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an almost independent monthly magazine / November 2010

Mark Webber The man behind the mask

All brains on deck

Mind, not grind, wins America’s Cup 2013

Box cart spills in Soweto Sgirigiri hits new high at iconic event

About to blow up!

Culoe De Song: SA house heir apparent

Experience

Print 2.0

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no ordinary adventure. no ordinary bakkie.

You won’t find a better wingman than the NP200. With its aggressive styling, sporty interior and rugged good looks, this is the ultimate head turner.

No matter how big or small a job is, “Bring it on” is the attitude of the Nissan NP200 bakkie. This little mean machine will handle anything you throw at it with ease.

Whether you’re taking your bike to the race track or carrying a load for your business, the Nissan NP200 is your best companion.

leading loadbox dimensions and its fuel-efficient 1.6 litre petrol (8V, 16V) and 1.5dCi engines, which means that this bakkie has a few muscles underneath its bonnet. It even has a softer side to it, with the greenest engine in its class, the NP200 diesel engine emits only 140g of CO2 per kilometer.

What sets this beaut apart from all its competitors you ask? Well, only its amazing 800kg payload, class

With all these features and versatility, it’s easy to see why this bakkie is anything but ordinary.

BullHorn

Worth the wait All good things, we’re told, come to those who wait. In the case of sporting prodigies – those whose physical prowess reaches an early peak – that might mean not having to wait very long at all. Jimmy Spithill, for example, who you’ll meet in the Action section of this magazine, is a 30-year-old Australian who earlier this year became the youngest-ever member of an America’s Cup-winning crew. Ten years earlier he had been that competition’s youngest helmsman, aged, yes, just 20.

Sebastian Vettel, one half of the Red Bull Racing Formula One driving strength, is another young man who, if the motor racing stars align, will not have had to wait very long to achieve his life’s ambition: he’s still in with a chance of becoming the youngest-ever Formula One world champion, aged just 23.

But it’s Vettel’s teammate, that granite-visaged Aussie Mark Webber, who more truly understands what it means to wait for that which you most desire.

Webber, this month’s cover star, is 34 – hardly an old man! – tho’ in a sport that lives by the maxim of “if you’re fast enough, you’re old enough”, he’s something of a veteran. He got his Formula One break back in 2002 with a little Italian team called Minardi, and while he quickly developed a reputation for a being a hard racer, the big points never quite came his way.

That all changed when he joined Red Bull Racing for 2007. Results took a swift upturn, culminating in a first F1 victory at the 2009 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring. That was not much more than a year ago and now Webber is within touching distance of a remarkable prize: the Formula One Drivers’ World Championship.

His journey there, from a small commuter town near Canberra, Australia, is a stirring tale of wild ambition laced with grit, determination, a couple of lucky breaks and, most of all, a refusal ever to give up.

Whoever does finally win this year’s epic contest for the Formula One world title will be a deserving champion. But if that man is Mark Webber, none will have waited longer, nor earned it harder.

Cover Photography: Alan mahon

Your editorial team

Mark Webber: as you’ve never seen him before On page 66 Anthony Rowlinson talks to the Red Bull Racing driver and Formula One World Championship challenger about his journey from small-town Australia to the pinnacle of motorsport

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Contents

welcome to the world of Red Bull

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Inside your race-pace Red Bulletin this month

Bullevard

14 now and next What to see and where to be in the worlds of culture and sport

18 where’s your head at?

Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen is back, with an all-new, all-old album – the perfect excuse for us to delve into the mind of rock royalty 20 KIT BAG Rugby players are as beefy as ever, but their balls these days are distinctly vegetarian. Ahem

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23 me and my body Superbike champ Lance Isaacs knows that pain (and lots of it) is the price for life at the limit 24 winning formula “You’ll know a backflip is right the minute you take off,” says freestyle motocross ace Levi Sherwood. But as the physics proves, you’ll know just as fast when it’s wrong 26 lucky numbers When it comes to World Rally Championships, no one but French ace Sébastien Loeb can boast lucky number seven. And his digits don’t end there

Heroes

28 CULOE DE SONG It’s all about essential rhythms for the rising star of South Africa’s Afro house scene

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30 FRED LEBOW This Holocaust refugee with an eye for the ladies “ran like a duck”. But 40 years ago, he also just happened to found the world’s biggest marathon, in New York City Every Issue 06 Kainrath’s calendar 08 pictures of the month 98 mind’s eye 04

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contents

Action

32 INDIAN WRESTLING The 3,000-year-old martial art of Kushti grapples for its place in a modern age 42 fanny ardant She’s the darling of French cinema, but she’s never wanted Hollywood 46 RED BULL BOX CART RACE Men race carts that look like trainers…

Photography: APA Picturedesk, Palani Mohan/Reportage by Getty Images, Elsa Okazaki, Gibsonpictures.com/Red Bull Photofiles, Getty Images/red bull Photofiles, James Oatway, The NewYorkTimes/Redux/laif, Digital Polyphony Inc/Sony Entertainment Inc

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54 39 DAYS A musical roadtrip to Africa, on a budget 58 RED BULL RAMPAGE The toughest Big Mountain bike contest – even for seasoned downhillers 66 MARK WEBBER Meet the Aussie who dreams of becoming Formula One world champ 74 AMERICA’S CUP The classic sailing trophy gets a shake-up

More Body & Mind

80 CRAZY MARATHONS Nothing deters some from a 26-mile trot 82 GRAN TURISMO 5 We talk to two of its key ‘makers’ 84 GET THE GEAR Hayato Sakamoto’s baseball essentials 86 Chefs’ Secrets From ingredients to gadgets 86 CRASHED ICE The thrilling skating spectacle returns 88 listings Worldwide, day and night 90 nightlife A Californian soul man, a Kiwi comic, at home in Aukland with a fashion designer and clubbing Barcelona

the red Bulletin Print 2.0 Movies, sounds and animation wherever you see this sign in your Red Bulletin 1

za.redbulletin.com/ print2.0 In your browser window you’ll see the magazine cover. Just click at ‘Start Bull’s Eye’

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Switch on your webcam If a webcam activation window opens, just click ‘activate’

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Hold your Red Bulletin up to the webcam You’ll see all the multimedia content in this month’s mag – movies, sound and animation

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illustration: dietmar kainrath

K a i n r at h

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PHOTO of the Month

Cow ’s R e e f, W e st e r n Au st ra l i a

new-wave surfing Not pictured: the tech-laden meteorologist whose wave-prediction skills mean that today’s surfers reach the parts of the ocean their predecessors could not. Traditionalists may also scoff at the practice of towing surfers out to sea and into monster waves, but without the GPS and jet-skis, the four-storey swells would go unridden and lap up on shore with barely a ripple. The boardman here is Ross Clarke-Jones, an Australian big-wave specialist, who, along with fellow countrymen Tom Carroll (two-time world surfing champ) and Ben Matson (aforementioned weatherman), chase Southern Hemisphere big waves in the company of a film crew. Their latest Storm Surfers film, made in wild waters off New Zealand, is out now.

Watch and learn how it’s done at www.stormsurfers.tv

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photography: Peter Ranga

PHOTO of the Month

K i e v, Ukra i n e

City Tricker Sportsmen and women can be given a hard time over the glibness of their post-match comments, but, at the end of the day, elation, adrenalin and exertion combine to facilitate true and pure responses. It was just great to be out there. They did deserve to win. So, when Vasya Lukyanenko says that it was an “unbelievable feeling” to put on a rooftop bike show, you believe him. The 18-year-old BMXer from Ukraine’s third-largest city, Dnipropetrovsk, did what he normally does on quarteripe and halfpipe ramps at ground level on the strikingly designed, 100m-high roof of an apartment building overlooking Kiev’s Independence Square. If he had ignored all advice not to look down, he would have seen the local BMX crews in rapt admiration.

More stunning BMX action with Vasya at vimeo.com/vasyad

Print 2.0

photography: Sergey Illin/Red Bull Photofiles

za.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Ride across the rooftops of Kiev with Vasya Lukyanenko

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photography: Christopher Vanderyajt/Red Bull Photofiles

PHOTO of the Month

B o sto n, M a s sac h u s e t t s

Land Of The Freerunners More than 5,000 spectators headed into Boston’s City Plaza at the end of September, to watch the Red Bull Art of Motion freerunning competition.

Such a large crowd wasn’t a given: America hasn’t warmed to freerunning and parkour as vigorously as Europe, and this event, which combined the two disciplines, was one of the first and easily the largest on American soil. Despite the unfamiliarity of the spotlight on the home field, many local participants thrived, not least the truck-touching Cory DeMeyers. However, the winning 90-second run of tricks and flips and urban acrobatics came from Jason Paul of Germany, with the UK’s Pip Andersen close behind him in second place.

Learn the secrets of freerunning with Art of Motion judge Ryan Doyle at en.redbulletin.com/aomboston

Bullevard Sporting endeavour and cultural ingenuity from around the globe

The Final Showdown American rider Nate Adams was declared overall winner of the Red Bull X-Fighters competition at the season closer in Rome, clinching his title by the slimmest of margins

Wales Rally Unfolding on the streets of Cardiff, slippery forest tracks and military training terrain, the Wales Rally of Great Britain is one of the most testing and exhilarating World Rally Championship events. The GB Rally is a sporting institution dating back to 1932, and this year it constitutes the 13th and final round of the 2010 season.

Fresh from being crowned champion for a record seventh time, Frenchman Sébastien Loeb will be fighting to repeat his 2009 win in Cardiff to end yet another remarkable season on a high. However, with the rally increasing in length by an extra day to four, the task of winning, even for Loeb and his Citroën team, is that much more difficult. www.wrc.com

About 770 jumps and 17,000 ‘air metres’ in front of 169,000 spectators in six cities. That was the Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour 2010, and it climaxed spectacularly on Italian soil, where the modern gladiators of freestyle motocross ruled in Rome’s Stadio Flaminio. Dany Torres of Spain prevailed over American Adam Jones in a thrilling finale, after which the little crowd-pleaser shouted, “I love Italy” over the stadium PA, to the thunderous applause of 20,000 rapt spectators.

For the second year in a row, Nate Adams won the overall title – but only just.

The American beat his great rival Andre Villa of Norway in a head-to-head showdown for third place, which gave him the World Tour title by the tiny margin of five points.

Dany Torres beat Adam Jones (below, left) in Rome, and celebrated with 2010 overall champion Nate Adams (below, far right)

www.redbullxfighters.com

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 a Kevlar-reinforced, two-part cable (it can be short when running with a music player on your arm, or extended with a built-in volume control), reflective yellow headband stripe and fully sweat- and water-resistant parts, they’re perfect for sports. Visit: www.sennheiser.co.uk Email: letters@redbulletin.com

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Whistler Fresh snow and freezing temperatures test the bikers braving Red Bull 5000 Down Bryan Ralph

b u l l e va r d

Half the world away

Hero Blogs They said it, online; we print it

Words: Ruth morgan. Photography: McKlein/Citroen (1), Balazs Gardi/Red Bull Photofiles (1), Joerg Mitter/Red Bull Photofiles (2), Dom Daher/Red Bull Photofiles (1), Marcelo Maragni/Red Bull Photofiles (1), Jon Selkowitz/Red Bull Photofiles (1), Agustin Munoz/Red Bull Photofiles (1), Getty Images/Red Bull Photofiles (1), thomas Butler/Realise Creative (3)w

French B-Boy champ Lilou

Big in Japan November 2009, New York City: like big cats before the attack, two B-Boys prowl back and forth at the edge of the stage. The atmosphere is electric, like a penalty shootout. They look each other right in the eye. One of them spits into his hands, and steps into the ring. Canny uprocks, windmills, turtles, freezes, head spins and hand hops ensue. This Frenchman, Lilou, shows off breakdance moves as good as any seen in this city where breakin’ began. At the end of the Red Bull BC One finals in New York, the performance wins a gold belt for Lilou, who is declared the best B-Boy in the world. This year, Red Bull BC One is in Tokyo. Once again, 16 of the best B-Boys face each other in the most important one-on-one breakdance contest in the world. The reigning champ will be on the jury for the 2010 event, along with Ken Swift, original member of ’70s NYC breakers the Rock Steady Crew and evangelist for his craft in Japan for years. Tokyo has embraced B-Boy culture: Taisuke, who will represent his country at Red Bull BC One, is among the best in the world at what he does. The event in Yoyogi Stadium is a sell-out, but you can watch the live stream online on November 27. www.redbullbcone.com

AkSEL LUND SVINDAL skier 0600 wakeupcall to get drugtested. I’m sitting around my kitchen table with two strangers drinking water. They’re just waiting for me to pee in that cup. But i went just before they came, so this could take a while...

MAYA GABEIRA big-wave surfer Realized the last 3 nights i spent 2 on planes, and i have been in 6 airports....;) my body is so sore ;( !!!!!

It was Northern Hemisphere v Southern Hemisphere at a very unique beach volleyball match in Macapá, Brazil – right on the Equator. Brazilian sisters Maria Clara and Carolina Salgado and countrymen Alison Cerruti and Rhonney Ferramenta took on Austrian sisters Doris and Stefanie Schwaiger and German gents Julius Brink and Jonas Reckermann. After a women’s match, a men’s and a mixed fours, the ‘Southerners’ won.

Used cars Formula One vehicles are considered objects of great splendour, but their beauty is more than chassis-deep.

The new Part Of The Team collection features the intricate innards from Red Bull Racing cars in functional art/furniture pieces: exhaust system lamps, gearbox filter saltand-pepper pots and more.

Each piece has a unique racing history. “These parts have been raced and still look this slick?” said Red Bull Racing driver Mark Webber. “Bloody brilliant.” www.redbullracing.com

Aero Vase, made from rear wing element

Car, to Exhaust Table (above)

MARK WEBBER Formula One driver Few boys from the team and myself, getting SPECIAL foot massage in singapore! fish biting ya feet!

Alcatraz On the prison island, those playing in Tavarua The legendary Fijian Cloudbreak wave doesn’t Sapporo Red Bull King of the Rock basketball comp had a riot Garth Milan

disappoint this time out, as surfers test their mettle Brad Seaman

Kimi Räikkönen tackles Day 2 of the World Rally Championship’s Rally Japan Tamu Tamura

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gold rush

Full of beans: 60-hour-set-DJ Black Coffee

Right On Tracks SA house guru sets world DJing mark Nkosinathi Maphumulo, aka Black Coffee, played hundreds of records in order to post his own unique record, with a beyond-epic DJ set that lasted 60 hours straight.

The 34-year-old from Durban was allowed a 20-minute comfort break every four hours during his two-and-half-day performance at the Maponya Mall in Soweto. His effort was all the more remarkable, given that he lost his left hand in an accident aged 13.

The world record came second to promoting The Black Coffee Foundation, which aims to raise money for people affected by disability. The foundation’s founder first put needle to groove at

Monza

Red Bull Racing consultant Helmut Marko and guitarist Eric Clapton at the Italian GP Robert Andrews

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midnight on Thursday, September 30, and carried right on through to noon on Sunday, October 3.

“It was crazy, brah!” he said. “The toughest part was after my first break: I did eight hours in the first stint and took two of my breaks in a row. It was so hard to start again that I almost gave up. Fortunately, I had a lot of support from friends and fans to keep me going. It got easier.”

In the coming weeks, officials from the Guinness Book of World Records will confirm whether or not Black Coffee’s efforts constitute an ‘official’ world best.

Kit Wilson, of the Newmont Waihi Gold mining company, was surprised when his bosses allowed a mountain bike race in their Martha Mine pit.

“Rather than saying, ‘You’ve got to be mad,’ they asked, ‘Can this be done?’’ Wilson explained.

“It is a unique event and totally virgin territory. The places Red Bull Rock Drop is proposing to send the riders, mining people don’t usually go.”

On December 4, 80 of the world’s top mountain bikers will go down the mine on a 3km corkscrew course. The vertical drop, from the lip of the mine to the lake at the bottom, is about 250m, and descent time is estimated at 2-3 minutes.

Miners watching a trial run were surprised by the riders’ ability to stay on two wheels: they know how treacherous and steep it can be down there on two feet.

“They’ll watch the race with big grins on their faces,” said Wilson.

More at www.redbull.co.nz/rockdrop

If Black Coffee’s your cup of tea, listen to him at www.myspace.com/realblackcoffee

Cape Town Red Bull BC One champion Lilou busts some moves for aspiring South African B-Boys Kent Lingeveldt

Chichester

Trials legend Dougie Lampkin wows the crowd at the Goodwood Festival of Speed Jack Castle

Words: Steve Smith, Robert Tighe. Photography: Paul Tilsley, Mark Samson/Newmont Waihi Gold

Mine how you go: the NZ underground bike race

b u l l e va r d

Where’s Your Head At?

Bruce Springsteen A big month for The Boss: an all-new double album, a classic remastered and an archive documentary so deep behind the scenes it brings him right back to rock’s centre stage

It’s Sort-Of Dutc h For ‘Steppin g Ston e’

No Pictu re s, Pl

ease Although his songs have featured in over 100 movies, with one, ‘Street s Of Philadelphia’, winning an Oscar in 199 4, Springsteen, unlike other rock royalty, has nev er been tempted to act. In fact, he has made only one cameo appearance in films: a fou r-line turn as himself in High Fidelity, offering ex-girlfriend advice to a daydreaming-out-lo ud John Cusack.

On September 23, 1949, Adele Springsteen gave birth to her only son, Bruce Frederick, in Long Branch, New Jersey. For the first six years of his life, the boy lived just down NJ Route 18, at 87 Randolph Street, Freehold, NJ. In his seventh, after moving a couple of blocks over to Institute Street, he saw Elvis on TV, and everything else in his life happened after that.

Gu itar Men

In the All-Time Rock’N’Roll Greats category, Springsteen’s up at the top with Bob Dylan. Bruce once said that, “the way Elvis feeds your body, Bob feeds your mind”. In 2009, “an eccentric-looking man” (Dylan) was picked up in the vicinity of the house in which Bruce lived in ’74-75. He’d also visited former homes of John Lennon and Neil Young.

Momma’s Boy Aged 16, Mom’s Christmas present was a sunburst Kent guitar. On the 1998 outtakes and rarities collection Tracks, you can hear ‘The Wish’, Bruce’s tribute to her support of his rock’n’roll dream. In 1999, at his Rock’N’Roll Hall of Fame induction, he paid tribute to his late father, who was less happy about his son’s career choice: “I mean, you can imagine, if it was great between us, I’d have only written happy songs…”

Wedding Band

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

‘Born…’ The First Time

Springsteen is married to Patti Scialfa, who since 1984 has sung backing vocals in his bands (they wed in 1991). The couple are determined to keep life for them and their three kids as normal as possible, so Scialfa, a songwriter who has also recorded three well-received solo albums, doesn’t appear at all concerts on hubby’s tours; some she misses to be with the kids.

Springsteen’s third album, 1975’s Born To Run, was a huge hit, thanks in no small part to the stone-cold classic title song. However, a legal wrangle with his first manager prevented him from recording a follow-up until September 1977.

“Everything stopped,” he told The Guardian in September this year, “and we had to build it up again in a different place.” During their ‘time off’, Bruce and his E Street Band toured and rehearsed extensively.

‘Born…’ Again

Released in June 1984, the Born In The USA album spawned seven hit singles and a tour that lasted until October 1985. The title track was understood by both sides in the 1984 US presidential campaign – thanks to that stonking chorus – to be a patriotic anthem. Verses with lyrics like, ‘You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much / Till you spend half your life just covering up’ tell a very different story.

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Light In The ‘Darkness’

Killing The Radio Star No musician who got big in the 1980s did so without the help of MTV, and Bruce was no exception. His videos back then were directed by Hollywood filmmakers Brian De Palma and John Sayles. There were blue jeans and leather jackets, but also, in 1984, in the video for ‘Dancing In The Dark’, there was Courteney Cox, playing a girl picked from the crowd to dance with The Boss, a full 10 years before she starred in Friends.

After the legal hoo-hah that followed Born To Run in 1975, Bruce and his band returned to the studio with loads of new songs, and a slightly bitter taste in their mouths. The brooding 1978 album Darkness On The Edge Of Town was the first fruit of their labours, and now, 32 years on, there’s a box-set with The Promise, a double album of Darkness… outtakes, and a revealing film about the making of the record.

All things Boss can be found at www.brucespringsteen.net

B u l l e va r d

HAVE BOARD, WILL TRAVEL Skateboarding heavyweights take an African vacation

THE INSIDE LINE How to blitz a downhill mountain bike course, by two-time SA champ Johann Potgieter The Set-Up “Course conditions dictate specific tweaks for the bike. If it’s rocky you need harder tyres and softer suspension; on mud, you need softer tyres, mud guards and extra lube on the chain.”

Map It Out “You need to know your lines backwards by the time of your first timed run. Walk the course beforehand and do as many practice runs as you can. At European World Cup races, there are five or six lines to take through a section, so it really helps to do your homework.”

Words: Melissa Williams, Steve Smith. Photography: Tyrone Bradley/Red Bull Photofiles (2), Eric Palmer (1)

Ryan high: Ryan Decenzo (above) pulls off a perfect Alley Oop Air in front of a packed South African crowd; he and his crew (left) also took time to meet the fans and dole out advice

This vacation was more of a working holiday. Canadian skateboarder and 2010 X Games Skate Street bronze medallist Ryan Decenzo was in South Africa recently as part of the African Vacation Tour. Accompanying him on this country-wide jaunt were fellow pros Chris Haslam, also of Canada, the UK’s Ben Raemers and the Australian-born Los Angeles resident Andrew Brophy.

The tour kicked off at Boogaloos Brightwater Skatepark, Jo’burg, and ended a week later at The Shed skate park in Stellenbosch. The crew not only packed in the maximum of board time, they also got a first taste of the cultural and geographic diversity of this country of ours. Shark-cage diving, traditional African markets and hanging out with lion cubs are not usually on the itineraries of these otherwise seasoned travellers.

“I enjoyed Cape Town the most for sure,” said Decenzo, “because of the mountain and the water and the city in between.

It was a good time, good parties and everything. The beauty of skateboarding is that no matter how far from home you go, you’re always able to meet likeminded people and have a good time rolling around on your board.”

As well as inspiring the many local skaters they met on their journey, the four pros were no doubt scoping out the terrain with one eye on the Maloof Money Cup, which takes place in Kimberley next year from September 30 to October 2. The Cup, held previously in California and New York, offers pro skating’s richest purse.

Kimberley: a centre of SA and world skating talent. Who knew?

Check out the full tour experience at www.revolution.co.za

Train Body; Mind Follows “The fitter you are, the more you can concentrate and focus. I often get nervous pre-race, but I’ve learned to convince myself I’m there to have fun. That relaxes me, so I race quicker.”

Overcome Instinct “There are times when your brain says, ‘Brake’, but you shouldn’t.

Getting your head around this takes training and experience.

For example, the best way to get over a wet, slippery section of tree roots is to let the wheels roll with little or no brake influence.”

Go Pottie at www.johannpotgieter.com

Wheel advice from Johann Potgieter

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KIT EVOLUTION

Oval And Over

There has been constant evolution in rugby union balls since William Webb Ellis ‘picked up the ball and ran with it’ almost 180 years ago – not least, the reduction of animal parts used in their construction

A Stitch In Time 1958 Back in the game’s infancy, before its rules and regs were standardised in the 1820s, rugby union required two teams of men and the flotsam of the farmyard: leather balls of varying size stuffed with feathers, straw or inflated animal bladders. Then, at Rugby School, the boys and masters came to 20

favour a pig’s bladder covered in leather, made by local cobbler James Gilbert. In 1862, another Rugby ball-maker, Richard Lindon, developed a rubber bladder following his wife’s death due to blowing up diseased pigs’ bladders. Lindon also perfected the oval-shaped ball the boys

preferred, to distinguish their game from soccer. This ball – leather skin, rubber bladder – was used in the 1958 EnglandAustralia match at Twickenham; the home side won 9-6. You can see it, and other rugby treasures, at the World Rugby Museum, at Twickenham. www.rfu.com

words: paul wilson. photography: will thom

New Ball, Please 2010 James Gilbert’s business changed pretty quickly after he began supplying balls to Rugby School; by 1877, he’d stopped making boots and shoes to hand-stitch 2,700 balls a year. The Gilbert company leads the world in producing rugby balls: their oval offerings were used in the last

World Cup in 2007, and most leading international sides use a Gilbert. The current balls have panels consisting of a polycotton-laminated backing layer covered with a rubber compound, and a rubber bladder. The moulding processes gives the balls the pimply grip the old

leather balls lacked. Modern balls are also slightly smaller, and only the gusty conditions often found at the Autumn Internationals – Ireland host South Africa, Samoa, New Zealand and Argentina this month – prevent them flying true 100 per cent of the time. www.gilbertrugby.com 21

b u l l e va r d Jump to it: Nhlapho (right) encourages young BMXers

Hard & fast Top performers and winning ways from across the globe

Reigning world champ Mick Fanning of Australia won the Quiksilver Pro France. He’s now third in surfing’s 2010 rankings, with three events lef t.

WING MAN

SA’s BMX hero takes next-gen talent under consideration “Think of it as a video game,” said Sifiso Nhlapo. On day two of the three-day Red Bull Under My Wing BMX training camp he’s hosting, 15 of SA’s best junior BMX racers are busy with a gate session, honing their starting technique.

“Each section of the track is like a world in a Super Mario game,” he continued.

“You know those little coins you’ve got to get? You have to make sure you get them all in each world, else you won’t clock the stage completely. Racing this track’s the same: you have to make every jump and every corner count, else you lose.”

The camp took place at Nhlapo’s custom-built training track at the MTN/ Toyota Cycle Park in Bryanston, Jo’burg.

The young riders, 12 boys and three girls chosen by their video-game loving mentor, took part in practical sessions, focusing on jumping, cornering and 22

starts, and joined workshops on sports nutrition, performance-specific gym training, sponsorship management and interview skills. Nhlapo shared tutoring time with his first coach Aaron Holdstock, his manager Mark Squire and Owen Hannie, presenter of the TV show SuperCycling.

“I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to work with these kids and give them the inside scoop on what it takes to be a pro rider. I’m very proud of the progress I’ve seen over the three days,” said Nhlapo.

There was even talk among the riders that their three days of expert tuition will give them an almost unfair advantage in competition. Said 16-year-old Nick Joubert: “I can’t wait for the next race.”

Flick through a photo diary of the camp at www.skizo105.com

By virtue of a podium finish in all 13 World Supersport Championship races this year, including three wins, Turkish biker Kenan Sofuoglu won the overall title for a second time.

At the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA, a hotbed of land speed records, Brazil’s Cacá Bueno set a stock car world best of 345.6kph in his Chevrolet Vectra V-8.

photography: Craig Kolesky (3), PWA WORLD TOUR, Joli/Red Bull Photofiles, Graeme Brown/Hannspree Ten Kate Honda, Bruno Terena/Red Bull Photofiles

n Dunkerbeck, Windsurfing’s winningest, Björ in Sylt, Germany. t even Cup ld Wor the at was top er the Swiss und ng saili now ne, The Dutch-Da s to his name. flag, has more than 30 world title

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me & my body

Lance Isaacs

There is a price to be paid for exploring the limits of sporting endeavour: a whole lot of pain. No one knows this more than the current SA Superbike champ USING YOUR Head

Before Enduring, And After

Bike racers need endurance, fitness and muscle strength.

I do a lot of running and I also ride my Moto X bike regularly.

Two reasons for the latter: it gives seat time on a bike, and it’s also a very physically demanding activity. I also do some weight training in the gym. I focus on my quads – we obviously do a lot of standing on the bike’s foot pegs during the race, continually shifting body weight from side to side. Plus, I work on my back, shoulders and triceps.

Braking from 300kph to 60kph puts a lot of strain on your body.

Fu elled up

I’ve always been ver y conscious of eating properly and never more so than now I’m in my 30s. It’s increasingly tough to keep the weight off. One of my sponso rs, Reflex, is a sports nutrition bra nd, and they help me with an approp riate eating plan.

For example, in the we ek leading up to a race, I don’t eat red meat – sticking to fish, to keep my weigh t down – and I drink a lot of water. You can lose about three kilos per race by just sweating.

WORDS: STEVE SMITH. Photography: MOrn Van Zyl

Fighti ng Spirit

If you’re a bike racer and the red mist descends, this usually means trouble – but I welcome it. I love practising the art of war when attacking a rider in front of me. I’ve always found it easier to attack than waiting to be attacked: you have to concentrate a hell of a lot harder when you’re leading a race. It’s tough to put in consistently quick lap times when the biggest danger is your own distraction.

It’s I have always worn the best helmet I can get. skimp ever d shoul one no kit of the one piece t, R5 on. As they say in motorcycling: “R5 helme head my hit 1995, since g racin head.” I’ve been once. plenty of times, yet only been concussed s. knock ive mass some taken And I’ve

Boxin g Clever

I box three times a week; at leas t I try to.

Sparring is really good for my reflexes. When you’re travelling at the speeds we do, you need them to be as sharp as pos sible. Riding a Superbike quickly around a track is one thing – racing up to 30 other guys while doing that, is something else all together.

You not only have to concentrat e on what you’re doing, you have to second-guess the other guys, too.

Them’s The Breaks My first big injury came while racing in the World Superbike series for Ducati in 1999. It was in Albacete in Spain: I got high-sided off the bike and my left hand was trapped under the handlebars.

With a big chunk of flesh gouged out of my hand, I could see all the tendons and bones. I needed a skin graft. I’ve also broken both my heels, both hands, nearly lost two fingers on my right hand, and torn the tendons in my right shoulder. I still need an op to get that repaired.

Ouch Of The Ordinary The most painful injury I have ever had was breaking my tibia during the US Superbike championships in 2003. I was riding for Honda, in a race in Ohio, and was in second place when I hit a back marker.

I went flying and landed on my right leg, which rotated through 180º, shattering my tibia in six places. I tell you: once the morphine they gave me in hospital wore off, the pain was massive.

There’s a lot more of Lance at www.lancelot38.com

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b u l l ee vvaa rrdd

winning formula

Flip Decision

Upside it “You feel your way through a backflip,” says Levi Sherwood, the 19-year-old New Zealander and FMX rider, who finished fourth on the 2010 Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour. “I probably do more than 100 during a day of practice, so it becomes second nature. It’s easy to forget how hard it really is.

“You approach the ramp a little bit slower than usual, then accelerate more on the ramp. When your front wheel leaves the ramp you pull back, like you’re five years old again, trying to pull the biggest wheelie you can.

“After that, you’re a passenger. If it’s not right, there’s not much you can do about it; if it is, you’re all set. From then it’s over so fast, you’re looking at the ground before you know it.” inside it “Which is harder, a backflip on a mountain bike or on a motorbike?” asks Dr Martin Apolin, of Vienna’s Institute of Sports Science. “Contrary to what intuition might tell us, it’s easier on a motorbike.

“Angular momentum (L) is the product of rotational inertia (J) and angular velocity(ω): L= J*ω. Angular velocity indicates how many degrees an object turns per second. The rotational inertia indicates how difficult it is to set an object in rotation, or to slow it down. Given these, you need to know three more things to understand the backflip: 1) Total angular momentum (Ltotal) can be made up of many different partial momenta. In our case, it makes sense to use the angular momentum of each wheel as well as the complete momentum of the bike and the rider.

2) The bike turns in one direction and the wheels turn in the opposite direction. A negative sign represents the opposite direction in the formula.

3) Once bike and rider are in the air, angular momentum remains constant. This means that: Ltotal = Lbike + rider + (–L front wheel) + (–L back wheel) = constant Just before the wheels lose contact with the ground, the rider starts the backflip motion with his head and upper body – this can change the angular momentum. But, as we noted, in the air, total angular momentum is constant. However, on a motorbike, the rider can accelerate or use the brakes. Thus, the formula for the motorbike becomes: Ltotal =|Lbike + rider + (–L front wheel) + (–|L back wheel) = constant Here the angular speed of the back wheel increases, so its angular momentum rises. Since the angular momentum of the back wheel is negative, and the total must remain constant, the complete bike and rider have to turn more quickly. Similarly, if one or the other wheel is slowed, the bike turns more slowly. This is how the motorbike rider can fine-tune his flip in the air – a luxury not afforded to his flipping mountain bike counterpart.”

Watch Levi Sherwood do his stuff at www.redbullxfighters.com

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Words: Ruth Morgan, Martin Apolin. Photography: Christian Pondella/Red Bull Photofiles, Marv Watson/Red Bull Photofiles. illustration: mandy fischer

To turn a bike – mountain or motor – through a 360-degree circle requires both brains and bravery. But which of the two is harder to do?

Flight path: BMX rider Ryan Guettler (left) does a single flip, while Red Bull X-Fighter Cameron Sinclair makes it a double in Plaza de Toros de las Ventas in Madrid

B u l l e va r d

Lucky Numbers

The French World rally champ is right up there with the best drivers in the history of motorsport, but he can’t ride a pushbike

Rallies missed by Loeb in 2006 after a high-speed downhill mountain bike shunt resulted in a broken right humerus (the long bone that runs from shoulder to elbow). Ever the speed-demon, he’d been flying down a local trail in Switzerland when his front wheel hit a rut. Cue arse-over-tip moment.

Still, despite missing Turkey, Australia, New Zealand and GB, his pre-accident lead of 35 points over Marcus Grönholm allowed him to retain his world title, his third on the trot, when Grönholm finished only fifth in Oz. Séb learned of results Down Under while still at home on European time. He celebrated with early-morning coffee.

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Stages of the 2005 World Rally in Corsica, the Tour de Corse, won by Loeb. This is a big number of stage wins in any case (many drivers finish an entire career never having won one), but what was most remarkable this time around was that Super Séb actually managed a clean sweep: no one else won a stage – the first time this had happened in the World Rally Championship. Such consummate domination had never been seen in the WRC, although Loeb’s unmatchable brilliance on so-called ‘tarmac’ rallies like this (where the road surface is similar to that driven on by thee and me) has always been his singular hallmark.

1

The number of drivers to have won the WRC Rally Deutschland (all eight times) – and guess who that man might be? Correct! It’s Mr S Loeb.

Remarkably, since Rally Germany became a round of the WRC in 2002, no other man has been able to come close to Loeb’s speed across the concrete former army access roads that form the bulk of the event’s surfaces. Rally Germany skipped a year in 2009, and rivals had hoped Séb might have lost his touch. But no: this year he and trusty co-pilot Daniel Elena cruised to victory again. Sébastien über alles, one might observe…

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17

Car number of the Pescarolo-Judd Le Mans racer that in 2006 was co-driven by Loeb to second place at the 24-hour classic (driving was split with fellow Frenchmen Franck Montagny and Eric Hélary). It’s rare for rally drivers to compete on racetracks; rarer still to post such an impressive result.

Those in the know reckon Séb’s second spoke volumes for an immense natural talent that’s equally adaptable to the ‘neat and tidy’ style needed on circuits, as it is to the ‘fast but loose’ approach that wins rallies.

Those not in the know just said “merde”.

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Sébastiens or Sebastians who briefly appeared on the books of the two Red Bull-owned Formula One teams: Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso. How so?

Well, between the 2008 and ’09 F1 seasons Seb (astian Vettel) switched from Toro Rosso to Red Bull Racing. Vettel’s former teammate Séb (astien Bourdais) stayed put into ’09, and it looked briefly as if Séb (astien Loeb) might fill the vacated seat. The drive eventually went to Séb (astien Buemi – are you keeping up?), but when Séb (astien Bourdais) was ditched mid-’09, his ride almost went to Séb (astien Loeb). The naming nonsense stopped, though, when Toro Rosso put Spanish rookie Jaime Alguersuari alongside Séb (astien Buemi). But that’s not half as much fun.

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World titles won by Loeb – an increasingly record-breaking run of victories.

When he won the 2007 world title, he became only the third driver to win four WRC titles, alongside Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Mäkinen. His fifth crown, in 2008, put him on his own in rallying; follow-ups in ’09 and ’10 (that’s seven consecutive titles) mean that only he and a certain Michael Schumacher have won seven motorsport world championships.

Get the Loeb-down at www.sebastienloeb.com

Words: anthony rowlinson. photography: mcklien/citroen sport photo (2), citroen/mcklein/red bull photofiles (1)

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Sébastien Loeb

Keeps you moshing, from support Act to heAdliner. fits pocevery

ket

Tent? Check. Sleeping bag? Check. Wellies? Check.

But when you’re packing your rucksack for festival season, leave a little room for Red Bull Energy Shots.

At only 60ml, our shots can easily slip into a side pocket alongside the wet wipes. And whether you’ve spent

the day dancing in the sunshine or trudging through the mud, they deliver the boost you need in just a couple of sips.

With no carbonation and no need to chill, Red Bull Energy Shots are the perfect companion to long festival days and nights. It’s concentrated energy from Red Bull.

the only shot thAt gives you wings.

b u l l e va r d

CULOE DE SONG He’s the rising star of the Afro House scene; Rocking the Daisies is the rising star of the SA festival circuit.

The two finally met on the Red Bull Studio Live Stage Words: Evan Milton Photography: Morne van Zyl

Name Culoelethu Zulu, aka Culoe De Song Born August 20, 1990 Eshowe, South Africa Lives Johannesburg Got his name Culoelethu means “our song” in his mother tongue of Zulu. “My DJ name brings the Zulu song and the English song together in music” Life, music, and philosophy “You’ve got different kinds of experimental music and life is short, one way or another, so you’ve got to give in and go with all the music, and feel the universal language of rhythm”

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Apparently, the aliens have landed at Rocking the Daisies, a 10,000-strong music festival outside the Western Cape town of Darling. Tall, thin, grey folk have done the hour-long drive up the West Coast from Cape Town, and landed their big, grey, doublebubble spaceship off to the left of the main stage.

And apparently, they come in peace, too, for they have dedicated their craft to the cause of dance music and handed it over to Red Bull for the weekend. This football field-sized translucent wonder is the Red Bull Studio Live Stage, its arched portals welcoming the party faithful inside to a world of music and cutting-edge light projection.

Manning the decks on Friday night is rising star of the African house scene, Culoe De Song.

The crowd loves the rhythm and Culoe loves the crowd. He’s played in Italy, Germany, Belgium, ADE in Holland and the Miami Music Conference in the USA, wowed crowds at the Sonar electronic music festival and South Africa’s own Oppikoppi festival, but this is his first true experience of a multi-stage music festival on home soil.

“I’ve never really known this in my own country, a true festival of world music for the broader market, with rock bands and electronic music,” he says, his quiet tone belying the fact he ladles out thunderous African rhythms with deep, dark grooves.

“The rhythm was right there and people could feel it. There were so many there, all doing different things – drinking, juggling with fire, guys dressed in rock ’n’ roll leather. In the DJ tent, the energy was mad; even when I went to sleep at 3am, it was still going crazy with positive messages and true rhythms. I saw a festival on another level.”

Born Culoelethu Zulu in the small town of Eshowe, near Durban, on South Africa’s East Coast, he took the name Culoe De Song after discovering the sounds of deep African house being played by DJs such as Black Coffee and Kabila, and starting playing at private parties. The plan is working. His debut album A Giant Leap was nominated for a

South African Music Award with his song ‘We Baba’ up for Record Of The Year. On the international scene, his remix of Malian singer-songwriter Salif Keita’s ‘The Neighbour’ was well received, and his original single ‘The Bright Forest’ released to great acclaim on Innervisions. Critics called it “hypnotic, lush and absolutely deadly on the dance floor” with its use of African voice choir and translations of Zulu maskandi rhythms into a modern deep house idiom.

‘The Bright Forest’, made during his term at the Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona (“my favourite city”) might be his most applauded song, but he sees ‘We Baba’ as his most meaningful. The track also involved Black Coffee, and pays homage to Busi Mhlongo, the late and legendary queen of Zulu music.

“It was a spiritual collaboration; not just a remix, but more like a reworking after being really inspired by Ma Busi’s music. It came about from love and I was amazed at how big it went – and it’s still growing.”

Innervisions is releasing a 12in later in 2010.

Culoe De Song is one of the rising heroes of South African house, a style both unique and immediately accessible to international audiences. The ‘Durban house sound’ that swept South Africa has gone on to garner interest at key taste-making events (such as Sonar and the annual Music Conference in Miami). “It’s very big in South Africa now; there’s a resurgence,” says Culoe. “We can see it reflected in world music legends like Louie Vega coming here, and people are taking the sound to the world.”

So what is the DJ spinning on his own decks?

“I have to point out three locals. Black Coffee’s album is going to be a collector’s item. Tumelo is on Soulistic Music and his new album, Arise & Shine, takes you out of this world with a strong, positive message. Zakes Bantwini, who featured on Black Coffee’s ‘Juju’, creates a great atmosphere in his music, with a funk and soul groove added to the South African dance music sound.”

Listen Culoe De Song’s live set from the Oppikoppi Festival at redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1267/

Decks appeal: nothing less than a rhythmic gymnast

b u l l e va r d

Pioneer

fred lebow

The New York Marathon began 40 years ago this month as a gathering of oddball enthusiasts. It’s now the world’s biggest running event and its founder is a true icon

Name Fred Lebow Birth name Fischel Lebowitz Born June 3, 1932 Arad, Romania Died October 9, 1994 New York, USA Occupation Fabrics and textile trader Founded New York City Marathon in 1970 Completed 69 marathons in 30 countries during his running career

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It was a nice idea to erect a bronze statue of the founder of the New York City Marathon near the race’s finish line. But, really, it wasn’t necessary. Because Fred Lebow’s real monument is the New York City Marathon itself. Lebow, a Transylvanian refugee and charismatic ladies’ man, founded the world’s biggest marathon in 1969. In the 2,359 years since Pheidippides ran the first marathon, jogging had fallen somewhat out of fashion: people used to laugh at the athletes who ran around the streets “in their underwear” for no apparent reason and “kids even used to throw stones at us”, according to Ted Corbitt, an early pioneer of the sport. One of the sinewy men who used to run long-distance stretches round the Yankee Stadium was Lebow, a hip, sportscar-driving Manhattanite.

The tiny runners’ scene, dominated by Bronx natives, greeted him sceptically at first. “He ran like a duck,” one of his friends told Judd Ehrlich, director of a 2008 documentary on Lebow, “but slower.”

But the then-37-year-old Lebow had an appropriate talent that he deployed with skill: he knew how to get people excited. While training he came up with the idea of staging a marathon right in the heart of New York. In 1970, he charged a group of early maverick running enthusiasts an entry fee of one dollar each for New York’s first marathon: laps around Central Park. A mere 127 runners weaved their way through the park, attracting dumbfounded looks from passers-by. Only 55 of them made it to the finish line. “I had to give my prize back after the award ceremony,” recalls winner Gary Muhrcke, “because Fred was completely broke.”

Despite lack of funds, Lebow had developed a taste for the enterprise. He got prominent city officials on board for his plan to stage a marathon through the entire city. By 1976, he had transformed a dilettantish rehearsal into a glittering premiere. That year, the New York police blocked bridges, main roads and 300 intersections to guide the New York City Marathon through all five boroughs – Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan. The proposition

was unheard of at the time. The press anticipated murder and predicted that top running stars Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter would fall victim to muggers in the sinister side streets of the Bronx.

Then suddenly, running was the latest trend, and Lebow the trendsetter. He courted politicians, fed the press with stories, and, with every passing year, made the New York City Marathon bigger, better known and more professional. But above all he ran, every day, no matter what the weather.

Lebow’s drive came from his personal history.

In 1932, he was born Fischel Lebowitz in Romania and grew up happy and sheltered in a Jewish family with six siblings, until the war and the Holocaust changed everything. The family managed to flee in different directions in 1944, but were separated for 14 years before being reunited in Brooklyn – a period that Lebowitz rarely spoke about.

What counted for him was the present. The New York City Marathon, which developed into a major event, rewarded Lebow’s efforts with memorable highlights: in 1981, for instance, when US runner Alberto Salazar won in a world record time of 2:08.13 (which was later disqualified due to a dispute over the course length), or the winning streak of Norwegian Grete Waitz, who won the NYC Marathon nine times between 1978 and 1988 (and became Lebow’s best platonic female friend).

In 1990, Lebow was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. The next day he ordered his organising committee to stop addressing him as Fred. “From now on call me Fischel. I want to die under my real name.” For two years he underwent treatment until – terminally ill – he asked Grete Waitz a favour: to run the NYC Marathon with him one last time.

In a time of 5:32.34 the two completed what Grete (who today is herself battling cancer) called “the most emotional run of my career”. Thousands applauded from the sidelines. Lebow died in 1994; he missed the NYC Marathon by just four Sundays.

The 2010 NYC marathon is on November 7: www.nycmarathon.org

Photography: LAIF

Words: Alex Lisetz

Founder Fred Lebow on what the marathon did for his adopted city: “Every neighbourhood, the whole of New York was celebrating itself�

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The Final FIGHT In India, the sport of kushti, one of the world’s oldest martial arts, has been practised for 3,000 years. But can it survive as modern sport grapples for the hearts and minds of a new generation of fighters?

Words and photography: Palani Mohan/ Getty Images

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Kushti wrestlers practise in Kolhapur, India, the heartland of this ancient and endangered form of wrestling

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Preparation Kushti wrestlers must ready both themselves and their surroundings: the red clay pit is watered; fighters rub clay into their bodies, for display and for grip; muscles are ripped and rebuilt

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Education The concept of a school for study and practice is central to many of the world’s venerable martial arts and fighting styles. The greatest remaining concentration of kushti’s akhadas, or wrestling schools, is found in Kolhapur, an ancient city about 220 miles south-east of Mumbai.

But where there were once hundreds of akhadas, there are now just half a dozen

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Tradition Almost nothing has changed during the 30 centuries that kushti has been practised. A kushti school can house 24-100 wrestlers, who live and train there. Most are teenagers; some are young as seven, others are mid-20s

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The kushti wrestlers in the Indian city of Kolhapur, the last bastion of this 3,000-year-old endangered sport, eat, sleep, train and fight in their akhadas, or wrestling schools.

Each akhada has an earthen pit lined with red soil dredged from the river, and mixed with ghee [clarified butter] and water.

Each morning Hindu prayers are said in the pit, reflecting its revered, almost temple-like status in lives of the wrestlers.

The average day begins at 5am with a group run, followed by weightlifting and hundreds of press-ups. Then the trainers arrive and wrestlers are paired for practice bouts in the pit.

After prayers and the preparation of the pit, the wrestlers rub their faces and bodies, and those of their opponents, with red dirt, which serves both as a traditional blessing and to improve grip during fights. They spar for several hours, after which they eat and rest; in the evening, this routine is repeated.

To maintain muscle bulk, the wrestlers stick to a diet heavy on crushed almonds, milk and ghee, with some chicken and eggs. They cook chapattis over an open fire after training.

“My father and his father were all champions and this is what I want to be: the best fighter I can,” says Jathar Vaidbhav, a 16-year-old kushti wrestler. “We have to train every day – it is very hard work, but we love it.

“If you win a big title like the state or even the national championships [the tournament takes place in the first or second week in November], then you are set up for life. You receive not only money, but also a respected place in society, even long after death. It is a great thing, which I dream about.

“But it is not easy. We cannot drink, smoke or have sex.

We cannot even think about girls. Even in our dreams it’s forbidden. We are like sadhus [Hindu holy men] and if we want to be good wrestlers, then we must live a pure life.

Marriage and children can come afterwards.”

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Kushti Wrestling in Kolhapur: 3,000 years... and no more?

Kushti is found in the historical records of the Parthian Empire, which ruled from what is now modern Iran for 500 years from around 250BC. Since then, GrecoRoman wrestling has become the dominant style of competition, but kushti has survived, just, in Kolhapur and, to a lesser extent, in parts of Iran and Pakistan.

It is said that the best wrestlers come from Kolhapur because of the cool climate and the water,

which is reputed to be rich in iron and other minerals. The first Maharaja of Kolhapur built hundreds of akhadas during his reign of 1884-1922, but today only six survive. And now that India has Sushil Kumar, an Olympic medal-winning and world champion wrestler, sporting authorities there promote wrestling on the mat, to the detriment of wrestling in the pit. The question is: can kushti survive?

Delhi

IndiA

Mumbai Kolhapur Bangalore

Aspiration

Kushti wrestlers devote years of their young lives to becoming fighters because, for many, it represents their only chance of escaping poverty. Their fathers and grandfathers hope that the younger generation have the commitment to keep the sport alive

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I never wanted Hollywood One of the icons of European cinema, French actress Fanny Ardant has built a career on going her own way. Following her performance at the Salzburg Festival, she sat down to talk about the nature of freedom and the importance of not looking back Words: Uschi Korda Photography: Patrick Swirc/Corbis Outline

S

alzburg Festival, 2010.

While Gérard Depardieu carries off an interview marathon in Hangar-7, at Salzburg airport, his friend, compatriot, and frequent colleague on the film set has long retired to her secluded hotel. Fanny Ardant sits on the terrace with a glass of red wine, listening to classical music and gazes at the mountains. The day before, Ardant gave a highly acclaimed performance as Joan of Arc with Bertrand de Billy and the RSO Orchestra in the Felsenreitschule (Summer Riding School). Her performance as the sole speaker amid a sea of instruments was a tour de force, but there is not a hint of strain in her voice. red bulletin: You once said that you could only accept roles if you 42

understood the character. Do you understand Joan of Arc? fanny ardant: The way she is described in this piece by Paul Claudel makes me feel very close to her: she was lonely because suddenly everyone turned away from her. The judiciary, the king, the English. I don’t care about her as an historic figure or an epic heroine.

The purpose of her life doesn’t interest me. It’s more about the personal side of a human who acted the way she did because she believed in something, finding herself suddenly stranded alone, being betrayed by everyone.

Is she a heroine?

Yes, I think so. For a start because she stands by what she has done. But also because at the point where she realises that she must die, she admits she is

afraid. I like heroes when they are weak. I like the fight between weakness and courage. To question whether you are on the right path. You can never really be certain you’re not making a mistake. For me, heroes are those who fight against the herd mentality for a belief. That makes them immortal.

Are there still heroes today?

Right now, I don’t see any heroes. The last for me was Che Guevara. There are many people on our planet who do grand and important things, who fight for something. But heroes must also be beautiful and romantic, they have to die young. A tragic moment belongs to the hero.

You’ve always lived very independently…

With great difficulty. You have the

choice, and independence has its price.

You have to give up surety and security.

During your life you have to make this decision over and over again: freedom or security? If you choose security you have to live with it and not wail about losing your freedom because of your choice. And on the other hand, those who want to push for independence must be prepared to do without a lot of guarantees. Joan of Arc, for instance, paid a high price for her independence and she died very much alone.

Is there still something today that would be worth dying for?

Hmmm... I believe for love.

Could you?

Yes! Not like in the great opera, Madame Butterfly, for example. Or intentionally like [the poet, dramatist and novelist]

Heinrich von Kleist, who fatally shot himself with Henriette Vogel at the Kleine Wannsee. But more in the way life slowly ebbs out of you.

Did you ever feel you were losing your independence?

No! No! No! Freedom is my only luxury, my only richness! I’ve only ever done what I really desired. Even in my career.

I never accepted a role that I didn’t like.

Have you ever abandoned a project because you had the feeling it was going in the wrong direction?

No. Sometimes I made mistakes. I accepted a script, wanted the role, but the result wasn’t very good. It’s like a game. But I’ve never taken on a role that didn’t fit me just because of the money. Looking back, it never mattered to me whether I did a big film with

success or a small one without success.

The moment I was shooting I was happy and became totally immersed in it.

You raised your three children alone, never marrying. In this respect, did you not have to make compromises with your own independence?

In this case it was never a compromise for me. When I became a mother I changed. Beforehand I was really dangerous. Nothing could stop me. The first time I held my baby in my arms I wanted to give her more warmth and security and shield her from danger.

I became softer and more open to the world of others. Suddenly I was more fragile. I had to earn our living and it made me more responsible. When you take on responsibility you have to, as we say in France, pour a little water in 43

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your wine. Out of love for my children I did this and I’ve never regretted it.

Have you ever regretted anything?

Sometimes I regret never having become politically involved. This is the only way to make changes. But to do this you have to be totally committed. You can’t do politics as a pastime like playing bridge or drinking tea.

You were actually on the way when you studied international politics.

That was an agreement I had with my parents. When I told them that I wanted to become an actress, they were scared.

They said: “Ooh la la, but first you have to finish studying something.” I decided on international politics, because it was only a three-year course. Once I’d passed all the exams I was free. Studying politics is something quite different to devoting your life to politics.

As a politician you have to make a lot of compromises...

You only have real political clout as part of the opposition. That’s where you can change things. Not with power and authority.

You haven’t really raised your three daughters conservatively, have you?

Not really, but in the old French family tradition. My father taught me what it means to be a free spirit, free-thinking.

As a child I looked up to him and observed him like a dog. He truly lived his independence and I tried to pass that on to my daughters. It’s one of the most important things in life, not to be conservative, and not to judge people by their appearance alone.

Did it work?

More or less. My daughters have not become exactly like me, but that’s what makes it so exciting. There has to be some friction. One of my daughters is more conservative than me. I like that, because I enjoy the opposition and the conflict.

Thirty years ago you became internationally famous with Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door. Do you sometimes watch your old movies?

No! And definitely not The Woman Next Door. It’s too painful. (Ardant was in a relationship with director François Truffaut until his death in 1984. The pair’s daughter, Josephine, was born in 1983.)

Obviously I sometimes come across films when I’m flicking through TV channels, that’s unavoidable. I get a little startled and quickly change the channel.

Do you watch any of your other films?

I never have the idea of buying myself a DVD. I think it’s something biblical:

Independence has its price.

You have to give up surety and security never look back. You have so many memories of happy moments – it might crush you if you reminisce too much.

It’s like wings that flutter around in your head – tsschtschtsch – you have to shoo them away. I don’t have that kind of carefree character to look back with happy thoughts. No, I’m too melancholy.

Your father gave you Stendhal and Balzac to read when you were small.

Did you understand it back then?

Reading was naturally a great pleasure for me. But I was too young to grasp the complexities of love or relationships

between people. I only understood Proust or Dostoyevsky, which I’m reading at the moment, later. You see the characters more clearly, you read between the lines.

You recently began directing. What made you switch to the other side of the camera?

No special reason. I began writing a story and then things just went on from that. It was a totally new experience. I liked the challenge.

Do you believe that generally actors should experience what it’s like as a director?

That’s something you can’t make a generalisation about. My first experience with stage directing was an operetta in a small Paris opera.

I’ve heard that you also sing.

I can play the piano and I sing as a film actress, but I’m no Maria Callas.

Do you only listen to classical music?

I love all kinds of music. I like Portuguese Fado just as much as French chansons, gypsy music, vaudeville acts, jazz.

But I prefer classical music because it evokes the most emotion. Sometimes a Julio Iglesias song appeals, because he speaks to me. Pop music holds a truth and goes hand-in-hand with memories.

You practically relive the situation you were in when you first heard the song.

It’s like a Pavlovian response.

Do you also dance every now and then?

You will never see me in a disco.

But perhaps you like to dance for yourself, alone?

(Laughs loudly) Hmmm... with dancing I don’t really feel totally comfortable with my body, I don’t even dance at parties. I can rock’n’roll because someone leads you. But alone I’m too shy and I feel a bit ridiculous.

I’d rather have a glass of red wine.

Do you believe your life was lucky or filled with challenges?

At times I’ve fought for things, but

The Woman Next Door, 1981 The penultimate film of her life partner, director François Truffaut, made Ardant famous overnight and centres around an amour fou with Gérard Depardieu.

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Finally, Sunday! 1983 The second and last film of the Ardant/Truffaut pairing is an homage to the Film Noir of the ’40s and yielded a Cèsar nomination for the two.

Sabrina, 1995 In the remake of the Billy Wilder classic by Sydney Pollack, Ardant only played a supporting role. But she didn’t have to leave Europe for her sole Hollywood production.

Elizabeth, 1998 In the historical film drama about Elizabeth I, who was played by Cate Blanchett, Ardant shines as Marie de Guise, the eventual Queen of Scotland.

photography: mary evans/Picturedesk.Com, ddp images, mauritius images (2),

Fanny Ardant in film: highlights from three decades

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fabian cevallos/corbis, imago stock& people, moviestore collection, Alfama Films

never for materialistic things, more for my independence. In hindsight I would say... I don’t know, how shall I put this...

I don’t think I was particularly happy.

I was alone. I was lonely.

And you were often lucky?

Exactly! I was at a train station and I simply took the train! I never hesitated for long or thought about whether I should jump on or not. I just leapt.

Sometimes I caught trains that made me unhappy. At the end of my life I would like to say I was a traveller. And sometimes it’s better to be unhappy in this than not to have grabbed a chance.

When you talk you have such a fiery glint in your eye. Are you very passionate?

Others find me exhausting because I have so much energy. It’s difficult to quell me. I thank God that I have this strong intensity in me and I let it out.

If one day, for instance, my love of acting goes, then I will stop doing it immediately. I love my life despite sometimes being a big pessimist.

I also have a dark, tragic sense of life.

But we only have this one life and we must make it exciting. Then we can sleep and rest for eternity anyway.

Are you easily bored?

In company, yes, but never when I’m alone. Although I do very much enjoy conversation. To argue my own opinion with others, that’s what I love. But in a snobby scene, ooh la la, then I get very bored and it makes me want to provoke.

Even in major performances I get bored when it doesn’t strike an emotional chord. You’re forced to sit there and inside you shout: “Allez! Allez!” I often go to the theatre, to concerts or the opera, and I can say half of the time: boring. But then, suddenly, you encounter something full of emotion – and I never forget it.

The price for having strong emotions is that you are often bored!

8 Women, 2002 An award-winning French comedy in which the two grande dames, Fanny Ardant and Catherine Deneuve, initially fight before they kiss and make up in each other’s arms.

Would you ever leave a show because of boredom?

Never! Because with a book, a concert, a theatre piece, an opera or a film, you only find the answer at the end. If you don’t stay until the finish you can’t make sense of it all. I even read scripts that don’t really grab me at the beginning right to the last full stop. Sometimes I throw them into the corner with frustration and say: ‘I don’t like it!’ You can take it as a metaphor for life. We have to go to the end to understand it.

Do you believe in something?

I believe in good and evil, good deeds and bad deeds. And I believe

in something ethereal: angels. Every one of us has one that protects us and that brings out our good side. I can understand that people might laugh when I talk about angels, but I believe in something greater, something spiritual.

Not in the church and its rules.

At the beginning of your career, it can’t have been easy to stick with acting. Did you ever want to give it up?

Never. I was crazy. It really was a difficult time because I started out

Callas Forever, 2002 Ardant’s interpretation of the opera diva under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli enjoyed international acclaim at all film festivals. She learned to speak English for the film.

with no support, no money and, of course, no success. I had small jobs like typing and waitressing. Looking back though, I always had (snaps her fingers three times) faith in myself doing the right thing.

What would you have done if you hadn’t had success?

I can’t live my life again. I think I would never do anything that would hurt my pride. Pride protects you from accepting everything and losing yourself.

Are you very proud?

I was when I was very young. That saved me. When you are young you always get the message: “Let’s do this, or that, it’ll make us a lot of money.” “No,” I said.

Lots of money never mattered to me.

‘No’ was probably the first word that you could say as a child!

(Laughter) I was a handful! Very exhausting! My poor parents. I’m very sorry that they died so early and never saw my success.

Did you ever want to go to Hollywood?

No. I did only one Hollywood production with Sydney Pollack, but the film crew came to me in France (a remake of Sabrina). But not once did I have that American dream. For me, Europe was always the centre of the world. When I presented The Woman Next Door with Truffaut in New York, a journalist asked: “Madame Ardant, are you dreaming of a Hollywood career?” “No,” I replied, “I’m dreaming of Russia!” And François whispered to me: “Now you’re dead in America!” because it was still the time of the Cold War. Oh please, I wasn’t a communist, it was just that I loved Russia. I agree with General De Gaulle who said: “For me Europe goes from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

Fanny Ardant can be heard singing on the latest CD of the award-winning quartet Quatuor Ebène, Fictions

Hello, Goodbye, 2008 The latest collaboration with her long-time friend and film partner Gérard Depardieu. The romantic comedy about a Parisian couple was only saved by the two stars.

Cendres et sang (ashes and bl0od), 2009 Ardant’s first piece as a director for which she also wrote the script. It’s a dark, melancholy work filmed in Romania.

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Boxcart

Thousands of South Africans spent their Heritage Day public holiday witnessing the 2010 running of the Red Bull Box Cart race, held for the first time in Soweto Words: Steve Smith Photography: James Oatway

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ou know how there are two kinds of people in the world – those who like Kurt Darren and those who like music? So too there are two kinds of approaches to the Red Bull Box Cart race – there are those who are in it for the experience, the laugh … and those who are, as they put it themselves, “in it to win it”.

Approach one was followed to the letter by the aptly-named Soweto Poison. ‘Aptly’ not because of any nod to toxicity, but because these boys were homegrown products of Box Cart’s venue for 2010 – the famous, sprawling Jo’burg township of Soweto. It’s a suburb that’s developed a contradictory reputation for most South Africans. For those who have never been, it’s Bad Soweto, a place of violence you don’t want to venture into by day, let alone by night. And while that’s true for some parts (as you’d surely find in any big city), those who live there will describe the other side of the coin, Good Soweto – a proud and colourful suburb with a vibey street life driven by a sense of community absent in the manicured suburbs.

And that’s exactly what greeted visitors as they joined a throng of locals lining a steep hill in the Diepkloof suburb of Soweto for the 2010 incarnation

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of the iconic Red Bull Box Cart race. And Soweto Poison, like many, many teams before them in the history of this event, were determined to make it an experience they (and those watching them), would remember for a long time. As locals would know, box cart racing – or ‘sgirigiri’ as it’s called here – has a long history in Soweto.

A week before the event, the Soweto Poison crew were already deep in character. Their Converse All Star-shaped box cart was on-track for completion and, phoning up team leader and driver David Chelopo on the Monday preceding Friday’s event, it was clear the funfest had already kicked off.

How are things going – it sounds pretty busy there!

“It’s going OK, but yes, we have been very busy,” Chelopo confirms. “Two days back we had a bash in a nearby park to promote our team in the neighbourhood. It was from 6pm to 6am and we probably had around 500 people. I think most of them will be at the event. We even had team T-shirts made that we sold.”

Come across any problems so far?

“Yeah. Finance was a stumbling block for us, but we really wanted to do this event, so we hunted through some of the scrap metal yards here in Soweto and got steel for the basic construction.

After that, we found some people who helped us with donations of cash.”

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ednesday was my next check-up. This time it wasn’t the sound of metal being shape-shifted that spiked through the white noise of another poor mobile phone connection… but booming ‘kwaito’ music, house music with an African influence.

You guys sound like you’re having fun.

“Hey! Yeah, we’re busy putting in our music system at the moment,” says Chelopo. “It’s an iPod docking station; can your hear? [turns it up louder] We’ve been discussing what music to play on race day – I think it’ll probably be a typical kwaito track, something that represents Soweto. I don’t reckon it’ll put me off my driving.”

The rules show you’ve got to do a little show before your run down the hill. What have you got planned?

“We’ve organised some cheerleaders.”

Cheerleaders?

“Some local chicks. We explained that we have no budget, but they’re happy to do it to support the local boys. Plus, we gave them free T-shirts.”

So what do you reckon your chances are, then?

“We’re taking this seriously. We are a team. We have overcome challenges to get here. Initially we had a welder come and help us put the cart together, but after one day he left, so we had a serious job to do. We convinced him to let us use his welding machine and grinder, and we taught ourselves to weld in a day. Apparently, it takes years to learn how to weld properly – but not for us. It took us a few hours! Soweto Poison is solid. Solid. The guys have been practising their sprinting, too. We’re fully charged up and raring to go. We reckon we’ve got 48

VROOM VROOM

BOOM BOOM

BANG BANG

Sneaker preview: With a few tools and a lot of hard work and ingenuity, David Chelopo (top left) and his team found the will and the welding skills to give Soweto Poison’s Converse All Star box cart its all-important kick

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ace day reveals those who have adopted approach two in the ‘two kinds’ dichotomy mentioned at the start. These guys have really done their homework. And none more so than then men of Tri Hard R. A stroll through the buzzing box cart pits to the side of the long downhill section of the track reveals a low-slung, three-wheeled, space-age design that clearly means business. There’s no jokey bodywork meant to look like a sneaker or – in the case of a certain strip-club-sponsored cart – a bed.

Nope, this thing is made to do one thing only – and that’s to get down a hill very fast. Tri Hard R should know. This isn’t the first time they’ve entered the Red Bull Box Cart event.

“Last time we did this race,” says driver Charlie Repsold, “this cart was second-fastest by .09 seconds. This time, we reckon we’ll be quickest.

We simplified the wishbone suspension to stop the chassis leaning into the turns. We thought this would make us quicker, but it slowed us down a little. So we put in a stabiliser bar and that made it quicker straight away.”

OK, so it seems this guy really knows what he’s talking about…

“Ja, I used to build race cars – Lotus Sevens and Ford GT40s,” says Repsold. “One of the things I learned there is that a 60/40 weight distribution (with the 60 up front) is the perfect balance for a race car. Your heavier weight needs to be on the front wheels where you steer, but it must not be more than a 60/40 split. We put a 12.5kg barbell weight up front and a 10kg at the back. We actually weighed the car on each of the three wheels and it’s flippin’ perfect. The reason for adding the weight was that it will keep our momentum going after applying the brakes for the corners. When this cart first ran in Box Cart, it was called ‘Tri Hard’, but with these new mods, we’ve renamed it ‘Tri Hard R’ because we are trying harder.

“To build up a helluva speed down the straight, I’ve got two ex-rugby wingers who will push me off, and the blokes are very strong and quick. In practice, we’ve reached a launch speed of 32.4kph, and that was on a dead level road. Downhill, I reckon we’ll get up to 70-75kph.”

As many other competitors would discover through the day, getting up to speed on the initial downhill section was one thing; getting through the three-corner chicane at the end of it was a different story. The entrants first discovered this on the pre-race walk through the 500m course.

The smiles evident while strolling down the steep straight evaporated once the downright nastiness of the coiled chicane became apparent. Plus, there was the big “but wait, there’s more!” moment. At the apex of turn three was a little ramp. It wasn’t high enough to cause any actual low flying, but it was 50

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what it takes.” On the face of it, that all sounds very organised. Sure, they’ve got the fun dial turned up to 11, but it also sounds like they’ve done their homework. These guys could be real contenders.

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Walking the walk For a better idea of what it’s like to pilot a box cart down the Diepkloof hill, our Red Bulletin writer donned a helmet, hopped into Red Bull’s own box cart, and started rolling…

RUN RUN

additional photography: kolesky/nikon/red bull (1)

The hay wail: Intrepid box carter Steve decided to follow his instinct and avoid braking on a sharp bend – with predictable results and a few bruises, especially to his ego

Clockwise, from top left: The vuvuzela showed it’s not just for World Cups; the crowd thrilled to the twists and turns of the action; Soweto Poison set off, hoping victory was a shoe-in; it was umbrellas to the fore as everyone felt the heat and waited for the infamous three-corner chicane to claim its next victim

As it often does, received advice offered conflicting opinions. “Don’t bother braking for the chicane,” said a colleague who’d helped set up the course. “You don’t build up all that much speed and, with go-kart tyres on our box cart, you’ll have enough grip to get through the corners.”

“No, I’m going to brake,” said Charlie Repsold of ultra-quick Tri Hard R. “If your cart is quick, you’ll build up way more speed than you can handle on the corners, even with thin bicycling tyres, like ours, which are best for this kind of job.”

So… brake-and-use-gokart-tyres versus don’t-brakeand-bicycle-tyres-are-the-wayto-go. Someone was right.

The debate still pingponged under my helmet as the Red Bull crew gave the box cart an enthusiastic shove off.

The first half of the course – the long downhill – was the key to a fast time. It was here that having tyres with little

rolling resistance offered huge time bonuses. The only problem being that this meant I gathered speed through the three-corner chicane.

There was time to ponder this, head tucked down low on the long straight. Just enough time to make the wrong decision, as it turned out.

With a soundless “braking is for girls” rippling across my lips, I stayed off the pedal and… well, it went reasonably OK for the first corner, got a little sketchy through turn two, and then it all turned into a shower of yellow straw at turn three.

Carrying way too much speed for the wide-profile gokart tyres to handle, the box cart understeered straight off through the hay bales.

Fortunately, the impact absorption of the hay and the generous run-off area meant the only thing bruised that day was my pride.

Brakes 1, Steve 0

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Clockwise from top: Team Boere Cause That’s How We Roll (their cart modelled on a local delicacy) ‘rolled’ and crashed before the finish; Tri Hard R came third and set the fastest time; team Amavuvuzela chose an iconic image for their cart; team Metal Heads favoured a monochromatic look; Silly Buggers Chop Shop grabbed second place; but out and out victors were team Zooma in their aerodynamic bathtub

HAY, HAY, HAY

WHAMMM

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a strength tester. Any fragility in the wheel or axle area would be cruelly exposed.

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WOW WOW

nd as luck, often being cruel, would have it, one team to find this out the hard way were Cool Runnings. Taking their cue from the movie about the Jamaican bobsled team, this African box cart team’s cart was a rough approximation – OK, very rough approximation – of that gleaming black Caribbean missile. The cart looked cool, the team looked equally fab in their (albeit bobbly) Spandex one-pieces, but one glance at their engineering approach revealed a flaw.

While most teams had anticipated the course throwing up a few corners and built an ability to steer into their designs, Cool Runnings had apparently eschewed such boring predictability and opted for something a little more left-field: tiny castor wheels. Like the ones on a shopping trolley.

Hi guys, I was looking at your cart and wondering how the hell it’s going to make it around a corner?

“So are we, actually,” says breezy team captain Gregory Bean. “It does turn a bit, but I’d be disappointed if we finish.”

You’re hoping for a spectacular, hay bale-spraying crash, then?

“I hope so, I hope so.”

Sticking as close to the original script as possible, crash is exactly what their driver does. On cue, his team sprint down the hill to help him and, the cart/ sled hoisted up on their shoulders, they heroically carry it across the finish line.

Great show. Which is what this event is all about.

While it’s brilliant to watch the likes of Tri Hard R streak though in a time that would be nearly 10 seconds quicker than the second-placed cart, it’s as much fun to see Cool Runnings trundle down and crash, or the pre-run song and dance routine of our boys in Soweto Poison. Sadly, Poison’s engineering skills didn’t live up to their enthusiasm, and the cart – while it looked great – could do little more than amble down the course, thanks in no small part to a front wheel that buckled shortly after the start.

So Tri Hard R won, then?

Actually, no. Besides speed, the judges took three other factors into account: the car’s overall aesthetic design; the little show each team was required to do prior to their run (anything from Idosi I Matchise Iskorokoro doing a dance routine to Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, to the District 1459 team acting out a vignette from the successful recent sci-fi movie, District 9); and the actual time of the run.

At the end of a long and sweltering afternoon, a surprise winner emerged. Team Zooma, all the way from Durban, scooped first place in their inspired bathtub, with Silly Buggers Chop Shop in second and speedmeisters Tri Hard R grabbing third.

“We’re really stoked to have taken first prize,” said Zooma’s Michael Webb. “All our hard work and effort put into building our giant bath has paid off.”

For more lowdown, visit www.redbullboxcartrace.co.za

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A trip’s not just a trip, as time goes by Berlin to Casablanca in under six weeks: no one’s got any money, but there’s plenty of rhythm and flow. 39 Days – A Roadtrip, is a musical expedition by four friends in late summer through Europe and North Africa. Here are 39 facts to bring you up to speed…

Words: Simon Schreyer Illustrations: Thomas Kussin

1 The basics: August 1,

2010 and four 20-something friends set off from Berlin on a tour de force to Morocco.

Jamie Seidl-Curtis aka JollyJay, David Glover, Hanno Martius aka H2O and Max Wentzler.

Also going along for the ride: two microphones, instruments, an amp and a sofa on the roof. (The fourstrong film crew is travelling in a separate car.)

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Goal: Morocco’s firstever hip-hop block party, to be held in Casablanca. Two of the four, JollyJay and H2O, rap and write lyrics obsessively, David plays a white Les Paul and Max is three things in one: charmer, handyman and DJ.

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ETA: September 8, four days before the concert (Insha’Allah!) – the day on which Moroccans will be seriously celebrating the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

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The catch: Zero budget!

All travel expenses can only be covered by street gigs, the sales proceeds from their homemade and very listenable CD (Scattered Colours On The Rubiks Cube, featuring hefty beats by DJ Doe Diggler, Mr Boss 54

and guests) and from their T-shirts (Fairtrade, of course).

Their bank balance when they get started is zilch.

A goodbye gig in the Mauerpark in Berlin covers their first tank of petrol.

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5 Customers who like

The network: Musicians they’re friends with, Facebook acquaintances and club promoters are indispensable friends for the quartet while they’re on the road – shoulders to cry on, people with spare couches and generous helpers.

6 The lyrics: Hanno and

The vehicle: A black Land Rover Defender, weighing in at 1,840kg, decorated with graffiti over the course of the journey by local artists.

It’s a fully fledged travel companion to these AngloGerman adventurers as they undertake their trek.

what they see: Anyone who likes the UK hip-hop album is also bound to like Themlot (Sound Scientist Crew), The Pharcyde, Jehst, Chester P (The Taskforce), Jam Baxter (Contact Play) and Children Of The Damned.

Jamie are relentless and razor-sharp as they rhyme and muse over the allure of the snooze-button, the dubious appeal of Paris Hilton, the infamous “caffeine spider” and the confusion unleashed by pop culture gone wild.

7 The track: While on the

road, the instrumentalists and MCs make a sound collage, the basis of which is a Berlin bass-line. It was JollyJay’s stepfather, Uve Müllrich, who previously travelled far afield with The Dissidents, a pioneering world beat group formed in 1980, who invented the bass-line.

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10 Affiliates: Along the

way, there are joint gigs and recordings with Yarah Bravo (DJ Vadim’s wife who works with One Self), Faye Simon, DJ Word, MC Amalgam, Meggie Smith, Biz2risk, Hoofer, and Flip & Flow from Morocco, who sing in an artificial mishmash of Arabic and French.

11 Enemies: Internal

and external demons – heat, hunger, ‘No parking’ signs, cabin fever, stone-throwing home-owners, artistic chaos, time pressure, pickpockets.

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Daily bread: If they haven’t earned anything, they

don’t eat, but even when they do, it tends to be something from the pasta, pesto and peanut butter range. Pizza would only be to celebrate a particularly successful day.

13 The luxury of a

bed: The guys only get to experience the bliss of sleeping in a bed, in Amsterdam, and Pontarlier in France. Tents, back seats and the sofa on the roof comprise the uncomfortable norm for the foursome.

14 In for a penny, in for

a pound: It’s 7,870km from Berlin to Casablanca. Given the expensive tolls on the French motorways and the speed limit of 50mph due to their heavy load, the travelling musicians fall back on trunk roads.

15 Freedom in freestyle:

Jamie is the master of verbal, rhymed improvisation, known as freestyle. He comes up with perfect, cheeky descriptions of his listeners on the spot. When a sweaty woman of about 50 dances up to the guys with pursed lips in Nice, he composes rhymes about ecstasy at an advanced age, even at the risk of this Frenchwoman understanding English.

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34 Little helpers: The

Key to the highway: Questions about the car keys are always met with raised eyebrows, puffed cheeks and an inquisitive facial expression.

simple pleasures are what stood out day to day – an ice-cold chocolate egg, a beer at the end of the day or a mailbox full of new instrumentals that friends from far away had sent.

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Persecution complex: Whenever cameraman Jan and soundman York accompany the guys in the production vehicle, it’s not unusual for the Defender to turn off without batting an eyelid and the radio equipment to get buried among the T-shirts.

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Surprising: English hip-hop goes down better in France (apart from on the Riviera) than expected.

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Not so surprising: The further the journey takes the guys into the economically poorer southern parts of Europe, the harder it is to earn money. The only exception here is Lisbon.

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Cannes can sod off: The hip-hoppers feel most out of place by the marinas on the Côte d’Azur. They meet people there who come from a diametrically opposed galaxy where lifestyle is concerned.

The only consolation is that Michael Caine waves to them from his limousine.

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The David situation: Team-member David has to leave the rest of the gang behind in Marseille with a heavy heart. Explanation – a lady back in Lausanne who doesn’t like playing second fiddle. David has to decide between feelings and reason.

And reason loses, which is at least better than losing your mind due to deeply repressed emotions.

22 Doppelgangers: In

Spain the band come across a Polish group who are also undertaking a self-initiated promotional tour. The enthusiasm of both bands is contained by their financial situation.

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23 Law and order: Spain

proves to have incredibly assiduous policemen and the strict application of the law makes things harder here for the travelling musicians than anywhere else.

24 Ebb and cashflow:

Financial rock bottom arrives in Barcelona. The guys literally don’t have a euro to their name. By way of contrast, they make the best money in Lisbon, earning €300 (R2,877) in two hours.

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Slander: Upon arrival in Tangiers, the guys, in spite of their international background, get called Nazis by a Moroccan mob. Stones and flick-knives prove it’s best to keep their distance – while trying to keep their cool.

30 No time for the

25 Not much fun: The

blues: There’s no time for being introverted or travelweariness if you have to perform in front of strangers, just to survive on a daily basis. When their backs were against the wall, the guys discovered – and exhausted – incredible reserves of energy.

26 Stone age: Angry

A peek into the boot: Luggage was packed into and taken out of the Defender close to 100 times. A look at the horrendous pile reveals duffel bags, the corner of the amp, a trainer, a long-board to transport the amp, oiltorches and dirty sweaters.

Defender gets towed away overnight in the home of the Sagrada Família. If Max’s girlfriend hadn’t been visiting him and come up with the €195 (R1,870) to pay the fine, the trip would have come to an end in Barcelona.

Barcelona residents destroy the band’s laptop by hurling bricks at them from the fourth floor of a building, missing York by 20cm. The choice of beats they have is reduced to eight. The damage comes to an equally frightening €1,700 (R16,293).

27 Boiling point: A 48°C

heatwave in Madrid seriously saps Jamie, Max and Hanno’s motivation. It never once got as hot in Morocco.

28 Fair ferry: You

normally have to fork out €240 (R2,300) to cross the Straits of Gibraltar. But a special offer by the ferry company in Tarifa means they get a crossing to North Africa for just €130 (R1,245).

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A quick look into the interior: Parking tickets, crumpled Red Bull cans, broken CD covers, the corpses of an army of ants, a fragrant Head & Shoulders stain and a less fragrant spilt carton of sour milk.

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A quick look into the distance: The flat fields of Holland, the light and dark of the French Riviera, the Wild West landscape of La Mancha in Spain and the breezy coast of North Africa compensate for any number of trials and tribulations along the way.

Carpe diem: Every day is a challenge that brings financial pitfalls, unexpected highlights and new insights into countries and people.

InterRail is so last century, while a holiday like this is guaranteed to be different.

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The reckoning: The sound recordings and T-shirts took an initial investment of €3,500 (R33,530). Of the 200 T-shirts they shifted, 50 were given away as a token of gratitude, and of the 370 CDs they moved, 70 were given away for free.

37 Tip for copycats: If

the four of them were going to do it again, they’d want a financial cushion to fall back on. To remain true to the spirit of not involving money, that side could be dealt with in the two weeks before they set off. It would avoid serious material hardship.

38 The block party: When

Jamie, Hanno and Max finally get to rap and perform in a backyard under the cover of palm trees on September 8, they understand how hard they’ve worked to put on the show and enjoy it to the full. The event has been coorganised by extravagant fashionista Amine Bendriouich.

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What they found out: Music never stands still. It keeps on growing, regardless of national borders. 39 Days proactively transported hip-hop from Berlin to Africa (relatively) safe and sound. Amen to that.

Print2.0: The joys of the open road Find diary entries and excerpts from the film, 39 Days – A Road Trip, at en.redbulletin.com/39days and www.39daysthefilm.com

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za.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Take a steep ride downhill

Finding your way through impassable terrain and trying to look as good as possible while doing so‌ The Red Bull Rampage is the most important and undoubtedly the toughest Big Mountain contest in the world. Get a little closer to the unimaginable Words: Werner Jessner 58

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photography: christian pondella/red bull photofiles

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scape Vegas – the antechamber to hell, with its silicone breasts, weak beer, fake marble and slot machines – with a full tank northbound on to the I-15, and listen as breathless broadcasters on the car radio play the musical equivalent of silicone breasts, weak beer and slot machines: Bryan Adams, ZZ Top and Whitney Houston. A much better soundtrack for this road of the down and defeated would be Concrete Blonde’s 2004 concept album Mojave, something along the lines of: “Sorry Vegas didn’t treat us better, baby, damn!” Heading back east is the American equivalent of raising the white flag. At least we thought to invest those final quarters in a full tank. In Salt Lake City there would only be holy water.

And that’s not how we want things to turn out at all. Shortly after the Arizona Strip, we hit the accelerator and, soon, we’ve been driving for an hour. America is big. After St George, the place names start to sound a little more intriguing: Hurricane, Virgin, Rockville. Keep following the signs for Utah’s Zion National Park. After the turn-off, it’s four miles of dirt track and then you’re there. And nothing, really nothing, can prepare you for what you see when the road finally opens up.

Land seizure

It’s 40°C outside, and a dry heat wave cascades through the valley, peppered with a fine red dust. It’s a completely surreal landscape: reds shot through with white sandstone, bizarre rock formations and thornbushes in the middle of it all. You might almost think you were on the seabed if it wasn’t for the three tiny Red Bull arches up on the mountain. They look like gallows.

Far down below in the car park, a well-meaning soul has erected a sign that states: No bicycles allowed beyond this point.

As if any mere mortal would attempt to do anything here on two wheels. Scorching heat or not, you get goosebumps on your forearms, with the chill travelling up through your shoulders and into the back of your neck, as you make the ascent.

It takes almost 30 minutes to get all the way up to the gallows, and if you didn’t have vertigo before you set off, there’s a chance you’ll develop it along the way. The only sensible way to cross some of the sandstone bridges is on all fours. The riders ask you not to trample over their lines. What lines?

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photography: ian hylands/red bull photofiles

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The rules for Red Bull Rampage, the most important Big Mountain contest in the world, are pretty straightforward.

You can choose any of three starting points and the rest is up to you. Find, design and improvise the line you’ll take down into the valley and five judges positioned on the course will mark you. You’ve got to be quick, technically clean, safe, spectacular and, most important of all, creative. The digging the riders have to do for Red Bull Rampage is almost as important as the riding itself. It certainly takes a lot longer.

There are footsteps visible everywhere on the mountain.

On a plateau between two cliffs, a couple of rough berms or rider-fashioned tracks are visible. One of them leads straight over the abyss. That can’t be right. But there’s an explanation for everything. About the distance of two stacked houses down below, a tiny man with no shirt on can be seen shovelling away at the land. Opposite him, another little man is squatting down on his heels right on the edge of the cliff, hacking away at the rock-face with a pickaxe. Darren Berrecloth appears to be far from pleased with the take-off on his prospective jump.

But where can you jump to here? “Yeah, it’s a pretty big drop.

He’s developed the line he took last time,” a sweaty Thomas Vanderham wheezes from the neighbouring cliff. Vanderham is one of the all-time greats in this business. Any bike porn with him in it is worth buying purely for his presence.

There are hordes of people shovelling all over the mountain. Men taming the earth – an American tradition rooted in history. This gathering of Big Mountain pioneers includes a number of true artists. At least, there’s something poetic in the way Berrecloth, a revelation when he first arrived in 2002 to take a surprising third, cleaves the brittle sandstone with a practised blow of his pickaxe before extracting it and shaping it to his specifications.

In Utah there’s a tool the locals call a cloud – a cross between a pickaxe, a shovel and a rake. It’s square and perfect for attacking porous sandstone. You hack into it from above with the serrated edge and the layers come away smoothly.

The highest compliment a Rampage veteran can pay his troops after a complete section has been carved satisfactorily is that it “looks like a stretch of German autobahn”.

By midday, Vanderham’s gang are almost back down to the bottom, in a 30m canyon with a massive ramp in front of it. “If you make it this far, it doesn’t really matter after that,” he says.

Some details to consider: the Canyon Gap landing has been pushed back and the take-off ramp has been given more kick, sending the riders higher into the air. More height means less distance, so safe ground is now a little further away. The 10m drop and subsequent corner jump after the landing are blind, twisty and almost impossible to pull off cleanly. Dramatic, in other words. Vanderham is deep in thought.

While some riders roll forward silently, as if they’re going to leap into the Canyon for the millionth time without ever actually doing it, others have long since been fooling around down below. One group, centred around the wild Spaniard Andreu Lacondeguy, is happily doing scrubs, tabletops and no-footers off the ramp after the small drop. It’s as if they were on a playground, the fully equipped downhill weapons underneath them were harmless little BMX bikes and there wasn’t a yawning 15m gap between take-off and landing.

“It’s so sick,” giggles the tattoo-covered Lacondeguy. “And it’s so much fun. The berms after the landing – can you see them? We’re going to kill those now!” After half an hour of the crew playing around on the 15m-wide and 4m-high jump, one of the berms has taken such a pummelling that it’s gone completely flat. The sun slowly sets over Utah.

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Between a rock and a hard place: Canada’s Darren Berrecloth shows the speed of turn that earned third place on the podium

QUALIFYING FOR THIS IS AN EXERCISE IN DARWINISM

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DIGGING is ALMOST as crucial as riding Only the strong

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reeride specialist and gravity-defying Canadian Garett Buehler goes for it on the Sender, but his rear shock-absorber can’t cope with the impact when it hits the ground, and the hapless Buehler goes flying over the handlebars. He lands on his chest, then flips over.

His helmet takes the next knock and he somehow ends up back on his feet. But just when everyone is expecting him to land on his backside again, he manages to rip the helmet and goggles off his head while still hurtling downhill – only to hurl them onto the floor in cold anger and then take it out on them.

The crash has turned the handlebars into a pair of antlers, but the angry young man decides it’s best not to take them on, too. It’s a combination of showmanship and acting in the heat

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Above: Spain’s Andreu Lacondeguy shows his commitment Below: USA’s Cam Zink digs for victory

Photography: alessandro dilullo, david clerihew, gibsonpictures.com/red bull photofiles

The top 15 from the last event, held two years ago, qualify automatically for Sunday’s final and 25 invitees tussle for another 10 places. They all get two runs down the mountain, taking any line they please. The lines are smoother going down the right side. The left entails tackling the Icon Sender, an utterly insane wooden drop that sees the riders drop down a distance of at least two storeys.

Qualifying for the Red Bull Rampage is an exercise in Darwinism. Lacondeguy, the European dirt and slopestyle series winner who just recently secured a new bike contract, skulks around after his first run like a chastened dog. As things stand, he won’t have qualified. Lacondeguy gets advice from manager Tarek Rasouli and thinks of taking a line he’s never tried on the second run. But he ends up deciding on the safer option of a backflip off the ramp down below where he’d had so much fun the day before (he’d never tried the flip before, of course). It’s enough to get him through. “Man, I was so tense. But now it can only get easier.” Lacondeguy is the only European to qualify.

All the others are either American or Canadian.

Some of the riders, with their pimped-out big trucks and vanity plates, are not over-endowed with manners, blowing their noses into their tops. Some have questionable sartorial tastes, considering the things they’re about to put their bodies through. The standard gear for the torso is a plain T-shirt.

Some even dispense with the back protector, neck brace and gloves, at which point you might as well dispense with clothes altogether. The mountain couldn’t care less, though.

It’s seen enough rednecks in its time.

Moment of truth: Pulling off this 360 stunt clinched the title for Zink

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new talent TOOK on the battle-hard veterans

of the moment, and sums up the passion and intensity out there.

Among the course-tested veterans, there emerged some eye-opening talent. Just 16, Wil White, riding a stone-age Karpiel bike that any bike-park amateur would refuse to sit astride, just missed out on qualification by two places. (Can someone please buy this young man a new bike?)

Yannick Granieri, from the seemingly bottomless pool of French talent, used the 20m jump right after landing off the Sender drop for a backflip. He landed solidly before getting caught in some nearby thornbushes and crashing out.

Delighting in the applause from the spectators, Granieri dusted himself off, rolled up the ramp and – because it didn’t really matter any more – knocked out another flip, and… crashed again, to uproarious applause. Finally, there’s Alex Prochazka, shortened to Alex Pro in America: smart guy, nice haircut, tough with the shovel, cloud and pickaxe, but as light as a feather on the bike. “The judges like that kind of thing,” Vanderham said. And he was right. Alex Pro came second in qualifying, right behind local boy Logan Binggeli.

Anyone nervous yet? The newly crowned World Cup Champion gives a nod. “I’m always nervous,” says Gee Atherton. In a nerve-jangling fight that lasted all season, he beat South Africa’s Greg Minnaar for the overall Downhill World Cup in the final race by exactly 37 hundredths of a second. The G-Man is now the quickest downhiller of the 2010 season. So what’s the world’s best racer doing at a Big Mountain contest, particularly the toughest one in the world? It’s the equivalent of downhill skiers competing at the Winter X Games, or ski-jumpers doing the halfpipe. “I’ve always wanted to win the Rampage,” he says.

Atherton is the only racer (other than French all-rounder Cédric Gracia) who’s made the effort to be here after a long season, and his presence alone has guaranteed applause.

And there’s another surprise: he’s ahead after the first run.

Ahead of all those wild men: the free-riders, Big Mountain specialists, dirt-jumpers and young indestructibles. He took the line a racer would: down the right-hand side of the mountain.

It was fast, fluid and looked like he was racing, not performing stunts. “You’ve got to trust your strengths,” he says. “I’m not a jumper who can do silly things in the air, but I can go fast.”

There was the odd 30m jump in his run, too. Differentiating him further from the pack was his routine as a racer, marked by trademark preparation and planning. His team – Stevie, his cool, long-maned, somewhat incomprehensible mechanic, and Clay Porter, the Atherton clan’s cinematographer – dug out lines and sprayed the landings with water to get them hard.

Clay now looks constantly through the viewfinder of his camera. “Even the dust looks great here,” he says.

And he’s right. When a rugged utility vehicle, a Tomcar with workers in it, appears in the footage from Zion National Park, it looks like the off-road scenes in the film version of Hunter S Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

Surprisingly, Lacondeguy is in second place after the first run; two backflips see to that. Elsewhere, Vanderham may be the only one to pull off the Canyon Gap faultlessly, but then he comes off, “where it doesn’t matter anyway”.

Berrecloth, the overall favourite, takes a crazy line that no one else dares to, but with limited success – both of his feet off the pedals at one point. Joint favourite Cam Zink has the crazy idea of trying a 360 off the Icon Sender and takes a heavy fall. Canadian Kurt Sorge tries a no-footed landing 64

photography: christian pondella/red bull photofiles

Judgement Day

on the Canyon Gap and feels the painful effects on the body of thumping suddenly onto the ground from a great height.

The second run begins with Atherton going off to get something to eat. He can’t improve his score anyway. The first run was too good and a second is unnecessary. Plus, something’s broken in the rear of his bike and the weather forecast says there’s a 50 per cent chance of rain. When the storm that’s been threatening finally appears, the wily racer seems to have won outright. Of all the other riders who’ve come down the right-hand side of the mountain, none is anywhere near his tally of 82.40 points – and then the weather delays proceedings. Rain, squalls… there’s no hope of riding.

Then the skies lighten up a little. Gracia does a test-ride down the mountain to check for safety. Next, it’s Lacondeguy’s turn. “I didn’t want to ride at all. I thought it was too risky,”

Into the blue: No time for second thoughts as riders began their mountain assault in searing heat

he says afterwards. So what does our safety-conscious friend go and do? Only a no-hand backflip into a gust of wind on the big jump after the Sender. His landing is anything but perfect.

The silence that comes afterwards is terrifying and lasts far too long. Doctors are bent over the Spaniard. Photographers obscure him lying on the ground. Is that a good sign?

Eventually, he gets up and the whole mountain applauds this brave (mad?) man, who’s just bruised his shoulder.

Once the conditions are more or less OK again, Vanderham summons up all the courage his huge heart will allow and finally pulls off the faultless run he’d imagined, including a no-hander over the 30m Gap, which sees him move up to third.

An Atherton-Lacondeguy-Vanderham one-two-three might have been lovely; two Europeans and a racer and skilled dirt-jumper finishing ahead of freeriding’s best-known

character, and all of them ahead of the sport’s hot young things.

But things never stay as they are for long.

Zink, the American with a seemingly uneasy grip on sanity, revisits the idea of doing a 360 off the Sender. This time he nails it. “I wanted to do the biggest 360 anyone had ever done,” he says coolly, back at the mountain’s base. He wasn’t kidding. The stunt will be forever linked with Rampage 2010. And for Zink, it meant not just victory on the day. He was also crowned FMB champion, the overall winner of the Freeride World Tour.

As for Lacondeguy, who ended up knocked off the podium

by Berrecloth, he’ll be back next year. And a small thing like a bruised shoulder didn’t stop him partying the night away.

Isn’t it good for young people to have goals?

Print2.0: the hardest Big Mountain contest in the world Check out more at en.redbulletin.com/rampage

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Webber unmasked Mark Webber is the unstarry guy from an unstarry Australian commuter town who’s within touching distance of his dream: becoming Formula One world champion. This is the little-known story of how a boy from nowhere forced his way to the very top Words: Anthony Rowlinson Portraits: Alan Mahon

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Print 2.0

za.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Join Mark Webber in the Red Bull Racing F1 simulator

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ummer 1997 and Mark Webber is on the phone to his dad, Alan, 10,500 miles away in Queanbeyan, Australia.

Mark is crying. He’s a long way from home, a young, raw racing driver in Europe, chasing the impossible dream of one day becoming Formula One world champion. And right here, right now, the dream has gone sour. Full of ambition, but out of cash and with no friend-in-ahigh-place to turn to, or beg a favour from, he’s doing what any youngster-ina-jam would do: calling home.

“Yep, I remember crying on the phone to my dad at one stage, thinking I might have to give up and come home,” he says.

“But once you’ve left Australia, you have no option other than to keep it rolling.

Certain things are out of your hands, but you have to try to put it back in your hands whatever way you can.”

Hard to equate the image of a tearyeyed Mark Webber with the granite-jawed ‘Aussie Grit’ winner he has become today, but that’s how it was for a short while.

Mark, more than most – more, indeed, than any driver in recent memory – hasn’t had it easy on his way to the top.

He’s had to “fight, fight, fight” as one early believer put it; or, in the words of another: “He risked everything when all he had to back him was his talent.”

That much, at least, was a given, and natural speed in a powered vehicle was one of two or three essentials that would carry him from a town with a population of 21,000, to a point very near the top of the ziggurat.

Queanbeyan may lack the moviereel appeal of a Sydney or a Melbourne, but Mark speaks affectionately of his “lucky childhood in a rural town with lots of open space” where he would zap around the family farm on a dirt bike, discovering early a need for speed, while honing intuitively the feel and balance that would equip a future racer.

Dad, a petrol station owner and die-hard Formula One fan in a country where F1 68

wasn’t fashionable (“we’d always be up in the middle of the night. Dad would get me up, then be snoozing in the ol’ armchair; school would be a write-off the next day”) indulged the racing impulse to a degree, allowing Mark free rein around the homestead. But when the oil-smeared, dusty, exhilarated urchin that was a back-from-the-tracks Mark one day asked the inevitable: “Dad, can I go racing?” the paternal-protective instinct came on strong.

“Yeah… no way was I going to be allowed to race bikes. Dad was sponsoring a couple of the local kids and there were a few injuries, which wasn’t so good. So we looked at karting, which was a lot more attractive and safer, and better for his relationship in terms of not getting a divorce from Mum!” Mark, now 34, was 13 when he first parked his backside in one of the teenywheeled, skinny-tubed pocket rockets that allow kids to make early forays onto the tracks. His first kart was “borrowed from a mate, Matthew Hinton” and almost exactly 20 years ago, a course, unwittingly, was set.

He quickly proved as adept at this new sporting challenge as he had at most other school sports – rugby, swimming, cricket: “Whatever, mate, we were always encouraged to have a go.” And there was something else: a sniff that he might be more than just ‘pretty good’. Big Al, petrol in his veins, sport in his guts, backed his lad through two years of karting and into the Australian Formula Ford championship – the first rung of so-called ‘car’ racing, as distinct from karting.

This was a swift ascent for Webber junior; the racers he would later come up against in Europe – the Schumachers, Vettels, Hamiltons and Alonsos – were all in go-karts by the age of four or five: teeny track titans who already had a decade of racing experience by the age Mark got started.

It’s now 1994 and Mark, who would finish a modest 13th in that year’s Australian Formula Ford championship, was about to meet one of the two or three most important people in his life: Ann Neal.

Ann, then the media manager for Australian Formula Ford racing, these days Mark’s partner and personal manager, recalls a 17-year-old who was still dirt-track raw in many respects (“I knew nothing about car set-up. If I was slow I’d try to drive faster, then crash”), yet had a certain something that set him apart from his peers.

With the lack of hyperbole typical of the Webber clan, she recalls: “Mark had had a few good results the year before

photography: camera press (1), Mark Webber Archive (3)

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Quick off the Mark Mark Webber was a kid who always needed to be outdoors, burning off excess energy. The family motto was ‘have a go’, as shown in this selection of snaps from his family album

The family home was miles from the coast, so Aussie Mark didn’t grow up a surfer. He doesn’t look too happy about this paddlingpool dunking from dad Al

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Wheels were more Mark’s thing, from an early age. Here he’s at the helm of a tractor on the family farm. Possibly quicker than some of the cars he’d race

The racing urge got an outlet when Mark borrowed a go-kart “from a mate, Matthew Hinton”.

The bug bit and Mark was off – through Aussie racing to F1

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Race ace (clockwise from left): He looks a boy-band hopeful, but Yellow Pages cash secured his early career; driving in Formula 3000 from 2000-1, he showed enough speed to get an F1 test drive; Mercedes sportscars in 1998-9 were an important ‘big team’ step; the Formula Ford Festivals at the UK’s Brands Hatch circuit in 1995 and ’96 were landmark events for Mark – third on his debut, he won a year later against a top-level field; racing Australian Formula Ford (here at the Australian Grand Prix support event) took Mark across his homeland in pursuit of success Behind every man: Mark with Ann Neal, his partner and manager. Her drive and motorsport contacts were vital in guiding Mark towards the European motor-racing scene and eventually to the highest levels of Formula One

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photography: mark webber archive (4), sutton images (1), PA (1)

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and a couple of good potential showings – not awesome, but not too bad. Then I got roped into helping him find sponsorship which was not something I wanted to do, but I helped out.

“One of the things that struck me was that Mark wanted to try to do the best job that he could, whatever that was, and that impressed me. He’s still the same.

I could see that he didn’t want to be just like his mates, getting on the treadmill, getting married… He had ambition, but as for becoming F1 world champion, I don’t think anything was further from his mind. He had absolutely no idea how to go about it. And from such a long distance. It seemed an impossible idea.”

A spark, however, had been lit. Fired by Mark’s talent and Ann’s understanding of how motorsport worked, it began, slowly, slowly, to flame. But always, there was the problem of funding this cash-greedy sport. Al Webber’s bounty didn’t run to season after season of paying for his son to go motor racing. Someone – who? – would have to provide a corporate dollar.

It took months of chasing to find a backer and when those first bucks came, they were bright yellow. Geoff Donohue was head of corporate affairs for Yellow Pages Australia, and by his own admission, a man with “no knowledge of motorsport, nor any interest in it”. So when Ann and Mark presented him with a sponsorship dossier, proposing that Yellow Pages back Mark, the auguries weren’t good.

Their timing, however, was fortuitous.

The motoring section of Yellow Pages was a big revenue spinner, so the idea of having a motorsport sponsorship presence made sense. It had been a while, though, since the company had been involved in motorsport, and backing an unknown in single-seater racing when Australian motorsport was dominated by saloon-car racing was… unorthodox.

“I talked it over with my boss,” says Donohue, “and we decided in the end that we could return to motorsport and hedge our bets by sponsoring the whole of Mark’s car, without doing something more obvious and expensive like sponsoring a touring car team. And it’s fair to say Ann put her case for backing Mark pretty forcefully!”

The clincher was a mini-movie Ann had made of Mark’s racing highlights to date.

“That was super-impressive,” says Donohue, who, once the deal for a season’s funding had been agreed, would accompany Mark to races far and wide across Australia.

“We got to some pretty far-flung remote and rural tracks,” he says, “and it was a great bonding time. I remember

one race on Phillip Island, and it was pissing down. Mark had qualified fourth or something, but was up to second by the second corner, like a warm knife through butter. And this was against other young drivers who were mostly factory-backed. It was obvious pretty quickly that he was a really good young driver. They were fun times.”

Being “really good” or even the best in Australia wasn’t ever going to be enough for Team Webber, however, who by now, with Ann’s guidance, had set their sights firmly on Europe and pitting Mark against the cream of the racing crop.

“We talked about being ‘the best in Australia’ and what that meant,” says Ann, “but Mark wanted to test himself against the best in the world. He did a good job in 1995 in Australian Formula Ford [finishing fourth in the championship], but I said to him even if he stayed a year and won the championship, it wasn’t going to do him any good. Even at that stage, younger and younger drivers were making it to F1. I told him that he had to make the move to the UK for 1996.”

“She was pretty key, mate, yeah,” Mark confirms. “I definitely would have given it a crack without her, but it was hard to say what would have happened. Let’s say it was certainly very positive to have met her!”

Ann, a Brit who had emigrated to Australia, had plenty of motorsport connections from her former working life as a racing PR in the UK. She knew the scene, understood that for an unknown like Mark, a tried-and-trusted path would have to be followed, to prove his credentials, carve a reputation.

Together, they mapped out a career plan – a stepping-stone chart illustrated with the car from each category Mark would ideally race before reaching F1. At the top of the chart was a 1995 BenettonRenault, as driven by that year’s world champ, Michael Schumacher. They still have this prescient memento.

First stop, then, had to be a season of British Formula Ford for 1996, but before

Being the best in Australia was never going to be enough

that, an October of look-see in the UK, taking in the blue-riband Formula Ford event, the 1995 Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch race circuit.

Ann’s connections had bagged Mark a test drive with race car manufacturer Van Diemen and his performance impressed owner Ralph Firman so much, he offered Mark a ‘works’ (ie factorybacked) drive in the Festival proper.

History records Mark finished third (and was pushing for second) on his international racing debut. It was a massive result for the Queanbeyan kid.

“Finishing third was absolutely huge,” he says. “At least, I thought it was. But then we went back to Australia and there was absolutely nothing. For me that was fantastic petrol on the fire. It’s good to have people doubting you. That’s fantastic motivation.”

Corporate Australia, it seemed, could scarcely have been less impressed, but Mark’s 1996 season, at least, was secured with a works Van Diemen drive, thanks to that impressive Festival debut. Times were far from easy though: unknown tracks, homesickness and lack of cash all made the first half-season difficult. “We had no money, so I taught at race schools for £43 (R412) a day,” Mark remembers, “but it was never a sacrifice. This was our choice.”

A mid-season visit back home reminded him why he had left in the first place and a re-energised Mark Webber went on to finish second in the championship and win the Formula Ford Festival.

Having by now generated some real momentum, the British Formula 3 championship, Europe’s leading category for future F1 stars, was the next step.

“It was a very big jump,” says Ann, “and we didn’t have enough money to do it, but we needed to stick to the plan.”

They scraped together every nickel and dime to buy Mark a ride for the first four races in a leading team run by fellow Australian Alan Docking. Mark won his fourth race, but by then the piggy bank was empty.

It’s at precisely this point that Mark’s career took on, for the one and only time, a fairy-tale quality, with one David Campese, Australian rugby legend and one of the Union game’s greatest players, cast in the role of fairy godmother.

At the end of 1996 Campese had hung up his boots, following a massively successful career representing the Wallabies the world over. As fate would have it, he was also a Queanbeyan boy and had played rugby with Mark’s dad.

Looking to develop a post-playing career, Campese had become interested 71

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in sports management and Ann and Mark were advised to get in touch, see if he could help raise funds from back home.

This they did in spectacular fashion. “We pretty much ambushed him at Heathrow airport,” says Ann. “We knew he was returning home, and that we had to get him before he left, so that’s what we did.”

The result of this ‘ambush’ was Campese arranging a lunch at London’s swish Savoy hotel for leading Australian businessmen, introducing them to Mark with the aim of convincing them that here was an Aussie horse to back.

Says Campese: “I tried to explain to these guys how important funding was to a guy trying to make it in motorsport, but there was no interest. Nothing. I remember saying to Mark afterwards the most important thing was to just remember these guys who said no. And when you make it and they want a piece of you, tell them to get stuffed. They’ll want to jump on the bandwagon, you watch.”

The upshot of another corporate snub was Campese digging into his own pocket, to the tune of £100,000 (since repaid) to help Mark finish his F3 season.

“I gave him a bit of support, yeah.

Why? Because he was chasing a dream.

I’d been and chased mine, coming from a small town and ending up playing for the Wallabies. And y’know, if you really believe in what you’re doing and you’re passionate about it, then you have to go for it. And Mark was. His success is because he has been determined and passionate.”

Now competing in an arena where those who knew what to look for could spot future talent, Mark was at last attracting the right sort of attention, but, as ever, not without graft. After each of Mark’s races Ann would draft a press release that would be sent to all her and Mark’s best contacts. “This was before email,” she laughs. “Mark had to feed 60 releases into a fax machine and send them individually. I’d write it, he’d send it. That was our deal.”

One of those hundreds of faxes landed on the desk of Norbert Haug, boss of Mercedes’ motorsport division.

Mark had introduced himself to Haug a couple of years earlier at the Australian Grand Prix and Haug remembers liking the young man’s style: “He came up to me and we talked and he just said ‘I’m racing in England, can we stay in contact?’ I liked how he approached me.

He didn’t go down on his knees and beg for a drive, so I looked into his records and could see good results right from the outset. You could see he was quick.

You could also see that he had done it 72

without any big team or big money behind him. He had had to fight, fight, fight and in the end that’s all that matters.”

The Mercedes contact led to a full-time ride with the Silver Arrows in GT racing through 1998-99: big kudos with a prestige manufacturer, even if it meant a temporary move away from single-seat racing cars.

Mark’s 1998 season was successful: second in the FIA GT championship and the experience of racing for a factorybacked squad. A second Mercedes season followed and it was a disaster. Mercedes’ main focus that year was the classic Le Mans 24-hour race, where their cars proved aerodynamically unstable, causing both Mark and team-mate Peter Dumbreck to have huge reverse-flip take-off accidents from which they were incredibly lucky to emerge unhurt (log on to YouTube and search for Webber Le Mans flip).

Mercedes withdrew from the race and canned its sportscar programme.

What could have been a career-ending event proved, however, to be something of a disguised blessing: Mercedes’ withdrawal forced Mark once again to focus exclusively on the single-seater racing that had always been planned.

His route back came through another Australian connection, this time with businessman and race-team owner

Haug: “He had to fight, fight, fight and in the end that’s all that matters”

Paul Stoddart. “We’d been talking to a lot of people,” says Ann, “and one of them was [F1 team owner] Eddie Jordan who was giving Mark a lot of time, getting him into the factory and helping keep Mark believing in F1. Hard to say how much of it was bullshit, but EJ did introduce us to Paul and from there Mark got into Formula 3000.”

This was the last harem-scarem hurdle to the top category. Most who got this far were good; a few were exceptional; a clutch graduated to F1. Mark, after a two strong seasons, was one of those. He finished second in the 2001 championship and by this stage had bagged a test drive for the Benetton F1 team – the very team he and Ann had identified as the ‘F1 goal’ on their career-plan wallchart.

Simple? Hardly. Both were still relying on their wits to avoid contractual pitfalls with less-than-scrupulous team bosses hoping to tie Mark into restrictive multiyear deals. They would have none of it, walking away from early offers, yet so tantalisingly close to their goal. One offer they could not refuse was a longterm commercial management contract with Flavio Briatore, one of the most influential mover-shakers in F1.

An F1 race chance – finally – would come in 2002, after excellent test performances for Benetton. Mark would once again race with Paul Stoddart, who was by now owner of the Minardi F1 team, the sport’s humblest, lowest-budget operation. It was the break Mark and Ann had chased for almost a decade.

Minardi, of course, wasn’t the end of the Mark Webber story, nor even the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.

And for those who had been with him from the start of the crazy dream, who had helped when others would not, his example in doggedly remaining fixed on his life’s goal proved an inspiration.

Geoff Donohue: “The people in Australia who know the whole story are pretty amazed that he has managed to survive and is now a genuine contender for the world championship. I’m just in awe of his determination.”

And David Campese: “A lot of people who could have backed him early on will be eating their hats now. Everything he gets, he deserves.”

It’s no coincidence that the rear of Mark Webber’s helmet carries two discreet Australian national emblems – those of the emu and the kangaroo.

Neither animal can take a backward step.

Print 2.0: See Mark tackle a virtual Abu Dhabi track Follow Webber’s season at www.markwebber.com

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America’s Cup 2013

Match Me

If You Can

The grand sport of competitive match sailing is about to undergo a revolution, with an exciting new set of regulations for the 2013 America’s Cup set to galvanise the scene. And the dramatic new boats are forcing crews to hone their skills as never before…

Words: Wolfgang Rafetseder Photography: Kurt Pinter

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First, the time frame: Jimmy Spithill, the enfant terrible of America’s Cup racing, met with top Olympic duo Roman Hagara and Hans-Peter Steinacher in mid-August.

Spithill had wanted to make up for a missed opportunity due to bad weather a couple of months earlier, when the international Match Racing World Championship visited Traunsee, Austria: namely, to take part in a helicopter aerobatics flight with Hagara and Steinacher at the invitation of Red Bull’s Flying Bulls.

It was still a month before the new regulations for the America’s Cup would be made known, and talk soon turned to the pending decision and the big question: single or multihulls?

A press conference in Valencia on September 13 revealed all: the 2013 America’s Cup will be sailed in 72ft catamarans with impressive ‘wing’ sails (imagine something like a vertically positioned airplane wing). Together with a number of other progressive innovations in and around the America’s Cup, this move will probably lead to a revolution in sailing as a whole. Thanks to this bold new format and the advent of the World Series, which will start with 45ft catamarans in 2011, sailing should be more spectacular and closer to the public than ever.

But back to August, when Spithill duly appears on the jetty in front of the

How the other half live: Sailing a 1960s wooden Lacustre yacht on Lake Zell, with Roman Hagara at the helm and Jimmy Spithill the figurehead. Allied to a healthy respect for tradition, these guys want a progressive, action-packed future for sailing

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Grand Hotel Zell am See in trainers and apologises for being late, with a winning smile and an explanation that a run around the lake had taken longer than expected. The proud owner of the Lacustre wooden yacht Spithill will be sailing forgives him the faux pas of wearing his rough, black soles on the polished deck, until the Australian maestro senses the anxious glances and decides to walk around in his socks.

America’s Cup winners look different from the rest of us. More sophisticated.

More dignified. Which perhaps isn’t surprising. We’re talking about the oldest sporting trophy in the world here and the financial outlay that comes with trying to win it is more than most Formula One teams spend in a year.

Furthermore, the pride of a whole sailing nation can rise or fall with victory or defeat. So responsibility for the cherished America’s Cup yachts lies traditionally with the admirals of sailing and not the smart, young cadets.

At least that was the case until the 2010 America’s Cup, when the American BMW Oracle syndicate took on 30-yearold Jimmy Spithill as its helmsman – and he won the coveted trophy for the Golden Gate Yacht Club in San Francisco, making him the youngest America’s Cup skipper ever to win the event.

He is seen as the most talented man in match racing – a type of sailing that pits one yacht against another and in which the pre-start period, featuring tactical skirmishes for a better starting position or forcing the opposing yacht into violating the rules, is often the high point. His aggressive starting tactics have earned him the reputation of a killer. “I started out down the classic path, sailing dinghies and triangular courses, but it got too expensive for my family and we couldn’t afford a new boat,” he says. “One advantage of match racing is that the yacht clubs provide the boats and when you reach a certain level, you can win really good prize money.”

In Austria, starting out in competitive sailing usually means taking the same classic route and then graduating to Olympic categories mapped out for you – unless you’re called Roman Hagara or Hans-Peter Steinacher, who both came to sailing from other disciplines.

Hagara arrived from windsurfing and sailing for fun; Steinacher from skiracing and the School of Natural Talent.

“We had no tradition of match racing which, back then, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for a career in Olympic categories such as the Tornado,” says Hagara of 76

America’s Cup winner Jimmy Spithill, flanked by Austria’s double Olympic champions Hans-Peter Steinacher (left) and Roman Hagara. As regards the future of the America’s Cup, they’re going with the flow, and Austrian participation hasn’t been completely ruled out…

Austrian sailing. Thanks to the Extreme 40 scene, which he’s been sailing in since last year, he believes he can capitalise on the smaller starting line-ups and gain even greater match-racing experience.

Even as Hagara and Steinacher learned the ropes of racing as they went along, Spithill was able to garner support

Multihull power: high speeds need greater control from the two Austrians as he prepared for the last America’s Cup. Once it became clear that BMW Oracle were going to enter the trimaran for the Cup, Spithill, the perfect match racer, was left with a particular challenge. Over the course of his career, he’d taken charge of pretty much everything that floats on water and is powered by a sail, but most of those boats had been single-hulled.

Now he was welcomed to another sailing world: multihull boats react very differently from single hulls, are a lot faster at full steam – a helluva lot

faster – but they’re more cumbersome when manoeuvring and are particularly sensitive when a float or, in the case of the trimaran, the middle hull and even a side float, come out of the water.

The multihull looks swifter on the outside than it feels inside, but the juggling act still ends up creating speed.

In theory, the BMW Oracle trimaran, with its 68m wing sail, was probably the best boat in the last America’s Cup (the syndicate’s rival, the title-defending Swiss Alinghi team, raced a catamaran with a normal sail) – but that still had to be confirmed in practice.

Recalls Hagara: “It was our job to make the BMW Oracle crew better multihull sailors, because they were all from the monohull scene and didn’t have much multihull experience. We were able to compare speed using two Extreme 40 catamarans. The guys were quick to understand what they had to be aware of and how to make the most of the speed potential.”

But making the transition from singlehull sailing to Extreme 40 catamarans and then to the uncategorisable America’s Cup trimaran must have been daunting. “Roman and Hans-Peter made it clear how hard we’d have to push it to make the huge, lightweight trimaran go fast,” Spithill says as he describes the lengths the BMW Oracle crew had to go to. “But if we overdid

Photography: Kar Fai Tong/Red Bull Photofiles, JOSE JORDAN/AFP/Getty Images

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it by a tiny fraction or damaged the wing or capsized – whether during trimming, training or in one of the races themselves – it would have been an early bath.

Rolling over a multihull boat that size would smash it to bits.”

At the 2010 America’s Cup, the BMW Oracle team didn’t just win, they gained a massive advantage by better understanding how a multihull boat with a wing sail ticks.

And that didn’t just apply to the crew.

It was the same for everyone involved in the project, from designing the boat to building it, and from sitting behind computers to looking after the boat once it was in the water.

A foretaste of what might be to come as regards excitement in the America’s Cup in 2013 and the World Series in 2011 has been provided by this year’s Extreme 40 races. And in the midst of all this speed, tight manoeuvring and the occasional inevitable crash, are the Red Bull Extreme Sailing team of Hagara and Steinacher.

The courses for this latter event are designed to stick as close to the shore as possible, usually in a dock, which creates a stadium atmosphere and means the spectators can always see what’s going on. “It’s like Formula One on a karting track,” Steinacher explains, expressing the sailors’ feelings precisely.

Spithill says: “Whatever boat the next Cup will be contested in, the most important thing is high-quality TV broadcasting. That’s essential for the commercial success of a sporting event and for a sport’s image. The viewing public has to be captivated by what it sees and be able to link faces and emotions to the participants’ names.

Think of the Tour de France. Watching cycling for five or six hours at a stretch isn’t exactly gripping viewing. But a great TV event has been built up around expert commentators who explain team strategies, heart-rates are shown, and that keeps the viewers involved. Sailing has to do the same thing.”

Spithill adds: “Future America’s Cup yachts will have to deliver high performance, whatever the wind conditions. Live TV broadcasts at set times can’t wait because there’s too little or too much wind. The wing sail is proving very good from this point of view. But what interests the viewers on the technical side is also important.

I think the wing sail is the coolest thing people will have ever seen in sailing.”

Extreme 40 For the world’s best multihull sailors, racing this catamaran shows sailing in a comprehensible, spectacular format When the decision was taken to cut the Tornado catamaran class from the 2012 Olympics, a number of professional sailors had to find a new challenge. Alongside all the political wrangling about which boats would maintain or achieve Olympic status in time for 2012 (oddly, a lot of older boat types have been accepted), a new and exciting catamaran class was quietly establishing itself.

The Extreme 40 catamaran is about twice as long as a Tornado, state-of-the-art and manned by a crew of four for the race (plus a guest, usually someone from the sponsors). The boats have raced in Europe and Asia this year.

America’s Cup It’s the world’s oldest sports trophy and fraught with emotion: it’s not unusual for a court to decide who’s won and who’s lost The announcement of new regulations on September 13 ushers in changes that will affect more than the America’s Cup itself.

For the first time, a kind of premier league for professional sailing will be established, with a clear set of rules. The

current Cup-holder, the Golden Gate Yacht Club and its challenger, the Club Nautico di Roma, made the announcement during a joint press conference. Without going into too much detail about the roles of defender and challenger outlined in a complex

transcript, the press conference heralded a revolution for sailing as a whole and a break with several traditions.

“This is to make the America’s Cup fit for the future,” said Russell Coutts, head of the BMW Oracle team, as the changes were unveiled.

For news, videos, photos and blogs from the 34th America’s Cup, visit www.americascup.com

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More Body&Mind Reviews, previews and a look behind the scenes

photography: Jörg Mitter/Red Bull Photofiles

80 The world’s great marathons 82 the latest gran turismo game 84 get the gear 86 chefs’ secrets 86 discover Red Bull crashed ice 88 listings 90 nightlife 98 Mind’s eye

Print 2.0

za.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Crash in on Red Bull Crashed Ice

Martin Niefnecker (GER) heads Gabriel Andre (CAN) in the final for the Red Bull Crashed Ice 2010 in Munich, Germany. Get a first look at the 2011 series on page 86

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Joy and Pain Following his legendary run from the plains of Marathon, Pheidippides died after bringing news of an Athenian victory over the vast Persian force. The marathon itself hasn’t been as dramatic for the tens of millions of runners since, but the settings have

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Boston Marathon

First run in 1897, this is the most traditional marathon after the Olympic competition.

The starting line-up is limited to 20,000 and there are some strict criteria: men aged under 34 have to prove they have a personal best of under 3 hours 10 minutes.

Next marathon: April 18, 2011 Web: www.baa.org

2 New York City

Marathon The race through the Big Apple has about 45,000 participants, making it the world’s biggest. And public interest in the event is equally huge. Up to 2 million spectators line the course, which passes through all five New York boroughs.

Next marathon: November 7, 2010 Web: www.nycmarathon.org

3 Antarctic Ice

Marathon Probably not a bad idea to wrap up warm for a run through the snow and ice at 80 degrees south. The temperature is normally about 20º below zero. Plus there’s the altitude of almost 1,000m. The journey there is via the Chilean city of Punta Arenas.

Next marathon: December 12, 2010 Web: www.icemarathon.com

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4 Berlin Marathon One of the World Marathon Majors, alongside New York, Boston, Chicago and London, the Berlin race’s course is extremely quick.

Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie (above) proved as much on September 28, 2008, when he set the current world record of 2:03:59.

Next marathon: September 25, 2011 Web: www.berlin-marathon.com

5 T he Underground Marathon This takes place 700m below ground in a mine in Sondershausen, Germany. Participants, limited to a maximum of 400, have to wear helmets as they negotiate the 10.5km round course. The main challenges are temperatures of almost 31°C and low humidity.

Next marathon: December 4, 2010 Web: www.sc-impuls.de

7 Everest Marathon The world’s highest marathon starts 5,184m above sea-level and ends in the Nepalese Sherpa village of Namche Bazaar at an altitude of 3,446m. All the race participants meet for a 25-day trip through Nepal in advance to make sure they can adapt to the conditions in the Himalayas.

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Next marathon: November 2011 Web: www.everestmarathon.org.uk

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6 Great Wall Marathon The course in the province of Tianjin affords picturesque views of villages and paddy fields, but also includes 5,164 steps on the Great Wall of China. So perhaps not surprising that the best winning time is a ‘lowly’ 3:18:48.

Next marathon: May 21, 2011 Web: www.great-wall-marathon.com

photography: Getty Images (8), imago (1), picturedesk.com (1)

10 Marathon du Médoc This marathon, which has been run since 1985, is famous for its fancy-dress runners.

And it’s important to remember to pace yourself at the refreshment stations. Probably better off resisting the wine-tastings offered over the first few kilometres.

Next marathon: September 2011 Web: www.marathondumedoc.com

8 Athens Marathon The most historical run there is starts in Marathon. The relatively slow course – best time of 2:12:42 – passes through olive groves and vineyards and has views of the Acropolis.

The home stretch is in the Panathinaikon Stadium used in the 1896 Olympics.

Next marathon: November 2011 Web: www.athensclassicmarathon.gr

9 Venice Marathon

Further dates and info at www.aimsworldrunning.org

The course leads from Stra on the Brenta to the centre of Venice. It takes the runners over 14 famous canal bridges (including a floating bridge over the Grand Canal), and through Marghera and Mestre, and past St Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace.

Next marathon: October 2011 Web: www.venicemarathon.it

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Gran Designers What would be your ultimate driving experience?

How about taking on the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Sébastien Loeb’s WRC Citroën C4? Or racing around Rome in an Audi R8? Or what about a test drive in the Red Bull X1, the fastest road-going car ever designed?

Developing a huge 1,483bhp, which it delivers with the help of a whopping 9,800N of fan-powered downforce, this spaceage stunner dwarfs the performance figures of the existing record-holder, the Bugatti Veyron.

But Bugatti’s French workforce can breathe easy, because the only place you can put the X1 through its paces will be on the PlayStation 3 in the new version of Gran Turismo 5.

The X1 is a meeting of minds between one of the foremost racing car designers, Red Bull Racing’s Adrian Newey, and one of the greatest game designers, Polyphony Digital’s Kazunori Yamauchi, who has been the brains behind Gran Turismo from the start.

“This was the single most exciting project for me within Gran Turismo 5, because it really was a dream come true,” said Yamauchi, who has devoted six years of brain power and attention-to-detail to the development of the brand-new game.

He travelled to England to meet with Newey and came up with a simple brief. Says Newey: “He asked if, together, we could design a car purely for the purposes of going around a track as fast as possible. One that didn’t respect any sporting rules and regulations.

“The performance of a racing car is hugely restricted 82

by the regulations. Take those away and the opportunity exists to make something that’s obscenely fast.”

One of the most notable innovations that Newey brought to the X1 is fan-car technology for extra downforce – reminiscent of the revolutionary Brabham BT46B, the so-called Fan Car that entered just one Formula One Grand Prix, won it, then was outlawed from the sport.

And while the shape of the X1 makes it look like it might belong in a sci-fi movie, Yamauchi’s philosophy has always been that, when it comes to gaming, reality is fun – and that is what has made Gran Turismo so special.

“The gap between the real and the virtual is becoming

narrower and narrower: these days, racing drivers use simulators to practice. So realism and accuracy don’t make the game less fun – they make it more fun,” he reasons.

“With the involvement of Adrian Newey and Red Bull, we were able to use very accurate simulations to make something that doesn’t actually exist, but easily could – and accomplish that aim to a very high level.”

So what’s it like to drive?

Step forward virtual test driver Sebastian Vettel, who took the prototype for a shakedown around one of his favourite tracks: Suzuka in Japan, where he has won the past two Grands Prix. On his first flyer, the German beat Kimi Räikkönen’s actual lap

Meeting of minds: Newey (left) and Yamauchi teamed up to create the X1

Test drive: Sebastian Vettel puts it through its paces on the Suzuka track

record by more than 20 seconds. “Kazunori’s dream car handled brilliantly,” he said. “There are few tracks that reward bravery and commitment more than Suzuka and I can’t think of a better way to experience the pace and performance of the X1 than going through 130R corner at full throttle.”

But this is also a virtual car built to behave as if in the real world. So what would that be like? “Pretty uncomfortable,” is Newey’s verdict, pointing The Bulletin to a very complex sum that shows the X1 pulls more than 8G in corners.

“Take the weight of your head, plus the helmet and multiply it by eight [a Formula One car produces about five],” he explains. “That’s going to be tremendously physically exhausting.”

And none of that takes into account the costs of actually building the car. So unless you have a few million in the bank, or you can afford to garage the X1 in suitably spectacular home, such as Hangar-7 at Salzburg airport (as GT5 allows you to, see picture top right), you’re better off spending your hard-earned cash on GT5.

So to the burning question: does a serious-minded man like Adrian Newey ever play video games? “Yes, I enjoy gaming on the PlayStation 3.

I race my son on Sunday afternoons, but I really need a fast car like this to beat him!”

And what about Yamauchi?

What would he like to do on a free weekend? “I like racing cars. My short-term goal is to race in the Nürburgring 24 Hours with Sebastian Vettel and Sébastien Loeb.”

GT5 hits the streets in time for Christmas. You can find out more from www.gran-turismo.com Trailer: en.redbulletin.com/gt5

photography: POLYPHONY Digital Inc./Sony entertainment Inc.

Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi and design genius Adrian Newey have collaborated on an obscenely fast car – and everyone can drive it

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Print 2.0

za.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Adrian Newey designs a supercar

The X1 in Gran Turismo 5 is designed to go round a track as fast as possible

Something for the weekend? The X1 (three views); Sébastien Loeb’s Citroën C4 (first and third left); a ’60s classic (second left), or a Lamborghini Miura

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Get the Gear

Hayato Sakamoto’s Essentials The 21-year-old star of Nippon Professional Baseball (left) has had a double-hard task in the 2010 season: he’s first out to bat for a team defending their championship. For this, he needs the finest baseball equipment, secret presents and a regular supply of rap

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1. IceTek Master Chrono watch www.icetekwatch.com A Swiss chronograph, white, effortlessly stylish. Quartz calibre, four-carat white diamonds in the bezel.

2. SSK Professional Edge baseball bat www.ssksports.com Bats are very personal. Every player has his preferences regarding shape, weight, centre of gravity and what it’s made of. Every player tapes his bat himself.”

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3. NPB Official Game Ball www.npb.or.jp All 12 Nippon Pro Baseball teams have to use the official ball. Sakamoto hit hundreds of them every day.

4. Adidas baseball cleats www.adidas.com/jp The metal studs on players shoes are designed for artificial turf. Sakamoto wears size 43. ‘BANE’ is written inside them: it stands for Back Athletes to Natural Energy.

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5. Rawlings Pro helmet www.rawlings.com He tries to wear his helmet for as long as possible, which is why it always look so worn out. He’ll probably wear it until it breaks.

6. Slugger catching mitt and inners www.slugger.com Slugger make Sakamoto’s catching mitt especially for him from ox leather and the embroidered signature, number and seahorse are thrown in.

Slugger also make his inners.

7. Adidas batting glove www.adidas.com/jp They absorb vibrations from the bat when it strikes the ball. They also give a precise feel for the bat and ball. Adidas have issued a series with the Sakamoto signature on them.

8. iPod Touch apple.com With about 150 games a year – half of them away from home – good music is essential. Sakamoto’s current favourite song is the catchy ‘Whatever You Like’ by T. I. 9. NTT N-09A mobile phone www.nttdocomo.com Sakamoto’s mobile comes complete with diamond handcuffs, but he won’t let on who gave them to him.

10. SSK shin guard www.ssksports.com It can really hurt when a ball hits you, so players wear pads to protect their shins.

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A question of taste: A top chef’s secrets

All About Oil Three questions to Michelin-starred chef Sven Elverfeld, who teases the taste buds of gourmets at the Aqua Restaurant in Wolfsburg What’s the one ingredient you can’t do without when cooking?

“Different varieties of good olive oil,” Elverfeld explains. His style of cooking combines simplicity with sophistication, helping the Aqua (in the Ritz-Carlton hotel) to its third Michelin star, in November 2008. Each dish needs its own oil, according to the chef. Sometimes it has to be strong, sometimes mild. “Depending on what I’m cooking, I’ll use either an Italian, Greek, Turkish or Spanish oil. It’s vital for the oil and dish to go well together, both in the restaurant kitchen and at home.”

What food couldn’t you stand when you were younger?

“I was lucky,” the top chef recalls. “My mother cooked for me and my brother, and it was always good. I had a brief phase in my childhood when I refused to drink

milk.” But he’s since always been open to sampling anything new and unfamiliar.

“Even if it’s something I haven’t tried before, I’ll take the plunge anyway and then decide whether I like it or not.”

What’s the most important item of equipment in your kitchen?

“My Thermomix,” comes the instant reply.

He uses one at home, too. This do-it-all food-processor has built-in weighingscales and a hot-plate, which means you can purée and heat things at the same time. “A good knife is important too, of course. In the restaurant I use Japanese Haiku Damascus knives. I like them as they have well-made, sharp blades.”

But at home, it’s Porsche-designed blades for the master chef.

Sven Elverfeld is November’s guest chef at the Ikarus restaurant at Hangar-7: www.hangar-7.com

Get on Down Red Bull Crashed Ice? Wassat?

A quick summary: Gladiators on iceskates hurtle down an artificial ice-track, built through picturesque city centres, and the fastest man wins. To spice it up, there are ramps, hairpin bends and speeds of up to 80kph.

Spectacular? Most definitely!

This year the World Championships will play out in four countries: Germany, Holland, Russia and Canada – and you can take part, provided you’re an ace on skates and can convince judges of your skills at an obstacle course in qualifying competitions (see website, above right).

Contests take place in Munich (January 15, 2011); Valkenburg (February 5); Moscow (February 26) and Quebec (March 19). If that sounds like too much effort, then browse the online video archive to understand why there’s a ‘crash’ in Crashed Ice. 86

Ice-cold facts: you can find all qualifying dates, ticketing information and videos at: www.redbullcrashedice.com

The path to the World Championship is via the qualifying course (above)

Photogrphy: helge kirchberger/hangar-7 (2), Andreas Schaad/Red Bull Photofiles

Red Bull Crashed Ice is part downhill ice hockey, part skiing boardercross. And you can race too – if you’re good enough

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hot SPOTS For the world’s most exciting sporting events, look no further

FIS Snowboard World Cup 03 – 04.11.10

photography: Erich Spiess/Red Bull Photofiles, Alfredo Escobar/Red Bull Photofiles, Imago Sportfoto, Getty Images/Red Bull Photofiles

Some of the world’s best boarders settle in for another season as the World Cup competition picks up pace.

Legends-in-the-making Sigi Grabner and Shaun White are among those fighting to take halfpipe victory, as men’s and women’s competitions play out.

Saas-Fee, Switzerland

Juventus Turin v FC Red Bull Salzburg 04.11.10 The tension is building: can the Salzburgers see off the Italian team in the fourth round of the UEFA Europa League?

Olympic Stadium, Turin, Italy

Red Bull Flugtag 05 & 07.11.10 Tens of thousands of spectators crowd the shore to witness some truly spectacular homemade flying machines attempting to make it over the water. But ‘Flying Day’ is perhaps a misleading name, as all result in a splash.

05.11.10 Salmiya, Kuwait 07.11.10 Sydney, Australia

Red Bull Soapbox Race 06.11.10 Amateur engineering skills are put to the test as teams race their homemade creations in Parque Fundidora in front of a 20,000-strong crowd.

Monterrey, Mexico

Formula one Grand Prix of brazil 07.11.10 Penultimate round of a classic championship that has seen a fascinating five-way fight for the title since the first round last March.

Autodromo José Carlos Pace, São Paulo, Brazil

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MotoGP of valencia 07.11.10 After some unbelievably close battles, breathtaking crashes and hard-fought victories, the winner will more than deserve some silverware at the final race of the 2010 season.

Circuit Ricardo Tormo, Valencia, Spain

FIS Ski World Cup women 03 – 04.12.10 A week after the men gathered in the Canadian Rocky Mountains for an on-piste battle, it’s the women’s turn.

Last year it was the USA’s Lindsey Vonn (above) who emerged as super-G champion.

Lake Louise, Canada

WRC Rally of Great Britain 11 – 14.11.10 One of the world’s oldest rallies just got longer, becoming a four-day affair to tie up this year’s world title fight. At the notoriously wet rally, which takes in slippery forest stages and exposed fog-prone runs north of Brecon, drama is all but guaranteed.

Cardiff, Wales

IFSC Climbing World Cup 13 – 14.11.10 Men and women test their lead climbing skills at the final event of the season. Angie Eiter and David Lama are among those hoping for victory.

Krainj, Slovenia

Red Bull Port-O-Bowl 15 – 21.11.10 Using a portable skating ramp, skate stars Joey Brezinski, Ryan Sheckler and Steven Webb create a playground wherever they please, surprising locals in unique locations.

Houston, Texas, USA

Red Bull Under My Wing 17 & 24.11.10 Italian freeclimber Jenny Lavarda is organising amateur indoor climbing camps to pass on the benefit of her ample experience to the next generation of athletes.

17.11.10 Turin, Italy 24.11.10 Florence, Italy

ASP World Tour 30.10 – 10.11.10 The championship is still wide open, with Jordy Smith and Mick Fanning pushing hard for the title.

Puerto Rico

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US Endurocross Championship 20.11.10

FIS Cross-country World Cup 20 – 21.11.10 In the popular ski resort of Gällivare, men and women get the 2010/11 cross-country season under way over two days.

Gällivare, Sweden

There’s no doubt that this year’s stand-out rider is Polishborn Taddy Blazusiak who has dominated proceedings throughout the season. The return to Las Vegas for the 2010 finale gives him another opportunity to show what he can do on a bike.

The Orleans Arena, Las Vegas, USA

Athens Supercross 20 – 21.11.10 The country’s biggest twowheel event attracts around 20,000 spectators who flock to watch this international two-day indoor motocross race and freestyle motocross show.

This year, Supercross features Czech FMX star Petr Pilat.

Athens, Greece

FIM Supermoto World Championship 21.11.10 The last round of the 2010 championship is set to be action-packed, with some of the world’s top riders determined to race themselves into a podium position.

Salou, Spain

NASCAR Sprint Cup Series 21.11.10 This 1.5-mile oval track opened in 1995 and is home to the Ford 400, the last race of the series.

Expect fumes, collisions and high-octane action.

Homestead-Miami Speedway, USA

FIS Ski Jumping World Cup 27 – 28.11.10 Gregor Schlierenzauer, Thomas Morgenstern, Adam Malysz and co compete as a night-jump team and also in individual competition on the piste at the Rukatunturi ski resort.

Kuusamo, Finland

Formula One Grand Prix of Abu Dhabi 14.11.10 The only evening race on the racing calendar is the setting for the final battle of the season.

Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel returns to the track, hoping to repeat last year’s win.

Yas Marina Circuit, Abu Dhabi

FIS Ski World Cup Men 27 – 28.11.10 The first speed weekend of the season kicks off in Canada.

Last year, Swiss skier Didier Cuche won the downhill at this location, while Manuel Osborne-Paradis took a home victory in the super-G. Lake Louise, Canada

Race of Champions 27 – 28.11.10 The annual event brings together the world’s finest drivers from all the disciplines of motorsport and sets them free to battle, head-to-head, on the very same track in the very same car. Competing stars this year include F1 ace Sebastian Vettel, seven-times world rally champion Sébastien Loeb and master of two wheels and four, Travis Pastrana.

ESPRIT Arena, Düsseldorf, Germany

DTM Shanghai 28.11.10 The Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (German Touring Car) series branches out for its only non-European stop of the season.

Shanghai, China

FIA GT1 Grand Prix of Brazil 28.11.10 Karl Wendlinger and his Swiss Racing Team arrive in São Paulo ready for the next endurance test on the calendar, before travelling to Chile where the season ends next month.

Autodromo José Carlos Pace, São Paulo, Brazil

Middle East Rally Championship 02 – 04.12.10 Eighteen drivers, including Qatari hotshoe Nasser Al Attiyah, and their co-drivers, have overcome tough conditions at seven previous stops, so none will want to give up a single point as the championship comes to a head at the final event in Dubai.

Dubai, UAE

Boston Celtics v Chicago Bulls 03.12.10 Last year, the Bulls clinched the playoffs with the number eight seed in the Eastern Conference. This year, they play under Tom Thibodeau, former Celtics assistant, and the results remain to be seen.

TD Garden, Boston, USA

SA Gravity Racing Series 05 – 06.12.10 The world’s best downhill skateboarders, streetlugers and buttboarders do their thing in the penultimate race.

Cape Town, South Africa

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more body & mind ALoe Blacc

night spots

His anthem ‘I Need A Dollar’ has made Aloe Blacc into a true soul bard. He gives us his thoughts on meditation and capitalism, on page 96.

Los Angeles, USA

We pick the coolest club nights and parties the world over BUSY P 02.11.10

AXEL BOMAN 05.11.10

The French electro entrepreneur and hipster du jour heads behind the decks in Latin America with a crate full of delectable cuts from his label Ed Banger.

Centro Gallego, Mexico City, Mexico

‘Axel’ is Swedish for shoulder.

But the word ‘rumpa’ (that’s arse in English) would suit this Stockholm native better as that’s the body part that Boman sets in motion with his DJ sets. And that also applies to DJ Koze, who releases Boman’s deep house on his Pampa label.

City Hall, Barcelona, Spain

SPACE DIMENSION CONTROLLER 05.11.10 “Controlling dimensions, loitering in space, seducing astro-bitches” is apparently what Jack Hamill, alias Space Dimension Controller, gets up to in his spare time. When the Northern Irish whippersnapper gets behind the controls you’ll hear the cosmic mix of disco, deep house and wonky, currently making him the Milky Way’s latest supernova.

Jelly Roll Soul, Glasgow, Scotland

Photography: Elsa Okazaki, Tobi Bauer, thomas Butler, Paul Tilsley

A GUY CALLED GERALD 05.11.10 ‘Voodoo Ray’, the 1988 acid house anthem made A Guy Called Gerald the dance producer of that era. He became a drum’n’bass pioneer, but now the electronic musician from Manchester is returning to his roots. Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions is a pure hit of acid house, with urgent beats and twittering 303 synths.

Berghain, Berlin, Germany

BRAIDEN 05.11.10 Fashion photographer, radio presenter, musician, DJ: London Red Bull Music Academy graduate Steve Braiden is a jack of all trades, and an emerging ambassador for London’s new bass sound, a cross between hectic electro and tripping house.

Niesenberger, Graz, Austria

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RED BULL SOUNDERGROUND 08 – 12.11.10 Real underground musicians from Paris, New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, St Petersburg and more meet for the world’s first Metro Music Festival.

Stations become subterranean concert halls with the audience delivered by escalator.

Metro, São Paulo, Brazil

CARL CRAIG 12.11.10 Techno is king of Detroit, and Carl Craig its most active ambassador. He commands a cult following and the records he’s released as Innerzone Orchestra, 69 or Paperclip People are collectors’ items.

And although he’s currently working with Moritz von Oswald to drag techno into the concert hall, you can still find him in underground clubs.

The Warehouse Project, Manchester, England

MAYER HAWTHORNE 12.11.10 Is that a lost Smokey Robinson hit? Or Marvin Gaye, serenading us from beyond the grave? No, it’s the young Californian with the golden voice and he’s got more soul in his little finger than most collectors have on an entire record shelf.

The Music Box, Los Angeles, USA

Razzmatazz The mecca for hipsters, a temple of the night: Razzmatazz brings five floors of the coolest bands and DJs covering indie rock to techno.

Read more on page 94.

Barcelona, Spain

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Jarred Christmas An amusing Kiwi in Scotland: with four gigs a night and never-ending jokes, the Fringe Festival comedian Jarred Christmas calls himself a “human Red Bull can”, on page 92.

Edinburgh, Scotland

MAGNETIC MAN & JAMIE XX 12.11.10 Magnetic Man is a new all-star dubstep project comprising Skream, Benga and Artwork.

The three producers garnish their super-heavy bass with garage and jungle beats as well as poppy vocals with the aim of tearing down the borders between genres.

This also applies to Jamie xx, mastermind of British indie sensations The xx.

Maria am Ostbahnhof, Berlin, Germany

MODESELEKTOR PRESENTS: MODESELEKTION 12.11.10 The cheeky Berliners mixing up dubstep and techno count Björk and Thom Yorke among their fans and collaborators.

For their lesser-known artist friends they set up the label Monkeytown a year ago, and they now present a CD compilation called Modeselektion featuring acts like 2562, Shed, Ramadanman and Siriusmo.

Kongresshalle, Munich, Germany

ELEKTRO GUZZI 12.11.10 Three guys from Vienna playing guitar, bass and drums. But what looks like a rock band sounds like something you plug into the wall, thanks to effects, an experimental approach to playing and a pumping kick drum. Consequently, the trio call themselves a techno dance band, a group more at home in clubs than concert venues.

Solyanka, Moscow, Russia

I LOVE TECHNO 13.11.10

Red Bull Kasi Crawl 06.11.10 It’s the ultra-cool street party.

Four stages of house, kwaito and hip-hop celebrate township living in a feast for all music, dance and culture fanatics.

Soweto, South Africa

The first ‘I Love Techno’ party took place in Ghent in 1995 – with 700 ravers. A lot has changed since then. It’s not just that the festival has moved to the Flanders Expo Centre, with six floors and 50,000m² of space, but also that the number of dancers making the pilgrimage to Ghent every year has grown to 35,000. This year, they’ll experience DJs like Keatch, Fantomaxx and Geht’s Noch on the Red Bull Elektropedia floor.

Flanders Expo Centre, Ghent, Belgium

SWEDE:ART 13.11.10 Swede:art might not be Swedish, but he is a major artist, specialising in hip-hop beats and giving them a jazz massage. He describes his style as a hybrid of dubstep and skittering future soul. And on the evidence of his great new album Emotional Colors, that’s pretty much spot on.

Roxy, Vienna, Austria

ZOLA JESUS AND XIU XIU 15.11.10 Her music is dark, with raw, enveloping synth waves and choppy drum machine beats, over which Zola Jesus’ voice looms. Zola – aka Nika Rosa Danilova – is a goth pop wunderkind making beautiful music out of anger and despair.

Tunnel, Milan, Italy

THE GASLAMP KILLER, SAMIYAM AND DAEDELUS 16.11.10 Three artists, one family. The US beat-makers belong to Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label. The Gaslamp Killer looks like Animal from The Muppet Show and his music is an acid-laced fusion of ’60s psychedelia and dubstep.

Samiyam deals in experimental hip-hop while Daedelus serves up his mix of breakcore and easy listening.

Trees, Dallas, USA

JAMIE LIDELL 16.11.10 Along with Christian Vogel, Jamie Lidell made electronic musical history in the ’90s with the intricate funk of Super Collider. This Brit now dedicates himself to soul and has the quality of Otis Redding, that is, if Otis Redding had warbled over Aphex Twin tracks.

Elysée Montmartre, Paris, France

SCIENTIST V THE UPSETTERS, PINCH, SGT POKES, MALA, LOEFAH 18.11.10 Dub legend Scientist recently ran tracks from dubstep producers like Kode 9, Pinch and Mala through his mixing desk/echo chamber. The result is Scientist Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space, which unites two generations of bass music.

Fabric, London, England

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“You’re spending the next hour with me. A guy with a sexy accent and a penchant for secret snacking”

Jarred Christmas Edinburgh Nightcrawler

Keeping up With Father Christmas

included selling fluorescent lighting tubes from an office above Stringfellows and taking part in a medical trial,” he says in an accent unchanged by his 10 years in the country.

But now his accessible-yet-surreal brand of comedy has not only allowed him to turn pro, but also get close to making the leap from circuit stand-up to household name.

Ruth Morgan breaks a sweat with the ascendant Kiwi comic as he “And it is my real name,” he says, one eyebrow raised above his trademark takes on the comedy marathon that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival thick-rimmed glasses. After the improv, he will now spend the rest of the night There is a discernible buzz in the evening crowd queuing outside, eager for the laughs being himself. Well, the on-stage version of himself Time Out magazine described air as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival nears that are making his name. And, despite its final weekend. Colourful poster collages having just jogged here from the first of as ‘human Red Bull’. cover almost every wall and the city is four shows he’ll perform tonight, Christmas, The audience take their seats and, to swollen with people craving entertainment a man who understands comedy as an ‘Backstreet’s Back’ by the Backstreet Boys, and performers keen to oblige. endurance sport, will be ready for them.

Christmas returns. “You’re spending the Through the ambling crowds jogs Jarred Born in New Zealand long before next hour with me, a guy with a sexy accent Christmas. His large frame bursts through Flight of the Conchords blazed a trail for and a penchant for secret snacking,” he the doors of a small theatre like a goodthe home-grown comedy scene, and with says, pausing for the crowd’s laughter. natured whirlwind. “Jeez, it’s hot. What a dad and older brother who had chosen “But decisions have been made, money’s are the numbers like?” he shouts over his careers in the army, Christmas’s dream of been paid, let’s get started!” shoulder as he takes a swig of cough syrup becoming a comedian seemed about as His show, Jarred Christmas Stands Up, is and changes into a black cowboy shirt. likely as becoming Prime Minister or a inspired by becoming a dad. “Writing ‘standThe Kiwi comedian has four minutes to spaceman. But a move to the UK in 2000 up comedian’ under ‘father’s occupation’ on prepare for what he learns is a 40-strong changed that – eventually. “Some early jobs my daughter’s birth certificate – now that’s 92

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LE BUTCHERETTES 18.11.10 Teri Gender Bender, of Mexican duo Le Butcherettes, will be a star within a matter of months. The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodríguez López, who produced Le Butcherettes’ debut album Sin Sin Sin, and Jack White, who took them on tour with him, are both sure of that. And anybody who has experienced one of their live shows full of fake blood, exorcism and underarm hair would agree.

Glav Club, St Petersburg, Russia

RED BULL THRE3STYLE 18 – 20.11.10 Red Bull Thre3Style is calling all local DJs. Participants play a 15-minute set which includes three selected styles. It doesn’t matter what they are, as long as the DJ manages to blend them with flair. Spinners are judged on song selection, technical skills, creativity and – most importantly – their ability to rock the house. The winner will fly to the international final in Paris next month.

18.11 Christchurch, 19.11 Wellington, 20.11 Auckland, New Zealand

Photography: Thomas Butler

RED BULL SOUNDCLASH 19.11.10 Thick glasses and a distinctive accent: Christmas was the star of this year’s Fringe Festival

Backstage: Even with four shows in one night, his stamina level stays high – and the jokes fresh

pressure,” he booms. “Now it’s like, ‘if you don’t get laughs, your daughter starves!’”

Having cut his teeth on the tough London circuit, there’s truth beneath the gag. “As an unknown, no one wanted to book me,” he explained earlier. “So I took unpaid open spots. I remember at one early gig, a guy just shouting out, ‘you’ve ruined my birthday!’” But two years of constant gigging built Christmas’s reputation, and in 2002 he achieved his dream and went pro.

“I was scraping a living for another year and a half,” he says. “Then I started getting offered the big gigs.” Regular paid work at well-known venues such as London’s Comedy Store elevated Christmas to a new league, and he’s now climbed another rung of the comedy ladder, having worked on shows for the BBC, appeared on prime-time TV panel shows and just won the prestigious Chortle Award for Best Compere 2010.

In Edinburgh he has the audience on side as he strides confidently about the stage, taking them on a high-energy journey that includes a miscellaneous gags round and a full-on moonwalking Michael Jackson impersonation. “Man, I’ve even got sweat on

my eyeballs!” he winces when he eventually leaves the stage to whoops and applause.

At 1am Christmas is running again, from his third show of the night to his last, compere at Edinburgh’s loud and lewd Late ’n’ Live. He starts dancing with the crew to Prodigy’s ‘Voodoo People’ as they gee him up for his entrance, the hum of 400 inebriated comedy fans audible over the music. The Kiwi is in his element, keeping order with the same energy he began his evening with, and it’s 3am by the time he leaves the stage.

“Man, I am so sick of my own smell!” he grins.

The pace shows no sign of slowing in the coming months. His first UK tour will be followed by a tour of New Zealand, then more TV appearances, jokes to write…

“But the night’s not over yet,” he winks.

And, with customary stamina, he’s off to the bar before it all begins again tomorrow.

Jarred Christmas UK tour dates: 10.11.10 Harlow Playhouse, Essex 11.11.10 Highlight, Watford 12.11.10 The Y, Leicester 16.11.10 The Stand, Edinburgh 17.11.10 The Stand, Glasgow www.jarredchristmas.com

Two acoustic worlds collide in the Swiss Red Bull Soundclash: 7 Dollar Taxi from Lucerne and Da Sign & The Opposite from Bern. Two bands with different sounds and styles, facing off on opposing stages. But nobody’s waging war; it’s the art of creative collaboration that this event prizes above all.

Komplex 457, Zurich, Switzerland

MARCO PASSARANI 19.11.10 If pizza really was invented in the USA, could it be that techno comes from Italy? Rome’s Marco Passarani could serve as evidence of that theory. Since the early ’90s, this pioneer musician and DJ has been tinkering away at his vision for electronic dance music which lies somewhere between acid house, disco and crystalline techno.

Pratersauna, Vienna, Austria

FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE CINE DE GIJÓN 19 – 27.11.10 This year, the film festival on Spain’s north coast focuses on the Berlin School, showing films from the likes of Christian Petzold, Angela Shanelec and Thomas Arslan. Prizes tend to go to young filmmakers.

Gijón, Spain

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FOUR TET & CARIBOU 20.11.10 Friends, and soul brothers, this pair put together digital campfire songs, remix each other and are both competing for the ‘album of the year’ title. Four Tet’s There Is Love In You is a playful electronic record with occasional nods to the dance floor, while Caribou’s excellent Swim fuses psychedelic ’60s pop with refined house.

The Warehouse Project, Manchester, England

Razzmatazz Barcelona

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS 20.11.10

LE GUESS WHO? FESTIVAL 24 – 28.11.10 This started in 2007 as a Dutch festival for Canadian bands. Since then curator Bob van Heur has loosened the concept so this year, alongside the obligatory Canucks like Born Ruffians and Broken Social Scene, you’ll see great acts from elsewhere, covering everything from indie rock and chillwave to lo-fi songwriting à la Ganglians, Beach House, Giant Sand and Swans.

Various locations, Utrecht, Holland

NUMBERS LABEL SHOWCASE 25.11.10 The hottest dance label of the year isn’t based in London or New York.

No, Numbers or rather label chief Jackmaster, lives in Glasgow, where the accents are as cool and strange as the beats that this youngster releases. As well as a crate full of garage house and shimmering grime sounds he’s also got Deadboy, Nelson and Kool Clap in tow.

Social Club, Paris, France

BENGA 26.11.10 The dubstep DJ from South London, real name Adegbenga Adejumo, heads to the Emerald Isle to spread his pioneering sounds.

The Twisted Pepper, Dublin, Ireland

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World’s Best Clubs

Macro Disco Five floors with 3,500 revellers: Razzmatazz is Europe’s coolest big club. Kate Moss, Billy Corgan and, er, Florian Obkircher agree Razzmatazz isn’t a club, it’s a temple.

The former warehouse in Barcelona’s El Poblenou industrial area has five rooms where top international DJs and bands pull in up to 3,500 revellers a night. Sounds like a vast, soulless mega club, right? Well, no.

The ‘Macro Disco’, as organiser and music enthusiast Daniel Faidella calls the venue, was created 10 years ago to bring more indie rock to Barcelona. The Sónar Festival had established the city’s electronic music reputation but there was no large club presenting electro and rock together. It was a huge success from its first night.

“The Flaming Lips performed live, it was crazy,” Faidella recalls. “There were Teletubbies leaping onstage and confetti and balloons floating all over the place.”

Since then, probably every indie to techno act worth its salt has been to Razzmatazz as performers or guests. “Wendy James and Kate Moss are often seen here. Legends like Marky Ramone and Andy Rourke from The Smiths have asked me if they can perform,” Faidella says. “Others, like Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins, come here after their Barcelona gigs to experience the club.”

Probably the wildest night at the club was thanks to British indie hedonist Pete Doherty. “He grabbed a fire-extinguisher backstage and sprayed it all over the place

like a madman,” says Daniel. “There was foam everywhere. What a night!”

Artists like Ed Banger Crew, 2manydjs, Miss Kittin and Paul Kalkbrenner often appear in one of the five rooms. Razz Club is the large teenage rock floor where up to 1,200 people can sweat it out. The first-floor Pop Bar attracts bloggers, journalists and trendsetters. The Rex Room balances rock and electro, while The Loft offers techno, house or dubstep. Small but charming, the Lolita Bar hosts eclectic electronic gigs.

Once inside the impressive five-level industrial labyrinth, finding the artist you want to see can be a challenge. Screens in each room display who’s playing each night.

To mark the venue’s 10th anniversary this autumn, Faidella is presenting artists who have made their mark at Razzmatazz plus promising newcomers over the course of a party that ends on December 22. These include LCD Soundsystem and Jamaica, Suede and Two Door Cinema Club.

Faidella is most excited by psychedelic rockers Primal Scream, who’ll perform their classic 1991 album ‘Screamadelica’ in full on November 20. Once again, Razzmatazz will be the place to be for music-lovers and hipsters from all over Europe.

Razzmatazz, Pamplona, 88, 1er piso, 08018 Barcelona, Spain; www.salarazzmatazz.com

credit Photography: Tobi Bauer

Along with groups like Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, The New Pornographers form part of the ‘Canadian Invasion’: a wave of superhumanly good bands whose stirring, euphoric songs gladdened the hearts of indie rock fans throughout the noughties. The story continues with the latest New Pornographers’ album Together, a homage to bands like The Byrds, Beach Boys and Cheap Trick.

The Kings Arms, Auckland, New Zealand

Lasers and dancers on the main floor at Razzmatazz

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Breakfast at Dizengoff

Marc Moore, one of the founders of NZ’s Stolen Girlfriends Club label

MARC MOORE Auckland Visit Mondiale for tapas

Resident Artist

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and their coffee is amazing. It’s the best coffee I’ve tasted anywhere. I think Auckland has the most serious coffee culture in the world. I struggle to find good coffee overseas. Maybe we are just used to the coffee here, so everything else tastes rubbish and maybe the rest of the world come here and think our coffee is rubbish, but I wouldn’t say so. The visitors we have here usually rave about the coffee.

When we have visitors I take them to the Takapuna Beach Café (2). I don’t get over there that often, but it is a nice drive over the Harbour Bridge. The café is right on the water so you can totally Zen out there. The food is great and the coffee is good, but I mainly go there for a change of scene.

Mondiale (3), in the Grey Lynn shopping area, is a really cool tapas place. It is owned by a French guy and a Spanish guy, so they’ve got this fusion thing going. They do awesome sangria and great tapas. It’s hard to get a table sometimes because it’s always packed, so it’s worth booking.

But SPQR (4) is pretty much my favourite restaurant. I go there every Thursday to catch up with my friends. The food is beautiful. It’s not a fussy menu. It’s pretty simple, but everything is very tasty – their pizzas are amazing, they do a great steak and they have the best dessert menu. If you

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I moved to Auckland from Raglan in 2001 and lived at Piha Beach on the west coast for the first two years because I had to be beside the waves. I still surf there most weekends and if we don’t have much work on in the week, we’ll knock off early if the waves are good.

I surfed professionally for eight years with my business partner. We got a bit old for surfing and started to do different things.

Stolen Girlfriends Club started as an art exhibition and then we got into fashion.

I get a lot of shit from my old surfer friends for living in Ponsonby and for doing the fashion thing, but Ponsonby is the best place to hang out in Auckland. It is kind of sad, but most people’s first impression of Auckland is the Viaduct down by the waterfront. Most visitors don’t even know about Ponsonby and it is cool up here.

I seldom go into the city.

I start the day in Dizengoff (1), probably my favourite café and I generally go there twice a day. I usually have the Marc Moore special for breakfast. It’s a seasonal fruit platter with coconut bread and a shot glass of lemon curd. The owners named it after me.

I’ve never had a meal named after me before.

Apart from the food, owners Mark and Troy are really cool, they make you feel kind of special which is what you want when you go to a café. It is great for people-watching

Unwind at SPQR

ou

Photography: Guy Coombes

Marc Moore grew up in an isolated coastal town two hours’ drive south of Auckland. Now, as one of the ‘motley crew of surfers’ behind the Stolen Girlfriends Club fashion brand, the designer is a self-confessed city slicker

1 Dizengoff, 256 Ponsonby Road, Freemans Bay 2 Takapuna Beach Café, Old Lake Road, Narrow Neck, North Shore 3 Mondial Bar Café, 549 Great North Road, Grey Lynn 4 SPQR, 150 Ponsonby Road, Ponsonby

1. Dizengoff just dessert, go to SPQR. They also do 2.want Takapuna Beach C a good espresso martini, a very manly drink!

It’s way to start the night, especially 3.a great Mondial Bar Cafe if you’re feeling a bit tired or slow. Have an espresso martini and you’re like, ‘Bam!’ 4. SPQR Later on, the place has a little bit of a club feel as well. It’s an Auckland institution.

For more on Marc check out: www.facebook.com/ stolenGFclub, www.stolengirlfriendsclub.com or follow him on twitter @stolengfclub

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In Profile

Power to the People

aloe Blacc los angeles

Southern Californian soul man Aloe Blacc is hitting his stride, says Florian Obkircher, his new album proving that political consciousness and chart positions aren’t mutually exclusive He wears a fine white shirt, vest, dress trousers and elegant leather shoes. It’s not a look you find that often on the concert stage these days.

But Aloe Blacc doesn’t just allude to the stylings of icons such as Al Green and Marvin Gaye in his music – the 31-year-old LA crooner borrows from them sartorially as well. “I’m inspired by the clothes that artists were wearing in the late ’60s, early ’70s, just as the music was the inspiration for my new album, Good Things,” he says.

And it seems like a good time for a soul revival that goes beyond Amy Winehouse and her ilk. While Blacc has been hailed as the new John Legend and his single ‘I Need A Dollar’ is high in the charts as the theme song of the HBO TV series How To Make It In America, there are other things on his mind: capitalism, greed and injustice.

You’ve been in the business for 15 years, but ‘I Need A Dollar’ is your first major success. Did you think it was something special when you wrote it?

I had a good feeling about that song all along, but I never dreamed it would become such a massive hit.

Can you still remember the circumstances in which you wrote it?

I was in the car. I often get ideas for songs when I’m driving around Los Angeles. You’re not distracted – it’s like cooking, walking or even tidying up – all meditative kinds of activities. The chorus came first.

At the time I was listening to a lot of music that sounds like ‘I Need A Dollar’: chain-gang music; old recordings of prisoners working in chains and singing their own songs as they worked. I wanted 96

Elegant in song and appearance: Aloe Blacc has been inspired by style legends such as Marvin Gaye

to write a song that generated that kind of situation; the kind of song that people would sing together in a circle or group. Each of them has a verse where they describe why they need a dollar.

As in: ‘And if I share with you my story, would you share your dollar with me?’

Exactly. The song is about personal stories – situations in which people lose their home, become alcoholic and need money. It’s also about people who never give up hope that their situation will improve. A few years ago, I was working as a business consultant and got fired very suddenly. The song is partly autobiographical, but represents a lot of people’s destinies.

Soul with a message… that sounds like the 1970s, when Marvin Gaye was asking ‘What’s Going On?’ and Curtis Mayfield demanded ‘Power To The

People’. Both the music and the lyrics of your new album Good Things seem to reference that tradition.

Absolutely. My biggest influences writing that album were Al Green, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone. But the album is also a result of the fact that my producers, the New York production team Truth & Soul, are amazing soul musicians.

And lyrically? The role models you cite were writing about the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement in the USA. What are the issues today? What does political activism look like under the banner of soul music?

The main problem today is capitalism.

There needs to be more awareness about consumption. We live in a world of greed, buying things we don’t need as well as things we think we want. And there’s always

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STEREOSONIC 2010 27.11.10 While Jack Frost claims the last of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer festival aficionados, sunglasses are already de rigueur in Australia, especially colourful Ray-Bans, perfect for the raveheavy line-up at the biggest Down Under dance festival. Acts include Benny Benassi, Redshape, Jeff Mills, Carl Cox and Optimo.

Sydney Showground, Australia

INFESTUS 27.11.10

Force for change: Blacc’s haunting new album is a paen to positive thinking

If bass were a virus, Infestus would be its number one carrier.

The Portuguese youngster describes his dancehall breaks as “a hip-hop fusion which can shake the sunset”. Find out what that actually means when Infestus works the decks in his hometown.

Musicbox, Lisbon, Portugal

RED BULL BC ONE 27.11.10 The world’s best B-Boys face each other in the ring. This time Red Bull BC One, the unofficial breakdance World Championship, takes place in Japan. And the big question is: who has the headspins and power moves to knock reigning champion Lilou off the top spot?

Yoyogi Stadium #2, Tokyo, Japan

BONOBO & TOKiMONSTA 29.11.10

Photography: Elsa Okazaki

In The Grand Scheme of things: with his backing band, going down a storm in Vienna

something we want. I think people need to sort that out, because every time you want something, the earth has to give something up, as do the people who live in countries with the raw materials being used. It’s important to think about these things and consume more sensibly.

So for consistency, will you only put your music out digitally and not on CD? Yes! That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m contractually bound to a record company that can do what it likes with my music.

None of this sounds very cheery – and yet the album’s called Good Things.

Well, you see, the name of my backing band is The Grand Scheme, because my grand scheme is to spread happiness. And to achieve that, you have to think positively yourself. Of course, the album is full of dark

issues: I’m singing about political, social and economic injustices. But at the end, you hear the answer: the damage has to stop.

That’s why my album is about solutions: think positively and do good deeds.

Bono said that music can change the world because it can change people.

Would you agree?

Completely. Society is made up of individuals and if you can change an individual, then you’ve achieved something. I’m sure my music can do that. A schoolteacher wrote to me recently.

She’d taught her class one of my songs, ‘I Am Beautiful’, and had the kids sing it to their parents. Doesn’t that go to show that music can change the world?

Aloe Blacc: Good Things (Stones Throw/ Universal); Tour dates, videos and sound samples at www.aloeblacc.com

The music of British electronic musician Simon Green, alias Bonobo, isn’t nearly as ape-like as his name suggests. Backed by the legendary Ninja Tune label, he cooks up a stew of synths, samples, guitars and drums. It’s a downbeat meal garnished with live vocals from singer Andreya Triana. Also along for the outing is Californian Red Bull Music Academy graduate and hip-hop machine TOKiMONSTA. Wonder Ballroom, Portland, USA

JUAN ATKINS PRESENTED

BY RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY & FM4 LA BOUM DELUXE 04.12.10 Techno is as integral to Detroit as Flex is to Viennese nightlife.

So it will be a fitting match when the club welcomes Detroit legend Juan Atkins, aka Cybotron, who in 1985 released the very first techno record, ‘No UFOs’.

Flex, Vienna, Austria

97

P

J O’Rourke once revealed one of the great truths of journalism when he wrote it was a littleknown fact that: taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents. Never a truer word spoken in, er, truth, I suppose, rather than jest. O’Rourke is a jester who uses the power of humour to point out the truths and quirks of the world.

I write this having experienced one of the most powerful and quirky nations of the world while running around Delhi covering the Commonwealth Games. It’s a place that takes some getting used to, but once you get your preconceptions to stop fighting with what’s presented and accept it, rather than seek to make it “more like home”, you ease into the rhythm of the place and ride the wave of organised chaos that is Delhi.

Delhi traffic is a reflection of Delhi life: hectic, manic, a place that shouldn’t work, an accident waiting to happen that doesn’t happen.

In Delhi I caught taxis every day and tuk-tuks when the need arose. Every taxi trip I took, bar one, cost the same, no matter how far I went – 200 rupees. On my first few trips I negotiated with the drivers beforehand, then just asked them upon arrival, and by the time I left, I just handed over the two 100-rupee notes without question.

One of the three Jaspirs who was my driver took me to the Pragati Maidan, where the main press centre for the Commonwealth Games was situated. It was a trip of 15 minutes and when we got there, he turned and looked at me with smiling eyes.

“Is 200 rupees OK?” I asked.

“If you’re happy with that, then I’m happy with that,” he said.

Jaspir number one was a lot more forthright. He was Jaspir Singh and wore a turban. The other Jaspirs only wore bandanas. He wanted to be my driver for the entire two weeks I was due to be in

Mind’s Eye

Rank Insiders Three similar, but different, taxi drivers help Kevin McCallum negotiate his way around Delhi Delhi. It would have cost me around 2000 rupees a day. I tried to explain to him that my time would be flexible and I wouldn’t know when I was finished each day. He looked at me with hurt in his eyes. “But I will wait for you.”

Breaking up with a taxi driver is so very hard to do. Jaspir put my South African cell number on his phone and would send an SMS to find out if I needed a taxi at the strangest hours.

That’s a five-rupee SMS from Delhi to South Africa and back again. I never saw him again after that first day, but on one trip in which we drove around most of northern Delhi as I tried to find out from the organisers where I had to pick up my Games accreditation, he explained the madness of Delhi in two words: “It’s OK.” The Games organisers were idiots, he said, because they had made so many mistakes. The Government officials were idiots; the police were idiots; and the guy who had just slowed down in front of him at a roundabout was an idiot, but

a nice idiot because at least he had used the hooter of his car in a polite way. Which was nice of him.

It was with this Jaspir that I learned the lane markings on the roads are there merely for show, as cars, motorbikes, bicycles and buses rumble along at the same speed. The secret to Delhi traffic is that it all travels at the same speed.

No one is in a massive rush. They know they will get there eventually, and being in a hurry will make the journey that much less enjoyable.

The contradiction of India is that it is a country that has leapt into the 21st century as an economic power, yet large parts of it still seem to be stuck in the 1950s. Like the taxi driven so skilfully by my trio of Jaspirs. The Hindustan Ambassador Classic, based on the Morris Oxford III, is, save for a few minor alterations over the years, the same car built outside Kolkata since 1958. Practically every dashboard has a Hindu god, although I saw the odd Muslim prayer written on a card and a picture of that other Indian deity, Sachin Tendulkar, in another.

Every taxi trip teaches you something new about this beautifully different country. The three Jaspirs were all vastly different, fiercely proud of their city, but unafraid to tell their leaders when they were acting like fools.

The Commonwealth Games were marred by incompetence and indifference, but the crowds and fans slowly warmed to them and began attending. By the time they finished, they had achieved some measure of success. Jaspir the third asked me what I thought of his city and his Games as we drove on our 200-rupee journey.

“It’s OK,” I told him.

He nodded and smiled. Delhi was OK. A taxi driver had spoken. I had my quote.

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

South Africa, ISSN 2079-4282: The Red Bulletin is published by Red Bulletin GMBH Editor-In-Chief Robert Sperl Editorial Office Anthony Rowlinson (Executive Editor), Stefan Wagner Associate Editor Paul Wilson Contributing Editor Andreas Tzortzis Chief Sub-editor Nancy James Production Editor Marion Wildmann Photo Editors Susie Forman (Chief), Fritz Schuster Deputy Photo Editors Markus Kucera, Valerie Rosenburg, Catherine Shaw Design Erik Turek (Art Director), Miles English, Judit Fortelny, Markus Kietreiber, Esther Straganz Staff Writers Werner Jessner, Uschi Korda, Ruth Morgan Contributors Martin Apolin, Paul Keith, Jazz Kuschke, Alex Lisetz, Kevin McCallum, Palani Mohan, Evan Milton, Florian Obkircher, Wolfgang Rafetseder, Andreas Rottenschlager, Simon Schreyer, Caroline Stammers (production), Robert Tighe, Melissa Williams Production Managers Michael Bergmeister, Wolfgang Stecher, Walter Omar Sádaba Repro Managers Christian Graf-Simpson, Clemens Ragotzky Augmented Reality Christoph Rietner, Martin Herz, www.imagination.at General Managers Alexander Koppel, Rudolf Theierl International Project Management Bernd Fisa Finance Siegmar Hofstetter.

Editor, South Africa Steve Smith. The Red Bulletin is published simultaneously in Austria, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Poland, South Africa and New Zealand. Website www.redbulletin.com. Head office: Red Bulletin GmbH, Am Brunnen 1, A-5330 Fuschl am See, FN 287869m, ATU63087028. UK office: 155-171 Tooley Street, London SE1 2JP, +44 (0)20 3117 2100. Austrian office: Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna, +43 (1) 90221 28800. Printed by CTP Printers, Duminy Street, Parow-East, Cape Town 8000. For all advertising enquiries, contact Anthony Fenton-Wells, +27 (0)82 464 6376, or email anthony@tfwcc.net Write to us: email letters@redbulletin.com

The next issue of the Red Bulletin is out on December 7

Illustration: Albert Exergian

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