Dimitri Bretting, 18

Alexander Ritschard, 16

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Goran Ivanisevic, 39

Mate Pavic, 17

real. The oldies and the youngsters play a mixed doubles tournament, train together, and bump into each other in the players’ lounge, in the hotel’s breakfast room and in the backs of the chauffeuring service’s limousines. “I asked Tim Henman if he knew anything that works for nerves,” says Liam Broady, “because I get nervous pretty often. And he said: you just have to keep thinking about how you plan to score your next point – that’ll leave no room in your head to be nervous.” In the next match, Broady is leading Vesely 5:0 in the second set. But then he’s abandoned by both his nerves and his serve – costing him the set and the match. “Tim’s tip was good,” he says afterwards. “I just didn’t put it into practice well enough.” Switzerland’s Next Federer. Zurich is also where we encounter the man who has what must be the world’s most hopeless job: his name is Roland Burtscher, he’s from Austria, and he’s head men’s coach for the Swiss Tennis Federation. Burtscher’s job description, simplified a bit, goes like this: to bring forth the next Roger Federer. There are two young Swiss players participating in the tournament, the lanky

Tim Henman, 36

Liam Broady, 17

They’re both from the same country (Croatia), and even the same town (Split). Both are lefthanded. The one is the idol of the other – Mate Pavic’s biggest strength is his serve: “Like Goran,” says the 17-year-old. “When Goran won Wimbledon in 2001, I was at the big reception for him in Split. I was only eight years old back then. But at that moment, I knew: someday, I wanted to stand where Goran was standing”

Alexander Ritschard and the lively Dimitri Bretting, who – at the age of 18 – already knows what a stress fracture of the hip feels like. “I don’t exactly have the most stable joints,” he confesses. Bretting walks away from training against Thomas Muster with one very unhappy arm, but he still manages to claim third place in the junior tournament; the reward is his second-ever press conference. His first one took place a year ago on exactly the same spot. “For the youngsters, this tournament is as important as a Grand Slam,” says Burtscher. “There’s no better opportunity to present yourself.” And Burtscher adds that the juniors “are playing for their lives here.” That’s to be taken almost literally – because for some of the athletes’ families it’s about attracting sponsors or agencies in order to avert financial ruin. These days, the 1980s story about Goran Ivenisevic’s father selling the family home to finance his son’s tennis training no longer seems like an amazing, singular case. Training young tennis players has become a worldwide arms race. Two decades ago, Michael Stich had time to finish school and decide against university studies before starting to train on a professional level at the age of 18. Today, anyone who misses

If you ask the juniors who they think is the biggest talent among them, they’ll all say Liam Broady. The English player suffers from occasional nerves, but role model Tim Henman has some good advice: “You just have to keep thinking about how you plan to score your next point – that’ll leave no room in your head to be nervous.” The biggest test for the nerves of British tennis players is Wimbledon. The last victory by a domestic player was in 1936, by Fred Perry

You’ve got to love it FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION: WHAT IVAN LENDL, 51, HAS TO SAY TO JUNIOR PLAYER FILIP HORANSKY, 17 Ivan Lendl was the world’s best junior tennis player in 1978. As a professional between 1979 and 1994, he made more than US$21 million in prize money, won 94 tournaments (including eight Grand Slams) and spent 270 weeks as the tennis world’s number one. After his career ended, he quit playing tennis entirely for 14 years due to back problems. These days, he’s plays four times a week, one hour each time. “Enough to hurt my golf game,” he quips. Lendl has five daughters, three of whom are said to be exceptional golf talents. He also plans to open a tennis academy in the autumn. He is the oldest participant here in Zurich, having turned 51 as the week began. He’s the declared idol of junior tournament winner Filip Horansky. Ivan Lendl, the kid next to you – Filip Horansky – was born in January 1993, your next-to-last year on the pro circuit. Ask him who’s his greatest idol, and he’ll say, Ivan Lendl. IVAN LENDL: The kid really has to work on his taste. There are others on offer – Federer, Nadal and Djokovic… Horansky says you stand for a unique kind of work ethic. Is he old-fashioned? You just can’t compare his and my eras. It’s a totally different game these

these days, though, is that you just have way more good players. It used to be that, for the top-seeded player, the tournament really only got underway at the quarter-finals – everything before that was a warm-up. Today you can lose to anyone, anytime. Has anything changed in terms of the attitude that a top athlete needs to have? Not at all. You have to work hard, and you have to love it, to have fun at it. You need to give it everything you’ve got. And you’ve just got to love it.

Ivan Lendl, 51

because you got every possible type of support. And the communist system had another, even bigger advantage: it motivated you to become good enough to get out of it. Three of your daughters are outstanding golfers. They’re golfers, let’s leave it at that. Is there some personal contribution you can make to your daughters’ careers? Well, since they’re my daughters, they won’t be listening to me. Your own daughters will listen to just about anyone more than their own father. But it’s certainly no coincidence that your daughters have become successful athletes. It was important to me that they do some sport, regardless of which

Filip Horansky, 17

“THEY’RE MY DAUGHTERS, SO THEY DON’T LISTEN TO ME. DAUGHTERS WILL LISTEN TO ANYONE MORE THAN THEIR OWN FATHER” days. It’s become more aggressive, the players are all bigger, more athletic, better-trained… and they just plain play better tennis than we ever did. Then why don’t we see any teenagers in the men’s top 100? The kids I see here really aren’t bad, but the competition in men’s tennis is huge. A good junior used to be able to keep up with the grown men. But today? Not a chance. Thirty years ago, the main thing was to play good tennis. Today you have to be in top shape technically, tactically, mentally and – most of all – athletically to have a chance. You had to be all that back then, too – I’m proof of that. The difference

Sounds like it shouldn’t be all that much of a chore. If you have to force yourself to do your work, then you need to go looking for different work. An Ivan Lendl born 35 years later would be as old as Filip Horansky… Well, Filip is 17, I’d be 16. …would the young Lendl have a crack at success today? If I were young today, I’d play golf. Then I’d never have to step down. You two come from the same part of the world, but you grew up in different political and social systems. Did that or does that play a role? The communist system was a good thing for athletes in lots of ways,

sport. And they chose golf. Their lives would have been pretty pathetic if they hadn’t chosen any sport at all. How so? Because without hard training and consistent work they wouldn’t have enjoyed any privileges during their childhood. If you could pass on just three things to a young athlete, what would those be? You’ve got to work hard. And you’ve got to be able to enjoy working hard. Hard work, talent and a bit of luck are what make achievement possible. There’s no other way. And the earlier you get that, the greater your chances are of making it.

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the final fork in the road – at the age of become so challenging athletically that 14 – might as well throw in the towel. a teenager has no chance at all, bodyDo the kids feel the pressure that wise, of prevailing. So it’s no coincidence comes from knowing that their career that all eight juniors in Zurich use a twohas so far cost the same as a family handed backhand; this lets them hit the home and a new car? “It’s important ball with more strength. Seven of the that they feel it. Because it’s important eight champions still play using a classic that they learn to deal with it. After one-handed backhand. all, the really difficult years,” says The battle for those coveted spots Burtscher, who clawed his way to among the top 100 is getting harder and 315 in the ATP ranking in 1994, “still harder at levels lower and lower: 20 lie ahead of them, after entering the years ago, the number 1,000 in the ATP men’s tour. After their junior careers world ranking was a good amateur club are over, most of them will face a player – today, he’s a pro. Mark Philippoussis, 34 daily battle for economic survival What’s more, alongside association that will go on for years.” football, tennis is the world’s most The talents are confident in their ability to handle You’re a tennis junior up until intensely professionalised sport. In Leconte and Stich; some even think they can deal with December 31 of the year you turn 18. the ATP ranking valid during the Lendl. When asked who they’d rather not play against, What awaits players on January 1 of Zurich tournament, the top 20 includes they point to that 34-year-old who still serves faster the following year is the lowest level of than Federer, Nadal or Djokovic. Mark Philippoussis is players from 12 countries. The top 100 even feeling strong enough to re-enter the ATP Tour men’s tennis, the Future Tour, a grabcomprises players from 27 nations – bag of upwardly mobile young players, from Taiwan to Uruguay, and from downwardly mobile older players and Kazakhstan to Canada. a lot of unfulfilled hopes. “Compared Tim Henman mentions in passing with life in the Futures, the Junior that, just recently, the Chinese Tour is a petting zoo,” says Burtscher. government designated tennis a school “I’ve been clear about this to my sport. “And with that,” says the Briton, players: you have to really appreciate who was world number four in 2002, this hotel here in Zurich, because “the number of tennis players in the you’re not going to experience anything world was doubled literally overnight.” like it again for a long time.” As of yet, there are no Chinese players This is the dry spell that one has to in the ATP’s top 300. One can expect endure before being able to survive as a commando-style campaign to a tennis pro. Rule-of-thumb: starting change that, however. at a rank of around 200, you can pay your bills. From 100 upwards, you can The Little Prince. The big crowd-pleaser even save a bit – but getting that far in Zurich is Henri Leconte. The little has never taken longer than it does crowd-pleaser, on the other hand, is today. In the 1980s and ’90s, the step the youngest of the juniors. He’s British, up from junior to men’s tennis still he comes from Bedfordshire, and his really was something of a step up: name is Josh Sapwell. Even a layman Boris Becker and Michael Chang won will instantly recognise this barely their first Grand Slam tournaments 15-year-old’s exceptional talent. He plays at 17. Today, the step up of yore has using rather odd technique, he’s full of Josh Sapwell, 15 turned into an obstacle course. In fact, curious ideas, and he’s by far the brashest 2010 was the first year without a single His dad’s a mechanic, his mum’s a cleaner, his coach of all the juniors: in the intergenerational teenager among the ATP’s top 100. mixed doubles, he hits four winners in a is a seriously ill club tennis instructor, and he’s being The experts are pretty unanimous row off Philippoussis serve; he also argues looked after by two young pros who are sidelined due to injuries. There’s nothing typical about Josh Sapwell, on just why this is the case: the speed with the referee, makes life hell for Pavic, of play has been increasing for decades 15: he’s even getting dangerous for the best 17-year-olds and comes close to beating Golding. now, with the game looking more and Sapwell’s story is every bit as amazing more like a one-dimensional shoot-out as is his precocious talent: his father thanks to better racquets with better strings and a generation is a mechanic, his mother a cleaner, and no one in his family of servers like Goran Ivanisevic and Mark Philippoussis. In a plays tennis. Back when he was three, young Josh happened to step-by-step effort to counter this, the balls have been made be spotted by Neil Claxton, a club tennis teacher, while flogging heavier and the court surfaces rougher. Even today’s Wimbledon an old tennis ball with a racquet to pass the time. Claxton was uses a different mix of grass than it did 10 years ago – one that so impressed that he made his parents an offer to coach their makes the balls bounce higher. Changes like these have slowed son free of charge. Claxton was soon to become far more than the game back down, rendering it a more attractive and little Josh’s most important athletic mentor, and he remains understandable spectator sport. But at the same time, it has that today even if a mysterious case of chronic fatigue prevents 62

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him from coaching his protégé himself. The job of day-in, day-out training on the court has been taken over by Marc Beckles and Dominic Ross-Hurst, aged 23 and 25. These two are not experienced coaches, but Future Tour players who are currently sidelined as a result of injuries. Despite – or perhaps because of – his not-exactly-textbook background, Sapwell is the best 15-year-old player in the world; serious opponents are hardly to be found anymore among other players his age, and since last year he has been under contract with IMG, the same management agency that markets players including Roger Federer. Coach Ross-Hurst is actually happy that his charge in Zurich lost all three matches: “He has the opportunity here to learn how to deal with defeat. At first he was shocked at just how good the three older players are. But he got used to their level so fast, it was almost terrifying.” In Zurich, Josh Sapwell does really badly in one of his three matches – it’s the one against Swiss player Bretting. It was

he did. He showed just what you can make possible through work and determination. And I admire that.” What did Lendl have to say to him? “That I should work hard every day, and that I’ll only make it if I don’t go out with my friends.” But come on, he’s got to have heard all that before from his own coach… “But when Ivan Lendl says it to you,” says Filip Horansky, “it’s something totally different.” Horansky himself leaves Zurich different than when he came and more fiercely determined than ever. “I’m going to give it everything, really everything.” Hit The Ball. Zurich’s concluding Saturday ends with the final round of the mixed doubles: it’s Goran Ivanisevic and Mate Pavic against Henri Leconte and Jiri Vesely. The outcome here is secondary; what it’s really about is ending the week on a friendly note, with some humour and a few trick shots. And it’s at this point that things finally come full circle: Henri Leconte’s at the net, and Mate Pavic, the young Croatian,

Sapwell’s FIRST MATCH IN FRONT OF A TV CAMERA was STREAMED LIVE ON THE INTERNET. “HE KNEW THAT HIS PARENTS AND COACH WERE WATCHING BACK HOME. HE WAS SO NERVOUS, HE COULD HARDLY STAND UPRIGHT” Josh’s first match in front of a TV camera, and it was streamed live on the Internet. “He knew his parents and coach were watching at home,” says Ross-Hurst. “Josh was so nervous, he could hardly stand upright.” It sounds almost like he’s relieved that his little charge can still be bested on the court. Off-court, however, that isn’t quite so difficult. Faced with a question to be answered, Sapwell scans over all corners of the room and fidgets around with his fingers before blurting out a few awkward syllables. He mentions that he met Ivan Lendl. “Asked him if tennis is still fun when you’re old.” And? “Said yeah.” Good news, huh Josh? “Yeah,” he lifts his gaze and grins. “Yeah!” Filip Horansky’s Big Moment. Mark Philippoussis prevails against Tim Henman to win the final match between the Champions, and Goran Ivanisevic beats Ivan Lendl to take third place. The juniors’ final match is won by Filip Horansky playing against Oliver Golding, and third place goes to Dimitri Bretting playing against Jiri Vesely. Horansky’s big moment in Zurich wasn’t his tournament victory, however – “That was just my biggest win so far.” Horansky’s truly big moment was his encounter with Ivan Lendl. “We talked with each other in the players’ lounge. He’s my idol.” The 17-year-old Slovakian native – born one year before Lendl’s career ended – grew up watching the latter’s matches on YouTube and peppering his coach with questions about the great player. “He’s fascinating… it’s fascinating what he was able to achieve. Today each of us has a tennis coach, a mental coach, a personal fitness trainer – you can’t do without them anymore. Ivan Lendl didn’t have any of that. He didn’t need it. Nobody worked as hard for his success as

is on the baseline. Pavić swings hard, Leconte volleys effortlessly… twice, three times… and then the Frenchman, midway through the rally, shouts out for all to hear: “Hit the ball!” Laughter in the audience. Pavic swings harder, Leconte volleys effortlessly; and again: “Hit the ball! Hit it!” Laughter. Then Pavic draws his racquet way back to execute a wide forehand with all his strength, and he hits the ball straight on; it misses hitting Leconte by mere centimetres, rocketing past him and onto the court. Uproarious laughter, thunderous applause. Leconte wheels around wordlessly, takes a couple of steps towards the baseline and is silent for a moment. Then he casts a glance over his shoulder, acknowledging Pavic with a wink. French Open: May 17, to June 5, 2011, Roland Garros, Paris, France: www.rolandgarros.com

Shaking hands: Thomas Muster and Josh Sapwell (rear), Dimitri Bretting and Mark Philippoussis (front).

Wild West Waverider The mystical allure of Irelandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s west coast has drawn tourists for generations. Now its untamed Atlantic waves are pulling in a tiny, but ultra-dedicated band of hardcore surfers Words: Anthony Rowlinson Photography: Mickey Smith

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Splendid isolation: Off Irelandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s west coast lies a surfing paradise unreachable to all but the most passionate, most committed riders. Cold Atlantic waters, cliffs, bad weatherâ&#x20AC;Ś these obstacles are forgotten in the beauty of moments such as this

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The joys of surfing waves such as Aileen’s, which breaks at the foot of the Cliffs of Moher, aren’t easily bestowed. A perilous hike (below, left), or a Jet Ski (below), is needed to get close to many of the best waves. And the danger of such powerful swell is always apparent; Mickey Smith (opposite) takes five with some of his camera equipment. Note flippers, The Surfer’s Journal and waterproof camera cases

Additional Photography: RV Photo (1)

he jet-black Jet Ski sputters to a halt half a mile offshore. Out of gas, water in the pipes… Trouble, whatever. Mickey Smith and his small crew of surfing buddies are now powerless and bobbing around in the deep, dark, leaden Atlantic swells off the Aran Islands that sit near Ireland’s west coast, somewhere between the city of Galway in the north and the town of Kilkee to the south. There’s no script for this. Their craft is kaput; the coast a fiercehard half-hour paddle away. Grey skies, big seas, no one watching out for them. Nothing for it but to lash the ’ski to a buoy and make a break for the shore, catching any wave that might help. Bedraggled, core-cold and chattery-toothed, they drag themselves towards the slate-dark rocks that pass for a beach where they wash up and, after a treacherous clamber, head inland. Even on shore there’s no swift respite from the jagged chill: their only option is to shamble along a track and hitch a ride – any ride – and then find some shelter. A passing farmer takes pity… back of the van… to a pub: a messed-up crew of surfers who might have drowned if things had worked out worse. “They filled us with soup and Guinness and whiskey,” Mickey chuckles. “They took pity on us, they could see we were in a bad way.” He pauses, with a trace of a sheepish smile on his lips as he surveys the hardscrabble landscape we’re trucking through in his surf-wagon Ford: “Then we had to ask them for a ride out to rescue our ’ski.” Generosity and bemusement earned them a lift, later, with a local fisherman “who moaned all the way” then told the lads: “You tied your Jet Ski to my buoy. So it’s mine…” before cracking into a mile-wide smile and towing them all home, ’ski ’n’ all.

‘Hard’, ‘black’, ‘cold’, ‘powerful’, ‘mighty’, ‘Atlantic Guinness’… These are just some of the words Mickey Smith has used to describe the surf that has become his life’s guiding passion. There’s another: ‘beauty’

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ondi, this ain’t. Nor is it the Gold Coast, nor SoCal, nor the Mentawai Islands, Jeffreys Bay, Bali, Hawaii… This is a different kind of surf paradise: an idyll for the few (the very few) to whom it makes sense; a watery hell for those who yearn for sunny dreamscapes of blue skies and perfect breaks. For all its elemental magnificence, Ireland’s west coast is fickle, cold (did we mention already how cold it is?), unwelcoming and just… hard, hard, hard. It’s a dangerous place; deadly, even, and fittingly wrapped in myth. Celtic legend has it that the ancient rulers of this land, the Tuatha Dé Danann, tried to escape the arrival of Christianity by turning themselves into horses and hiding in local caves. Generations later, seeking freedom, they plunged to their deaths in the sea, their spirits captured in the waves. History more concrete is that of the Spanish Armada, sections of which ran aground in 1588, depleted and broken, after violent storms, at a spot now known as Spanish Point. Although far from home, the survivors believed they would be safe, at least, on Catholic soil. All were slaughtered. Mickey Smith is driving through this storied hinterland towards the Cliffs of Moher, 10km or so north of Lahinch (An Leacht), a wee town blessed by a graceful sandy arc of beach that forever smiles at the surly Atlantic. It’s a nascent west Ireland surf hub, whose board shops and emerging cafe culture are the tangibles of surfdom, which is slowly creeping up on Lahinch’s more established golf holiday trade (it’s home to 18 of the country’s most popular holes). This is where surf groms come to learn; where old hands get an easy kick and where, once in a while, records are set: on May 14, 2006, 44 surfers rode the same wave, upping the 42-mark set in Rio de Janeiro a year earlier. These beguiling sands aren’t for Mickey though. At 30, he has spent two of his three decades surfing and half his life searching the world for his version of truth on a wave. “When I was a kid, my mum’s boyfriend was a musician and there were always musicians going through the house,” he says. “I picked up various instruments and I was in bands playing three nights a week by the time I was 11. So by 16, when I left school, I’d saved enough cash to take off. I just hit the road.” And then some – his road stretched all the way to the other side of the world, western Australia, where teenage Mickey fell in with surfers, travellers, musicians. “None of it was planned,” he says. “I just rolled with it. My mum [Sue]’s a teacher, and she always encouraged me to follow what I believed in and not what I was taught in school. So I stayed in Australia for a few years, but wherever I went, surfing was the driver. It was always ‘Where’s the next mission? Where can we go that people aren’t going?’ “There was just a little unit of us who travelled together and we had the same mind-set: we were looking for the same, really specific things – heavy waves, isolated places and being up for putting in hard yards to make it happen. It had to be people who could see the possibilities in something, rather than saying ‘nah’.” Mickey, a Penzance Cornishman – “from a family of pirates” – moved from Australia through Iceland, Tahiti, the Azores islands and Madeira, all the while experiencing each location as intensely, as intimately, as he could and documenting all he saw with his lens. His love of photography was born of

“ We were looking for specific things: heavy waves, isolated places” 69

a desire to record the “magic beauty” of moments he was experiencing in the water, and he’d been tinkering with cameras since getting his first, a gift, aged nine. “Even when I was younger, I’d go for a surf and then I’d go back out with a camera,” says Mickey. “I’d always be in the water thinking ‘that’s beautiful’, and I’d just have to shoot something. It’s amazing to be able to try to convey that side of it. There’s some kind of spark of divinity when you’re right up close to the elements, something that you can’t put your finger on, but that you identify with. I like to feel in awe of it and to be happy I’m in that state – a sense of wonder that little kids have.” This simple, instinctive desire kept Mickey travelling for more than a decade, until, one day, a funny thing happened. Returning for a season to Ireland’s west coast – a place where he’d experienced a special harmony since his first hike there aged 17 – he stopped. Here, for the first time in his life, he felt a sense of homecoming, of spiritual belonging, that had always proved elusive before. “The coast here has so much potential for incredible waves,” he says, “and the experiences I’ve had over the years have convinced me of that. The culture here is so similar to where I grew up in Cornwall that I felt relaxed, without a need to go off on another adventure. There are enough adventures on my doorstep every day.” He’s about to prove it: threading his black Transit van through narrow lanes better suited to mountain bikes (and chased at every farm gate by Border Collies that seem to identify the van as a large, lost sheep), Mickey climbs closer and closer to what appears to be a range of hills. “Yeah, but there’s nothing on the other side. Just a sheer, 200m drop.” He’s not kidding: we’re looking from the land side at the Cliffs of Moher, a range of sandstone precipices that mark in the most dramatic fashion the edge of this part of County Clare. Out of the van and Mickey leads us across a field, ducking under some wires intended to halt overly 70

Clockwise from above: freeze-frame captures the majesty of the Irish Atlantic; cold and Celtic: there are sunshine breaks, here, too – just not so many; Mickey Smith’s nephew, Riley, after whom he has named one of his favourite, most isolated waves; winter surfing off Ireland demands a heavy wetsuit and body armour

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that, there’s a sense of wonder and of being exposed to the elements. It gives you a feeling of humility and a sense of how fragile you are. People are so wrapped up in their own worlds with a sense of security. But you only have to look at what happened in Japan. That’s real natural power.” In a small sop to Aileen’s’ might, there’s now a survival box tucked on a rock, above the water line where Aileen’s breaks, containing fluids, a survival blanket, some chocolate – enough to get a stranded surfer (maybe, one unfortunate day, Mickey or McCarthy) through the night. “When the weather’s bad there’d be no getting close to you,” says Mickey, “and a helicopter definitely couldn’t winch down those cliffs in a storm.”

M “ It’s dangerous, of course. But beyond that, there’s wonder” curious tourists in their tracks, and shouts (it’s very windy): “BASE-jumpers love it here!” On all fours, we creep to the precipice and peek over at raw Atlantic fury, smashing into the unyielding shoulders of Ireland. “That’s Aileen’s,” bellows Mickey, using one hand to hold his bobble hat, the other to grab grass and hang on. “It’s one of the best waves in the world. Lauren’s is another, just down the coast.” And what a wave! Aileen’s is beautiful – and huge. Even from 200m up, its scale and curvature are manifest, as are its speed, power and the ferocity with which it rolls in, backed by the heft of the Atlantic Ocean, before slamming into the foot of the cliffs. Surf that? Down there? It’s only in the past four years, in fact, that Aileen’s has been surfed and even then only when Mickey, in a small team that included local surf legend John McCarthy, decided they’d never rest till they’d tried this wave. “I was hiking the coast in winter when I saw these explosions from the base of the cliffs and I figured there had to be a really special wave breaking down there. But I couldn’t see it properly,” he says. McCarthy thought Mickey had imagined Aileen’s, until, months later in another heavy swell, he saw the same himself. With a Jet Ski, extreme caution and a great deal of patience, they were the first to taste Aileen’s’ salty embrace. And it was instantly apparent this was no ordinary wave. Apart from its sheer power, there was the very obvious risk of being smashed to death after a loss of balance, or a wrong choice of line. “Of course it’s dangerous,” says Mickey in a soft lilt completely at odds with a man who rides such deadly giants. “But beyond

ickey Smith, photographer, surfer, musician, traveller, is the closest thing to a free spirit you’re likely to encounter in the money-hurried 21st century, and he’s unblinkered about the fact that a life spent chasing epic surf, rather than a buck, could never be for everyone. “I’m very lucky with some of the people I’ve met through the years,” he reflects. “Like my landlord, Antoin, who lets the rent roll for a month if I’m skint or will put some of my pictures up in his restaurant so they might sell.” It’s clear that cash is of little interest to Mickey, except in as much as a certain amount is needed to keep him eating, surfing, searching. And that clarity of purpose, a singularity of vision, is frequently expressed through the muscular lyricism of his photographs, a small selection of which grace these pages. But it’s actually best articulated by the simple, determined act of living the life he chooses on terms that aren’t dictated by boss or bank; rather, by nature. It’s this article of faith that ensures his quest for the ultimate wave goes on. “In the middle of winter it’s pretty hard to get motivated,” he admits. “You’re in a six-mill wetsuit, with gloves, hood and boots but the water’s down to 6ºC, which means you’re freezing whatever you do, even without the windchill. So unless you’re really, really passionate, it’s not going to happen. It has to be a natural thing, like getting out of bed. And you never know when things might change, so you always have to be respectful.” He laughs off injuries, such as the broken arm which took four months to heal. Or those to friends who’ve broken legs and backs. “I guess it’s part of what I do and you try to put it to the back of your head,” he says. “Sometimes it’s really serious and on some waves there’s a chance of death. When you start, it’s not in your mind, but when you do hear of it happening to someone, maybe a friend somewhere else in the world, it’s pretty horrific. We’re such a small unit here that we really look out for each other. Fingers crossed it’ll never happen…”

few miles south of Lahinch, through farmland, past Quilty, the cliff-tops rise again and the coastline once more makes a brutal interface with the Atlantic. Mickey’s driving to a wave he’s christened ‘Riley’s’, after his two-and-a-half year old nephew, whose mother, Mickey’s sister, Cherry, died last year. She became ill during pregnancy and subsequently contracted MRSA. This, Mickey explains, is a special place, discovered only after miles and months of hiking, looking for a wave sufficiently isolated, sufficiently difficult, sufficiently unlikely ever to attract a crowd, to honour the memory of his late sister. “She always wanted to know what I was doing, where I was. And this is what it’s all about. It’s a spooky place. But I love it.” Fancy surfing the Irish coast? Get on board at www.isasurf.ie

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MASTERS As crowds flock to LA for the biggest-ever retrospective of street art and graffiti, we showcase the artists most likely to follow in the footsteps of Banksy and Shepard Fairey Words: Caroline Ryder 72

photography: Thomas Butler (1), David Ruiz (1)

The New

Born in its most current form in 1970s New York, graffiti and street art have made the unlikely transition from public scourge to a world in which the works of artists, like this piece by Smash 137, are eagerly sought after by collectors and curators alike

he rise of the leading pop-art movement of our time has been somewhat improbable. From the clanging, dirty New York subways that were its first canvases to white-walled galleries in London, New York, or Tokyo, graffiti has entranced teenagers and art collectors alike. Now the movement’s birthplace is finally recognising its most wide-reaching visual-art phenomenon with the first major museum exhibition to pay homage to the artists (or vandals, depending on your point of view) whose canvases are the urban streetscape. ‘Art In The Streets’, which opened last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, honours graffiti – and its hip young sibling, street art – with an exhibition spanning 30,000 square feet and featuring 50 artists, a number and size unprecedented in the movement’s history. “This is the biggest show on graffiti, street art, and underground urban cultures ever executed in a museum – or outside of a museum, for that matter,” says Roger Gastman, who co-curated the show with MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch and Beautiful Losers artist and filmmaker Aaron Rose. It has taken 40 years for anywhere to mount an exhibition of this scale, but the recognition is better late than never, says Gastman, author of The History of American Graffiti, published last month. He hopes the show will “open

up the eyes of stuffy museums and galleries, and attract art critics, historians and collectors who might otherwise not have taken a second look. It’s time they took it seriously, and acknowledged how culturally important this movement has become.” ‘Art In The Streets’ covers the 1970s through to the present day, tracing the evolution of graffiti from hobo scrawlings on the sides of trains to the colourful, ambitious, and highly controversial artworks immortalised in 1980s movies such as Wild Style and Style Wars, now regarded as emblematic of the golden age of New York City graffiti. It also features installations by modern street-art stars such as Space Invader and Neck Face, the secretive, self-proclaimed “vandal”. For the record, there is a difference between graffiti and street art. Graffiti is letter-based and name-driven and encompasses everything from etchings on bus-stop windows to elaborately crafted, 50ft-high murals; street art, on the other hand, is pictorially based, although it is equally illegal. But as the newer art form, street art is where the buzz is at now, thanks to artists like Shepard Fairey and Banksy, whose documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop was nominated for an Oscar this year. Both street art and graffiti rely on proliferation – the more frequently and regularly an artist’s work is displayed on the street, the more successful the artist is seen to be. Which is where problems can arise, as not everyone wants to see graffiti. Los Angeles has spent millions of dollars ‘buffing’ (whiting out) graffiti all over the city, including the biggest graffiti painting in the world: a 50ft by 350ft piece on the banks of the Los Angeles River by the artist SABER (also featured in the MOCA show), so large it could be seen from space. It was buffed in 2009. In March of this year police raided the home of former graffiti artist cum gallery darling Smear, the subject of a unique injunction by the LA City Attorney’s Office seeking to ban him from profiting from his work. Spray paint companies, such as RustOleum, have struggled with graffiti’s success, say many artists, working hard to distance their brand from the activities of some of their best clients. While the MOCA show has already helped draw attention to the movement, actual legitimisation (ie legalisation) is still far away, no matter how many world-class artists it spawns, how many cross over into the gallery scene, or how many – like Fairey with his Hope poster campaign – help elect presidents. “The establishment will never accept graffiti and street art,” says Gastman. “It is illegal, and will continue to be so. Even if you built 10 walls a mile long and gave them to graffiti writers, there would still be illegal graffiti. It’s a fact. And it will continue to grow and spread into more and more cities, where some people will love it, and some people will think it’s an eyesore. Either way, it will spawn young artists – and that’s what this show is about.” To give you a flavour of the show, the following pages profile three of the rising stars of street art and graffiti, each representing a different strain of the movement – from Smash 137’s intricacy to Neck Face’s irreverence and ROA’s striking artistry.

Both revered and despised, graffiti and street art have become increasingly lucrative forces in the art market, where pieces by Shepard Fairey and Banksy now fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds. Their success, along with that of their contemporaries, has paved the way for younger street artists, like ROA (right, on a wall in Paris) and Neck Face (left)

photography: peter sutherland (1), courtisey of ROA (1)

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“Some people will love it and some people will think it’s an eyesore, either way, it will spawn young artists” Roger Gastman

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ROA The Belgian street artist is known for his large-scale, intricate renderings of sad-looking wildlife depicted in black and white, like huge storybook illustrations transposed onto crumbling city walls. “Animals are fascinating in many ways,” he says. “How they adapt their habits to humans; how they survive in cities… they symbolise so much about us, and yet people are surprised to see them in the streets, even while they are eating them, or living right next to them.” His interest in the animal kingdom stems from his childhood in Ghent, Belgium. “My first art teacher had a genuine interest in nature,” says ROA. “Sometimes he walked with us in the woods and told us stories about birds.” There was no TV at ROA’s home, so drawing creatures became his preferred form of entertainment. His fascination with drawing animals, combined with the influence of American street culture (Spike Lee movies; the book Subway Art; hip-hop; skating; Keith Haring’s art) is what eventually compelled ROA to make art on the streets. He and his friends dabbled in scratching, skating, and graffiti. “There was no scene like in 76

New York or Los Angeles out here,” he says. “We were just a bunch of guys, friends, each trying to find our own way to participate in it.” Today, ROA’s works are up to 50ft high – like his heron near Brick Lane in east London, or his weasel in Turin – and appear in places as diverse as the US, England, Poland, Spain, and Germany. The pieces are so huge, he sometimes has to use a cherry picker to help him reach the corners. “A big wall is pure fun,” he says. But despite the size of his work, ROA has no desire for his identity to become public. “I don’t want to be famous, I just want to paint!” he says. “It disturbs me that people are more interested in the person than the work on the wall.” Meanwhile, his animals continue to appear, in the urban outdoors and in galleries around the world. But working inside a cube isn’t as difficult as you’d think: “Working inside is correlated with the outside, and vice versa. The inside can be inspiring for outside painting,” he says. “The inside does not represent a different world to me. I just do what I do.” See ROA’s huge animals on buildings here: roaweb.tumblr.com

A new piece can take ROA anywhere from an hour to a few days to complete. He begins by painting a white background, on which he sketches the outlines and details of his animals using spray-paint, as on this wall (right) in Shoreditch, east London. Above, the world offers a canvas: (clockwise from upper left) in Salton Sea, California, Berlin, Cholula in Mexico, and London

photography: thomas Butler (2), courtisey of ROA (3)

A love for wildlife inspires an artist comfortable painting both urban streets and gallery walls

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;It disturbs me that people are more interested in the person than the work on the wallâ&#x20AC;? ROA

“I am a vandal... I go around drawing stuff and some people get mad and some get psyched... that’s all” Neck face

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neck fac e

photography: Peter Sutherland (1), New Image Art (2)

... is what happens when you grow up in a boring suburban town The anonymous street artist known for painting macabre monsters born of a very bad acid trip says it was good old-fashioned boredom that began his ascent to the top of the art scene. Growing up in a charmless town where the cultural hub is Wal-Mart, suburban decay and underfunded schools left most teenagers with little hope of achieving an international art career. Of his hometown, near Sacramento, California, Neck Face says, “Last year, it was voted the most miserable city in America. But I am glad I grew up there, because without that boredom, I wouldn’t be doing what I do now.” He had grown up assuming he would end up working in his father’s tyre shop, a fate that wouldn’t likely be changed by the fact he had started writing “Neck Face” on walls around the town as a teenager. His name came about partially because of his friend Freddy, who “was always talking about things being ‘in the neck’,” and partially because he wanted a graffiti name that would stand out from the crowd. “If you pick a name like Star,” he explains, “there might be 12 other Stars in your state. I thought, ‘If I am going to do this, then I don’t want anyone else to ever come up with the same name.’ ” Then his brother’s girlfriend told him about this thing called “art school”. “I was like, ‘What?’ Art school seemed foreign to me, because every time I’d draw in class in school, I would get yelled at.” At 17, he left home and headed to New York, where he attended art school while exploring each corner of the city on his skateboard, leaving his name and various monsters on walls, billboards, and shop fronts. “I did a lot on the street, mainly because I didn’t have anything else to do and didn’t know anybody. Then I started meeting people and they already knew me because they had seen my stuff.” After two years, he dropped out of school, having already established his street fame. A friend – artist, curator, and fellow skater Rich Jacobs – invited Neck Face to be in his first gallery show. This was followed by solo exhibitions all over the world – in London, Sydney, Copenhagen and Los Angeles – where, as well as his trademark spray-can art, he created metal masks of his trademark doomy monster faces. At only 26, he also has been invited to create an installation for ‘Art In The Streets’. Did he ever imagine he would one day find himself and his monsters in a museum? “No! I am a vandal, a troublemaker. I definitely didn’t get into this saying, ‘I am going to do street art.’ That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I just go around drawing stuff, and some people get mad and some people get psyched. That’s all.”

The artiste at home, in a cape, owing to his obsession with both the horror genre and Halloween. He began showing his work in galleries at 19. In 2010, his solo show at OHWOW Gallery in Hollywood, California, attracted 5,000 people, evidence of his art world following. His works include the untitled piece above and ‘Cannibal Carnival’ (right)

His Hollywood exhibition is here: oh-wow.com/community

“My work indoors and outdoors have always influenced each other” Smash 137

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smash 137 The Swiss artist’s work is a dynamic homage to the New York masters

photography: David Ruiz

Considered a writer’s writer, the cut and swoop of Smash’s style is widely thought to be among the best in the graffiti scene. He travels the globe as part of the spray paint company ‘Montana Colors’ four-man writer team. The pieces on these pages were done in south-east Barcelona

In 1990, Smash 137 made his first piece of graffiti, painting the word “BOSTEN” in big orange letters outlined in black on a wall in his hometown of Basel, Switzerland. He meant to write “BOSTON”, in homage to his favourite basketball team, the Boston Celtics, but accuracy was the last thing on his mind – he had just joined an artistic brotherhood that would back him up wherever he went. “What always amazes me is the fact that it doesn’t matter how far I travel, or how different the culture and architecture is from my own, once I meet people with the same interest in graffiti as me, the differences disappear,” he says. “It feels like we’re a tribe split all over the world, which welcomes our own at any time, no matter what the situation.” A graffiti purist, known for his bold, letter-based pieces, Smash’s work builds on the tradition of early New York City subway artists like his idol, the late Dondi White, the New Yorker who pioneered the clear, readable writing style still favoured by many artists to this day. “His work on the NYC subways is still unbeaten, from my point of view,” says Smash. “His canvas work from the early ’80s was pretty much the only stuff that deserved to be shown in a gallery at that early stage of graffiti’s history.” Smash has travelled the world with his spray cans, and some cities have really stood out – such as Bucharest, where the subway-graffiti movement exploded in the 1990s. “Somehow, nobody felt disturbed by the subway cars being covered in paint, end to end on both sides,” he says. “The city in general is pretty safe, so it just looks amazing when one of these colourful ’80s-looking trains pulls into a station with people standing there on their iPhones wearing the latest fashions.” He also likes São Paulo’s omnipresent ‘Pixação’ style of urban hieroglyphics, a cryptic form of graffiti that demands fearlessness and free climbing skills from its artists. “And when it comes to the art market, it would have to be Paris. They’re far ahead of everybody else,” he adds. Indeed, as is often the case with the most talented and prolific of graffiti writers, Smash 137 began to find his work in demand by collectors. He’s happy to explore the world of fine art, but don’t expect him to abandon the streets any time soon. “I won’t stop working on walls and public places,” he says. “My work indoors and my work outdoors have always had a big influence on each other, and helped each other to grow, so it would be hard to lose one and just continue to grow with the other. Today, I can say that I feel just as good at a show opening as I do seeing a painted train of mine pulling into a station.” Smash’s writing can be found on walls at www.smash137.net

Body+ Mind more

Monte Carlo or bust: Red Bull X-Alps sees 32 endurance athletes race across the Alps from Salzburg to Monaco by paraglider and on foot. To do that they need the special equipment on page 86

Contents 84 TRAVEL IDEAS Boutique mobile living in the Mojave desert 86 GET THE GEAR All you’ll need for Red Bull X-Alps 87 TRAINING Top tips from the pros 88 FOOD A chef’s secrets and a recipe to try 90 BEST CLUBS Reina, Istanbul, Turkey 91 WILD BEASTS The art rockers on their “erotic” third album 92 TAKE 5 The music that influenced the stars of tomorrow 94 THE LIST 96 SAVE THE DATE

Photography: Olivier Laugero/Red Bull content pool

98 MIND’S EYE

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Trailer Park Fantasy

Up and away This month‘s travel tips

Tucked in a secret location in California’s Mojave Desert, Hicksville is a stylish homage to mobile living – and, yes, there is such a thing – plus it has a BB gun range and state-of-the art recording studio

icksville Trailer Palace rises out of the Mojave desert looking like the set of an unmade John Waters movie, a magnificent homage to exploitation cinema, the ’50s, punk rock, and white trash culture – all executed in the best possible taste. Located about two hours east of Los Angeles and a few miles from the eerily magnificent Joshua Tree National Park, this ultra-kitschy motel and recording studio is reachable by a dirt road that winds up into the arid landscape. Good luck finding it – Morgan Higby Night, the writer, DJ and music video director who opened Hicksville in April 2010, built it in the middle of nowhere, ensuring privacy for his Boho clientele and the rock bands that come to record there. When you make reservations, Higby Night will give you detailed directions,

but even those can be confusing late Corman’s production company, this is at night, and we got hopelessly lost. vintage trailer living at its finest. Clean, “Follow the moon and make a left at spacious and meticulously restored, it the telephone pole,” was his advice. has an elf-sized bathroom and full Higby Night is an intriguing kitchen with ’50s-style Smeg character. Orphaned at a fridge and dinky Dixie kitchen young age, he moved away stove. Two bunk beds can be of home when he was 17 folded away to make room and into a trailer park in for a film editing suite, Oregon, and has harboured and the main sleeping area a fondness for mobile-home features a comfortable queenliving ever since. Trailer size bed and a flat-screen TV. parks are a unique part of Outside we saw a huddle A sign at Hicksville; in American culture, embodying of guests sitting around a reality there are few rules, firepit, the flames illuminating both poverty and freedom, the most important is low-brow livin’ or, in this an AstroTurf garden with “Don’t bother the artists” particular case, high kitsch. a miniature Solar-heated The largest trailer at Hicksville, The saltwater swimming pool, complete New World, is set 30m away from the with underwater speakers. This being main compound for maximum privacy. the Wild West, there is a shooting range Named after B-movie director Roger for archers and BB Gun enthusiasts –

Words: caroline ryder

Hicksville Trailer Palace

San Francisco

Las Vegas

Los Angeles 200 km

Hicksville

100 miles

Getting there

Guests at Hicksville Trailer Palace can hang out poolside with a cocktail before retiring to their dream-themed trailer

The Trailer Palace is located about five miles north of Joshua Tree National Park, east on the I-10 from Los Angeles. Once near, call for specific directions. Cost: Each trailer is priced differently, rates range from $75/night for The Pony to $225/night for The New World. Book seven nights and pay for five. Make reservations on their website.

NOT THE MARRIOtT

Photography: Jason Carlin (2), Åbigail Yan (4)

The best things come in sevens, and are designed by Scandinavian architects in remote Swedish forests. Treehotel’s seven sleek ‘rooms’ are lofted high in the Boreal Forest, just south of the Arctic Circle. The MirrorCube is a clear favourite, with infrared strips to stop birds slamming into the window as you nuzzle with a loved one inside. www.treehotel.se

one of the few rules at Hicksville, aside from “don’t bother the artists” is “please don’t shoot each other”. Surrounding the pool is a collection of outrageously themed small trailers. The Lux, named after Lux Interior of punk band The Cramps, owes its décor to ’50s horror movies, psychobilly and Halloween. Far girlier is the Fifi trailer, with bold mauve and indigo fleur de lys designs. There’s also The Pioneer, a log-cabin themed trailer fit for Davey Crockett, The Pony, an airstream trailer which lives in its own ‘stall’, and The Integratrailor, which features an alien communication console and spaceship lights. It is named after The Integratron, an acoustically perfect dome constructed by George Van Tassel in 1959. The original is a 15-minute drive away. Also nearby, Noah Purifoy’s Art

Complex: acres of bizarre installations constructed from disused toilets or recycled bowling balls or anything else the sculptor could get his hands on. And there’s the magnificence of Joshua Tree National Park. Visit Cap Rock and look for the spot where country singer Gram Parson’s body was cremated or wait for sunset and behold a sky erupting with vivid crimsons, pinks and oranges. Having wandered the strange landscape of the national park and talked alien abduction at the Integratron, you’ll realise that Morgan Higby Night and his weird trailer palace aren’t so weird after all – it’s merely another reflection of the unbridled creativity and individualism that resides in this magical little pocket of the world. Careful, or you might have trouble ever wanting to leave.

Starkly modern holiday rentals, Living Architecture’s homes are where you go when reading Wallpaper magazine is no longer enough. Scattered across Kent, Suffolk and Norfolk, the design fantasies of four international architecture firms are perfect for a family or group of friends. www.living-architecture.co.uk

More magic at www.hicksville.com

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Get the Gear

SPEED OF LIGHT

When you have to schlep 17kg of equipment from Salzburg to Monaco, by foot and paraglider, in defence of your Red Bull X-Alps title, every gram counts Chrigel Maurer

Essential Pro Kit

competing in Red Bull X-Alps. These trousers are good in bad weather.

1 X-Bionic running shirt Intelligent fabric keeps you just right, so it’s not too hot and not too cold.

4 Provisions Just the bare essentials: lots of water, Red Bull Energy Shots and some carbohydrates.

2 Haglöfs jacket This is perfect for flying as it’s light, soft and windproof.

5 Technology I’ve always got a GPS system, mobile phone and maps on hand to make sure I don’t get lost on the way from Salzburg to Monaco.

3 Haglöfs trousers We don’t always enjoy the sun when

6 Lowa shoes These shoes are always perfect, no matter what the surface. When I encounter ice in the mountains I attach crampons to them. 7 Advance Rucksack This paragliding rucksack is specially adapted for how I use it and to my weight. 8 Black Diamond ice pick In case things get a little slippery.

9 Camp helmet This helmet is superlight but provides complete protection. 10 Advance harnesses They’re comfortable, which is a must when flying for long periods. 11 Gloves Because no one wants calluses. 12 Haglöfs jacket Even the most torrential rain doesn’t stand a chance against this.

13 Advance Paraglider Especially made for me. This parachute is very light, but robust. 14 Leki sticks Light and sturdy – ideal for this type of competition. 15 Gloryfy G3 sunglasses These glasses are indestructible, which is essential: when paragliding you often land harder than you’d like. redbullxalps.com

words: lisa blazek. photography: Gian Paul Lozza

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Half light, full throttle The early bird catches the worm, so it’s no surprise that Max Nagl rises early. He sent us his training schedule

Work out

No more second best

train like the pros

runner-up in the 2009 Motocross World Championship (MX1) is back from injury with just one goal for this season: trade second place for first

Words: werner jessner. Photography: KTM Images/Red Bull Content Pool (1), Redeye Media Ltd UK (2)

Max nagl The

Anyone who wants to become an Cairoli is the man to beat, MX1 world champion would be and that’s exactly what he well advised to hot-foot it to Red plans to do: without Nagl’s Bull Teka KTM Factory Racing. collarbone fracture last year, Reigning world champion the man from Upper Bavaria Tony Cairoli (ITA) and in Germany would be 2009 runner-up Max Nagl much closer to No 1 (GER) have, under team this year. If Cairoli manager Stefan Everts is seen as a genius (himself 10-time MX in the saddle, Nagl is world champion), “the driver who works built a power base most consistently and Max Nagl has set between Italy, Austria dedicates his life to his sights on and Belgium that has success”, according the MX1 title become a benchmark to KTM Motorsport for the highest possible Manager Pit Beirer. standards in the sport. Nagl, 24, spent the winter Constant pushing, paying getting back to full fitness attention to detail, and having in training. His big trump specialists in every field, as well card is professionalism as unusual technical approaches and his refusal to fall back such as KTM’s voluntary engine on excuses: when winter capacity reduction (see right) weather rendered bike training point to the team’s determination impossible, he simply got in to be the very best in the world his car and drove south until of motocross. Nagl’s team-mate he found better conditions.

Less is the new more Swapping capacity and peak power for driveability: the secret behind the ‘little’ KTM The KTM 350 SX-F shocked the MX world last year: for the first time a manufacturer started out with significantly lower cc (and thus performance) than the rules allowed: 350cc instead of 450cc; 58hp instead of 64hp. The drivers were sceptical at first: as late as 2010 Max Nagl was hoping to find “the strongest bike I can lay my hands on”. But now he’s happy to do without it: “The small motor is a particular advantage in bad conditions, in mud or sand,” he says. “It handles better, you get less tired and with a greater speed range you don’t have to change gears so often.” At 101.5kg, the KTM has to carry half-a-kilo ballast to conform with the rules. But even more crucial are the lower oscillating masses in comparison to the 450s: a saving of 3kg translates to excellent handling.

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The world’s best chefs who’s cooking at Hangar-7?

Now for the science bit

Anatoly Komm Fashion, physics and molecular science come together in Anatoly Komm’s one-of-a-kind kitchen

The kitchen at Moscow’s Varvary restaurant – Russian for Barbarians – could be a science lab. Syringes sit next to knives; dry ice sits alongside the pans; food centrifuges nudge up to dessert plates. This is the Russian home of molecular cooking, with Anatoly Komm as chief scientist. Not ‘head chef’? Well he’s that of course, but with a CV that takes in studies in physics and opening a Versace boutique after the Iron Curtain fell, it’s fair to say his route into elaborate cooking was… unconventional. These days he owns several restaurants in Moscow, but Varvary – Russia’s first haute cuisine restaurant – is Komm’s main focus. This is where his different passions fuse to create almost other-worldly food. “I want to prove that Russia isn’t lagging behind Europe when it comes to cooking,” explains Komm. He uses only local ingredients for his updated versions of Russian classics, something he considers a badge of national honour. “As a Russian chef, I have to use Russian ingredients. Nothing else will do.” Naturally, the local clientele is just as important to him as local ingredients. “I hope more Russians will be coming to Varvary soon,” he says. “That’s when I’ll know this restaurant is truly successful.” Borscht with blue cheese and garlic ice cream

My Restaurant Varvary 8A, Strastnoy Boulevard Moscow, Russia www.anatolykomm.ru The restaurant’s name may translate as ‘barbarians’, but the hanging white flowers and crystal candlesticks on tables in Varvary evoke the opulent splendour of the days of the Tsars. The highlight of the dining room is its tall windows, giving views across downtown Moscow.

Role reversal Bread is always solid and oil is always liquid. But not in an establishment run by Anatoly Komm. He uses a special technique to transform Borodinsky bread into a caviar-like substance, and he can also bring a crispy texture to sunflower oil. Choice of menu Komm’s dishes don’t just look like works of art – they’re also named accordingly. Diners can choose from elaborately titled plates of food such as ‘Soul of Russia’, ‘Moscow Summer’, ‘Unknown Far East’ and even ‘The Quiet Don’. Variety Any evening with Anatoly Komm is always going to be a unique culinary experience. Some of his one-off dishes include borscht with blue cheese and garlic ice cream, crab vareniki and scampi in ‘coral reef’.

Hangar-7’s guest chef Every month, a guest chef comes to the Ikarus Restaurant in Hangar-7, at Salzburg airport, and teams up with the permanent in-house kitchen staff to create two menus. The guest chef for May 2011 is 44-year-old Russian Anatoly Komm, who’s head chef at Varvary in Moscow. You can find more information about Komm’s menus and other forthcoming guest chefs at Ikarus at www.hangar-7.com. To book a table and to make enquiries send an email to ikarus@hangar-7.com or call +43 662 219-77.

Words: Lisa Blazek. Photography: Denis Klero/Red Bull Hangar-7

My Philosophy

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Cook global Let the world be your kitchen

Roots and nuts

Serves 4 FUFU 700g yams 300g plantain Salt 1tbsp butter Potato starch, if needed

I average sweet potato, boiled and pressed 3 tomatoes, peeled, deseeded and cubed 1 large onion, finely chopped 1tbsp ground ginger 3 cloves garlic Groundnut oil 1-2 green chilli peppers, cut into narrow rings 1/2tsp cayenne pepper Salt 1tbsp tomato puree 1 bay leaf 1 dash rice vinegar

In Ghana, the national dish is a staple, cooked the traditional way or bought ready made. Eat it with your hands

NKATEKWAN 1 litre vegetable soup 200g peanut butter 4 slices aubergine 1cm thick 6 to 8 okra pods

Fufu is a basic west African food and an essential part of life – especially in Ghana. It’s a simple yam and plantain paste, but has become the local food industry’s hit export. The manufacturers reduce it to a flaky powder, and Ghanaians living abroad can get a taste of home just by buying a packet, adding hot water and stirring thoroughly. It’s a lot simpler than the traditional grind of pounding the mixture in a pestle and mortar. A radio ad for instant fufu features a young boy running away from his mother to escape pestle tyranny. The correct way to eat fufu is out of a bowl using your hands. You take a lump of the thick paste, make a ball out of it, make a hole in the ball with your thumb and then dip it in the nkatenkwan, a classic peanut soup. Then you swallow without chewing.

For the fufu, peel the yams and plantain and cut into fairly large pieces. Cook for about 20 minutes in a large pan of salted boiling water until soft then simmer briefly. Next, pound the cooked yams and plantain into a solid paste with butter. Add a little potato starch if necessary. To make the nkatenkwan, first heat the vegetable soup. Stir the peanut butter to create a thick porridge-like substance, adding hot water to get the right consistency. Add to the soup. Cut the aubergine into small cubes and slice the okra thinly. Sweat the cubed tomatoes, onion, ginger, garlic, aubergine and okra in a little groundnut oil in a large frying pan and season with chilli, cayenne pepper and salt. Stir in the tomato puree, allow to cook for a little longer, then pour on the vegetable and peanut soup and stir in the pressed sweet potato. Add the bay leaf and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes. Finally, add a dash of rice vinegar. Serve the warm soup with the fufu paste.

FUFU AND NKATENKWAN Words: Klaus Kamolz. Photography: Fotostudio Eisenhut & Mayer

recipe

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Meet the maker

The terrace at Reina offers views of the illuminated Maiden‘s Tower, a landmark of Istanbul

Turkish delights Reina, Istanbul Owner

Ali Ünal explains how the stars arrive at his club in water taxis The club’s name is a reference to… …‘Queen’ in Spanish. We like to think of it as the Queen of the Bosporus. When we started our club in 2002 our idea was… …to create a nightly stopover for international celebrities visiting Turkey that lets them have some fun in a safe and comfortable environment. And it worked! No VIP goes back home without stopping by at Reina. From outside Reina looks like it is… …a small building. But when you walk inside you realise how large it really is. In fact, it stretches all the way down to the waterfront, so a lot of famous people like 50 Cent get to the club by water taxi. When you approach Reina from the sea, it looks like a pearl sitting on the Bosporus. 90

BESt CLUBs Party The World Over

To pass our doorman… …you’ve got to dress up and bring a partner with you. We usually get going at… …midnight. I’d consider the club packed if there are… …5,000 people dancing. The best drink to start the night with in our club is… …Reina Strawberry Cocktail, it’s our special vodka mix. We should also mention our bathrooms because… …there’s retro art all over the black marble walls. such as a painting of Scarface on the men’s bathroom entrance. The best spot nearby to soak up all the alcohol is... …the Tripe Restaurant. Order the tripe soup. It’s a famous thing to do in Turkey. A taxi back to the city centre costs… …10 Turkish Lira, which is around ¤4.50. Reina Muallim Naci Caddesi 44, Ortaköy/Instanbul, Turkey Tel: +90 212 259 5919 www.reina.com.tr

It’s tricky to encapsulate 20-year-old Tyler, The Creator in a few words. His occasionally offensive yet brilliantly observant wordplay has won him fans in the form of Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Justin Bieber. Inspired by everything from Dr Seuss to Salvador Dalí, N.E.R.D and Erykah Badu, he formed skate-rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA). With more than five million views on YouTube of his self-directed solo single, Yonkers, this rebellious LA hip-hop artist looks poised to be a star. You direct, write and produce as well as rap. Are you a self-taught auteur? Yeah. I taught myself piano after watching Pharrell playing this song called Thrasher on the piano. I was 12 and like, ‘That is the coolest shit ever.’ I bought a keyboard and taught myself. I spoke to Pharrell and he advised me to take some lessons. He said I was up there, so if I learn some stuff I’ll go left-field with it. You’ve formed an unlikely friendship with Justin Bieber. Yeah, Justin’s tight, he’s chill. He’s young and he has talent. You don’t really see people like him much now: young kids with talent. Me and Justin, in some people’s eyes are total opposites; I’m a black kid talking crazy shit, he’s a white kid talking about whatever… But it’s the deeper stuff. You could be very famous soon, but it’s hard to imagine you as a pop star… My video just got on MTV and I always wanted that. I want Grammys, VMAs, and little shit like a trampoline and a house with a mini-ramp. I think I’ll be nominated for a Grammy this year, but I won’t win. I’m going to lose. But my next one, I’m going to win it. I’ve got it all planned out. Tyler, The Creator’s album, Goblin, is out now

Tyler, The Creator

Words: HattiE Collins. Photography: Valerie Rosenburg, Getty Images/Redferns

Tyler, the creator One of hip-hop’s most talked-about talents taunts the music biz

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The path to Smother

In the urban jungle (from left): Hayden Thorpe, Ben Little, Tom Fleming and Chris Talbot

Out now Essential listening

“Our music needs rich red wine and dark chocolate”

Wild Beasts The

Words: Florian Obkircher. Photography: Paul Phung

British outfit builds a bridge between baroque and pop based on falsetto vocals, solemn songs and lyrical carnality, as last year’s Mercury Prize nominees reveal. Hear it on their third album Smother

Klaus Nomi Klaus Nomi He was pop music’s first countertenor. Blending New Wave with falsetto vocals in a Cubist suit earned Nomi the respect of musicians such as David Bowie.

red bulletin: You described the Two Dancers album as ‘erotic downbeat music’. What about the new one, Smother? tom fleming (bass and vocals): If anything, this is even more erotic and more downbeat which I feel terrible Wild Beasts for saying (laughs). But this Smother (Domino) is supposed to be an intimate record. It’s 10 love songs, but the thing about them is they shouldn’t be two-dimensional, people are complex. You recorded the album in Snowdonia, North Wales. Does that isolation work for you guys? hayden thorpe (vocals and guitar): Isolation is essential in terms of allowing you the space to become obsessive enough. Tennessee Williams said, when he writes a play, he’s creating a world to step into while the other one behind him disappears. Thematically you’ve been inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. How is this reference reflected within the album? ht: For a long time we roamed around looking for love as this sort of freakish amalgamation of a band

and there’s some sort of romantic comparison in that. And also there’s a few themes that recur in the album, like The Ancient Mariner and the myth of the albatross. It’s amazing to read something that’s 200 years old and it’s still as modern as yesterday. “You’re my plaything, yet I’m wondering how cruel I’ve been” is a line from your song Plaything. Exploring the male sexual psyche is quite your thing, huh? tf: The great thing about where we are now with our third album is that we can play up to character, pulling at that line where we exist most comfortably: what do you dare get away with? Sexuality is a fascinating thing. And music allows it to be opened up in the everyday which normal life doesn’t allow. You can’t say these things around a table. What is the best situation to experience the sexually charged Wild Beasts album? ht: With the last album we said, you should listen to it with a bottle of wine and chocolate. This time I’d be more specific: it should be rich red wine and 85 per cent cocoa dark chocolate. The new album Smother is released on May 7 on Domino; for videos and tour dates go to www.wild-beasts.co.uk

Prefab Sprout Steve McQueen Rich arrangements, elevated melodies, emotions: Prefab Sprout were the first band to use such sophisticated means of expression and be considered cool.

Antony and the Johnsons I Am a Bird Now Listening to Antony’s music for the first time is like a first kiss: breathtaking and overwhelming. Whenever Antony’s falsetto glides over melancholic piano lines, it’s the musical epitome of beauty.

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Take Five The music that influenced the musicians

“ Craig David helped me develop musically”

The Prodigy – The Fat Of The Land

The Manchester-based art rockers caused more than a few ripples with their debut album, Man Alive, in 2010 and are currently touring their “mystifying, impenetrable, beautiful” music throughout Europe. Jonathan Higgs, the band’s singer and guitarist, talks about the five albums that have had the most influence on his life and music

Craig David – Slicker Than Your Average I got into this partly because it amused me so much, but after a while the production really snared me and I ended up trying to mimic it without realising. It’s not a classic album by any means, but it was there for me at the right time in my musical development to steer me out of the teenage rock I was listening to, and opened up a world of new sounds and options, which I think can be found in our band. It was a stepping stone for me, I am still very much amused by it, and I still love it. Radiohead – OK Computer

Nirvana – Nevermind I first heard this at my friend’s house, when I was about 12 or 13. To say it was “instantly arresting” is a bit of an understatement. Over the years that followed, I spent a lot of time trying to work out what made it so exciting. It’s the directness of harmonies great melodies and his voice, but towering over it all is this simply gigantic drum sound. It’s a classic album and it influenced my early bands, and can definitely be heard in some of Everything Everything’s songs.

I was about 13, and I remember falling asleep and drifting in and out of consciousness while this was playing on loop. All these totally new sounds washed over me; the song writing, lyrics and overall atmosphere just took me so far away from reality and to new depths of what felt like understanding. The influence of this and all Radiohead’s albums on our band is probably obvious – it’s huge. Only a few of the very best bands made me jealous as a teenager, and this album was a bastard for that. It’s such an amazing-sounding record.

Bonzo Dog Band – The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse This was an old record belonging to my parents. Away from the annoying zaniness, it’s actually really dark and uncomfortable. There are lots of very chaotic, disjointed ambient sounds that you really can’t place and it’s very scary in the same way that Revolution 9 by The Beatles is. The fact that it’s all very close, distorted almost, and you just don’t know what’s making the sound, that makes it weirder. I think some of the Bonzos’ dark humour got into what we do, and in the right quantity I reckon it’s no bad thing. For music, videos, tour schedule and more visit: www.everything-everything.co.uk

words: Nick Amies. Photography: Petrus Olsson

everything everything

There’s a primal bombast to this album that fires you up and it soundtracked many a stupid night for me. I loved the way they incorporated vocals into the sound, and it was before it all got a bit formulaic. The production is perfect, I can remember my brother putting on Climbatize when he was really stoned and just watching his face as that bass line came in – just priceless. I still throw a lot of massive, unnecessary break beats over our demos, which are usually shot down, but it’s probably because of these chaps that I do it.

Win exciting bike action in SalzburgerLand Out of Bounds is 10 days (10th - 19th of June) of unadulterated mountain bike action of the highest calibre in the picturesque mountains of SalzburgerLand, including various activities and support events. Win exciting bike action in SalzburgerLand. Enter our competition and you could win a fantastic weekend in Saalfelden Leogang at the Out of Bounds Festival. And don’t miss the 26TRIX, one of the world’s premier mountain bike Dirt Jump events. As if that wasn’t enough: the iXS Downhill Cup, EFS Fourcross and an international Cross Country race are also part of the Out of Bounds Festival programme. Further information: www.outofbounds.at | bike.salzburgerland.com

SalzburgerLand Austria 2012

The prize includes: • 4 nights’ half-board accommodation for 2 people at the four-star Hotel Riederalm in Leogang • Admission to the World Cup races and qualifiers • Admission to all support events • 1 guided MTB tour or MTB skills training • Löwen Alpin Card (all-inclusive)

How to enter: send a postcard with your name, address and e-mail address marked ‘Out of Bounds’ to Red Bulletin GmbH, Heinrich-Collin-Straße 1, 1140 Vienna or send a fax to +43/1/90 221-28 209 or an e-mail with the subject ‘Out of Bounds’ to competition@at.redbulletin.com Terms and conditions of entry: The deadline for entries is May 29, 2011. The competition is not open to minors under the age of 18, employees of Red Bulletin GmbH, employees of the province of Salzburg or their families. Winners will be drawn in secret from all entries received by the deadline. There is only one prize per winning entry. Winners will be notified by e-mail. Prizes will be forfeited if not claimed on the day of the event. The judge’s decision is final and there is no cash equivalent. Entrants consent to the archiving, use and possible publication including name and photo of personal data provided for the competition by Red Bulletin GmbH for the purposes of the competition and for marketing purposes (advertising by post, telephone or electronically). Entrants may retract their consent in writing at any time by sending an e-mail to retraction@redbulletin.at. The use of automated scripts and/or services is prohibited. Copyright: Red Bulletin GmbH. All rights reserved.

Hotel & Restaurant

iederalm

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13 9

20 6

8 1

14 7

2 16 12

The Red Bull X-Fighters fly into to Brasilia

Motorsport FIM Superbike World Championship Italy (1) Autodromo Nazionale, Monza, 08.05.11 Northern Ireland’s Jonathan Rea has a score to settle with this four-mile-long track in Lombardy. He didn’t finish in either race last year after suffering two dramatic crashes. MotoGP France (2) Le Mans, 15.05.11 Spaniards Jorge Lorenzo and Toni Elias came out on top in the Moto GP and Moto2 races here last season respectively. This time their countryman Pol Espargaró is out for his own victory after narrowly finishing second in 2010’s 125cc category. NASCAR Sprint cup All Star Race USA (3) Charlotte Motor Speedway, 21.05.11 There may not be any points at stake, but with a $1m cheque up for grabs for the winner this special race is set to be among the most keenly contested on the calendar. WRC Rally Argentina (4) Villa Carlos Paz, 26–29.05.11 Argentina returns to the WRC calendar this season after a one-year absence. Sébastien Loeb is unbeaten in five WRC rallies in Córdoba Province, where the soft gravel tracks can turn into tricky mudbaths if it rains.

Red Bull X-Fighters brazil (5) Esplanada dos Ministérios, Brasília, 28.05.11 Three years ago the freestyle motocrossers flew their bikes over Rio de Janeiro. This time they’ll whizz over the sky of Brazil’s capital city. Formula One Grand Prix Monaco (6) Monte Carlo, 29.5.2011 Any F1 driver will tell you that winning on the narrow streets of Monaco is extra special. Last year Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel made it a one-two finish for Red Bull Racing.

The List May 2011

We recommend a round-the-world ticket to take in some of the month’s most spectacular and popular sporting and cultural events 94

Team sports IIHF Ice Hockey World Championships Slovakia (7) Bratislava, Košice, 29.04-15.05.11 With four groups containing 16 nations, the ice hockey season is set to draw to a nervy conclusion in the land of the 2002 winners. FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour Czech Republic (8) Prague, 17–22.05.11 USA’s Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers will be the ones to beat after winning here last year. But don’t write off German world champs Julius Brink and Jonas Reckermann. UEFA Champions League Final UK (9) Wembley Stadium, London 28.05.11 The new incarnation of Wembley Stadium stages the final of European football’s top club competition for the first time. The winner qualifies for the FIFA World Club Cup. Red Bull 4Skina cuba (10) Villa Clara, 28.05.11 In this unique Cuban street version of baseball, you may hit the ball with your hand instead of a bat, but you still need to run past all four bases to score a home run.

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21 17 18 3 10

Summer Camp USA (18) Three Sisters Park, Chillicothe, 27–29.05.11 With 65 bands, five stages and three days’ worth of live music, this kind of summer camp sounds a whole lot better than the type American teenagers are packed off to each year. This Illinois festival has got hip-hop from Wiz Khalifa and Girl Talk, dizzying electronic music from Daedelus and Gypsy punk courtesy of Dirtfoot.

11 5

Animal Collective pick the bands for ATP

Rumble Festival france (12) Le Transbordeur, Lyon, 05–07.05.11 This year’s ‘bass music meeting’ features appearances from Portuguese breakbeat outfit Buraka Som Sistema, UK rapper Toddla T and drum ’n’ bass master DJ Hype. Held at Le Transbordeur club, you’ll have to be ready to rumble at this Lyon festival.

Photography: Rex Features (2), Getty Images (1), Picturedesk.com (1)

culture Red Bull BC One Cyphers Peru (11) Trujillo, Arequipa and Lima, 04–08.05.11 Poland Park sowinskiego, warsaw, 07-08.05.2011 colombia Bogotá/Medellín, 14–21.05.11 Up-and-coming B-Boys from across the globe have the chance to reign supreme in this unique urban dance competition. Taking place in clubs or popular dance locations, national qualifiers in more than 20 countries will see a series of ‘cyphers’ – one-on-one dance battles – whittle down all the hopefuls to 16 B-Boys, who will then go on to battle in five regional finals in Brazil, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey and the USA. The winners will hot-foot it to Russia for a big final in November.

Wembley hosts the Champions League Final

Movement USA (17) Hart Plaza, Detroit, 28–30.05.11 Aficionados of electronica have been making a May pilgrimage to Detroit for this progressive festival for the last 11 years. The city’s big heroes, such as Carl Craig and DJ 3000, are essential guests, of course, but young faces such as Scuba and Ramadanman are welcome additions as well.

ATP Festival, curated by Animal Collective UK (13) Butlins Holiday Centre, Minehead, 13–15.05.2011 Most weekends at this family holiday camp consist of a lot of rounds of crazy golf. But this weekend will be much more exciting, as the hip All Tomorrow’s Parties concert organisers take over and let bands – this time Animal Collective – curate their own festival. The American indie weirdos have put together a stellar list of acts including Big Boi (Outkast), Beach House, Omar-S, Lee Scratch Perry, Gang Gang Dance and Terry Riley. SKIF-15 Russia (14) St Petersburg 13–15.05.2011 Composer Sergey Kuryokhin, a key figure in Russian rock and experimental music, died in 1996. He was the Brian Eno of the east. Now every year, electronic legends and newbies are invited to St Petersburg in his honour. This year’s line-up includes Mujuice, Gonjasufi, Swans and Zombie Zombie.

Summersoon Russia (19) Beach Stage, Kaliningrad, 27-30.05.11 Sumptuous dance from Blue Foundation, jagged indie-pop from The Twang and testosterone-heavy retro rock from Bromheads Jacket: Kaliningrad plays host to a high-profile international festival to celebrate the beginning of spring on what for most of the year is a chilly Baltic coast. Villette Sonique france (20) la Villette, Paris, 27.05–01.06.11 The Parc de la Villette is Paris’s third-largest green space, a modern area distinct for its deconstructivist architecture by Bernard Tschumi. It couldn’t be any better suited to the annual get-together of pop music’s current avant-garde, which this year features Animal Collective, Discodeine, Emeralds, Black Lips, Liars and Men Without Pants. Red Bull EMSEE Qualifier USA (21) Canterbury Downs, Minneapolis, 29.05.11 Freestyle rap calls for eloquence, spontaneity and a sense of rhythm, and nowhere more so than at Red Bull EMSEE. Wannabe word wizards are tasked with reacting to a series of prompts and pictures, and then incorporating them into their rhymes. Last year, star juror Eminem crowned MC Fowl from Detroit the 2010 Red Bull EMSEE and this year will see new rappers get their shot at the big time.

Red Bull Remake Bosnia-Herzegovina (15) Pozorište, Sarajevo, 20.05.11 An audio-visual feast with added wings is in store as the Red Bull Remake event calls into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Local talent will showcase wacky takes on Red Bull adverts, with the winner being announced here. Primavera Sound spain (16) Parc del Fòrum, Barcelona, 25–29.05.11 This outdoor festival in Barcelona is pretty special. On top of the sea, sun and cerveza, there’s one of the best line-ups of the summer. In addition to established heroes like John Cale, Pulp and Belle & Sebastian, the crème de la crème of indie newcomers – Ducktails, Holy Ghost! and Yuck – will also take to the stage on the Spanish coast.

Carl Craig plays at Movement in Detroit

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May 2011 Words: Ruth Morgan. Photography: Red Bull Content pool

Save The Date

Red Bull Flugtag returns to Ireland on Sunday May 22 at Europe’s largest man-made pier, in Dún Laoghaire Harbour, south of Dublin. It’s the fifth time the event has landed on Ireland’s shores, having touched down here for the first time in 1999, and this year’s antics promise to be even more unpredictable. Dublin has the honour of hosting the 100th Red Bull Flugtag, and the show will be fittingly grand: more than 40,000 people are expected to pack the harbour to see up to 40 teams undertake their aerial endeavours. For the teams it’s a labour of love and lunacy: most of the flying machines take around 1,000 hours to produce. Since its debut in

Austria in 1992, Red Bull Flugtag has travelled the globe, from Miami to Marseille to Moscow, during which time everything from a grand piano to a giant pair of false teeth has been launched into the narrow blue yonder. The distance record, set last year in the US at a Red Bull Flugtag in St Paul, Minnesota, stands at an impressive 63.09m. However, victory also rests on the flight crew’s look and feel. In addition, teams have 30 seconds atop the 30m ramp to impress the judging panel with a ‘performance’, before launching off the ramp for flight and the inevitable 6m drop into the water. Visit www.redbull.ie/flugtag for more information

Flugtag’s log book The true history of man-powered flight

1992

The first Red Bull Flugtag (‘flying day’ in German) is held in Vienna, Austria. It’s such a success that annual events are planned and a flying tradition is born

1999

Ireland hosts its first Red Bull Flugtag, attracting 39 teams and tens of thousands of spectators to the Dublin waterfront

2000

A new distance record, and the current European distance record, of 62m, is set, fittingly in the event’s birthplace: Vienna

2000

Red Bull Flugtag leaves Europe for the first time and heads to Johannesburg, South Africa

2001

More than 40,000 people pack Dublin’s docklands to watch 48 teams head into the Liffey on a mercifully sunny Sunday

2002

Red Bull Flugtag is staged for the first time in the USA, in San Francisco with Dan’s Teacher taking the win

2003

The largest Red Bull Flugtag event to date is held in London, with 350,000 people packing into Hyde Park to witness the action

2006 Red Bull Flugtag Dublin 2011

A spectator’s guide Your three-point plan for a successful day of watching the action on May 22 Set your alarm This is a free and non-ticketed event for all the family with a 1pm start and 40,000 spectators, so arrive early. The best vantage point will be from the East Pier. Leave the car Take public transport to avoid parking headaches. Dún Laoghaire is connected to central Dublin by the DART train, and is also a stop on the mainline rail service from Dublin to Wexford and Rosslare. The town is served by frequent bus services to the harbour. Bring some waterproofs Hopefully, the spring sun will shine on proceedings but, let’s face it, it’s Ireland and it’s outdoors – don’t expect the teams to be the only ones getting wet.

A flying golf course helps make Brazil’s first Red Bull Flugtag a big success. Canada also joins the fun with an event staged in Vancouver

2010

Team Major Trouble and the Dirty Dixies set a new world-wide record of 63m at Red Bull Flugtag Twin Cities in the USA

2010

Fans in Sydney, Australia, help the total number of spectators to have watched a Red Bull Flugtag event pass 3,500,000

2011

Ireland prepares to host the 100th Red Bull Flugtag in style

his month’s column brings together, I believe for the very first time, the Department of Health’s Working Group on Uniforms and Laundry and The Ritz hotel. On the September 17, 2007, Alan Johnson, Britain’s then Secretary of State for Health, issued a press release announcing the intention of making radical and urgent changes to the dress criteria of hospital doctors. Johnson, a rather natty suit-man himself, had been advised that medics should be naked below the elbow and must not wear ties. The rationale here was that, with the nation seized by a panic over hospitals crawling with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and clostridium difficile, doctors must avoid the risk of spreading disease by dangling infected ties and cuffs over them. Alas, this soon became controversial: patients began to complain that they missed the assurance a tie (and cufflinks) bring. So here is an exquisite case of irrational and status-driven human behaviour. Given the choice of catching a nasty disease or enjoying the prestige of someone dressed in a nice suit rather than got-up like a high-tech plumber, the majority of patients chose the status option over the risk of certain death. For such a wardrobe accessory, the tie carries, besides bacteria and lunch debris, a complicated set of messages. Its origin is unclear, but some etymologists believe that the French word ‘cravat’ is derived from the Serbo-Croat ‘Hrvati’ which is what the Croatians call themselves. Dashing Hrvati soldiers had a neck-tie thing going on and this was admired by Parisians after a delegation of Hrvatis visited Louis XIV. So combine ‘Croat’ and ‘Hrvati’ and you get ‘cravat’. A military connection remains: the regimental tie was for a long time a stock item in English snobbery. And ‘the old school tie’ means a lot more than a vintage piece of kit. One of the last photos

Mind’s Eye

Pain In The Neck Stephen Bayley is surprised to find that, in some places, there is still such a thing as dress code taken of John Lennon shows him wearing, one imagines with acid irony, the tie of the Liverpool school he badly attended. So, besides posing a threat of infection, ties are full of meaning. Yet today’s tie has no associations with the nobility to enrich its snob value. On the contrary, today’s tie has its origins in Victorian mentality, requiring definitions of social hierarchy. And the people who defended this most were the ones who most benefited from the symbolic apartheid it suggested: the new middle-classes for whom other 19th-century innovations – insurance and electricity, for example – were created. The poor couldn’t afford ties. The titled had no need for them. Ghosts of this obscene and exhausted sectarianism still patrol the odd grand hotel. They call it ‘dress code’. And they have such a thing at London’s Ritz. I went for lunch there recently with an elegant French female colleague. On the way, I had wondered if an organisation as stately as The Ritz might still insist on a tie in the dining room. I decided that, in the age of instant data transmission when each of us is seconds away from

information about anything, no such thing would be possible. Even credible. Anyway, I was wrong. On arrival, a small-eyed greeter looked pityingly at me and said “Didn’t I realise…?” A box of sordid ties was offered to correct my error. They had, I am certain, been found by chambermaids on bedroom floors after being discarded by afternoon lovers in the heat of passion. I chose the most ridiculous and least stained example and laughed it off, but the offence against good taste nagged at me, so I wrote to The Ritz’ PR. She grandly replied that insistence on ties was to “maintain standards”, which I found cheeky. I got back to her and said I approved of maintaining high standards, but in that case why limit your policy to neckwear? Why not ban fat, ugly people in cheap clothes? Why not give people booking lunch an IQ test? Or insist they do 60 push-ups before ordering? I am still waiting for an explanation. Years ago, Tom Wolfe explained the inverse law in fashion. Harlem Kids wore suits; Ivy Leaguers wore military surplus T-shirts. Today it’s the same. In posh hotels the flunkies wear Prada and those with Bentleys wear flip-flops and shorts. When the richest and most influential people – Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, for example – don’t even wear shirts, what sort of standard is The Ritz maintaining when it insists that I wear a tie? Let’s chase down the definition here. Would a clip-on novelty tie have been my passport to dining-room? If I removed a shoe lace and tied it around my neck would I have got in? If not, why knot? I met Yohji Yamamoto the other day and he wasn’t wearing a tie. I also met a scruffy Member of Parliament who was. You can see the sort of customer The Ritz is after. If you ask me, ties should come with a mental health warning. Stephen Bayley is an award-winning writer and a former director of the Design Museum in London

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