The Red Bulletin UK 11/21

UK EDITION NOVEMBER 2021, £3.50

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COLLECTIVE GENIUS EARTHGANG and their plan to take Atlanta hip hop to the next level

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Editor’s letter

CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE

SPENCER MURPHY

Winner of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize in 2013, the London lensman often captures what he calls “the notion of the outsider”.

It’s a mindset he shared prior to finding his career through skating. “It was nice hanging out in a skatepark again,” he says of shooting Lily Rice, who proved anything but an outsider. “She was happy to work together.” Page 42

CAM KIRK (COVER), EROS MAGGI

MAURICE G GARLAND

ESCAPE ARTISTS On September 4 this year, Dario Costa (page 48) emerged from a highway tunnel in Turkey and flew off into the sky, free as a bird.

The aerobatic pilot had redefined the limits of possibility, not least the insinuation that someone of his social standing could never be a pilot, let alone one of the best in the world.

This issue of The Red Bulletin is about breaking out of the boxes others place us in. Cover stars EarthGang (page 32), with fellow J Cole alumnus JID, are showing the world there’s more to Atlanta hip hop than just trap. The Bike Life movement in NYC (page 60) is riding a crusade against social, racial and economic discrimination.

And British wheelchair motocross champ Lily Rice (page 42) has proved she can tear up a skatepark with the best of them.

You’ll also read about runner Timothy Olson (page 30), who escaped a path of self-destruction by following another – Mexico to Canada – faster than anyone before him. War photographer Giles Duley (page 28) shows that even in a conflict zone you can find happiness, community and a love of good food. And DJ Ashibah (page 26) broke her dad’s heart when she spurned a pro basketball career to slam-dunk club bangers. Enjoy the issue.

The Atlanta-based writer, whose work has appeared in Complex, Hip-Hop Wired and on the NPR, calls his profile of EarthGang and JID “a fullcircle reunion”. He has followed them “since they first started doing shows at small venues in Atlanta, some of which I hosted. In the early days, I even wrote about them on my personal blog.

So it was great to reconnect with everyone.” Page 32

Zero hour: flying ace Dario Costa and crew roll out his plane in Turkey’s Çatalca Tunnels, ready to make history. Page 48 THE RED BULLETIN

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CONTENTS November 2021

60

Tyre purpose: living the freewheeling Bike Life in NYC

10 Gallery: an epic kayaking

adventure in Patagonia; catching a polar light wave in Norway; subaquatic cliff-diving off the coast of Taiwan, and rolling on a riverbank in eastern France

17 High scores: soundtrack composer

par excellence Danny Elfman shares his movie-music favourites

18 Bigger picture: the cut-out-and-

shoot art of Rudy Willingham reframes our view of the world

20 Sweating the small stuff: how

biomaterialist Alice Potts turns perspiration into inspiration

23 TikToks from the edge: the

BEN FRANKE

Arctic influencer bringing a sense of wonder to social media 24 Virtually There: an immersive VR

study of the realities of knife crime and its devastating aftermath

THE RED BULLETIN

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26 A shibah

The DJ who swapped balls for beats

28 G iles Duley

Breaking bread in the war zone

3 0 Timothy Olson

Healing through ultrarunning

32 E arthGang and JID

Think you know Atlanta hip hop?

Meet the collective who are flipping the Southern rap scene on its head

42 L ily Rice

The doyen of wheelchair motocross on skills, spills and self-expression

48 Dario Costa

Inside the aerobatic daredevil’s multi-record-breaking tunnel flight

69 Talisman Triathlon: the cross-

country, ultra-endurance challenge that’s putting in the hard yards for mental health 74 How MTB legend Greg Minnaar stays at the top of his game 75 Incus Nova: the next generation

in fitness tracking 76 Joy in repetition: time-loop

murder-mystery game 12 Minutes 77 Bat romance: celebrate the birth of

gaming with Atari’s Mini PONG Jr

78 Street smart: high-tech clothing

for the urban adventurer 88 Essential dates for your calendar 90 Austrian Tirol: a snow-lover’s guide 98 Outdoors wisdom from Semi-Rad

60 B ike Life

The young Black riders reclaiming the streets of NYC – one wheel at a time

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PATAGONIA, CHILE

Clicking into place Trek through jungle, lug heavy kayak, shoot, descend whitewater drop, check gear for water damage, shoot, scale granite wall, shoot, dangle off ledge, shoot… Multitasking can be a challenge in the most mundane environment, but this expedition to traverse Patagonia’s triple crown of rivers – Rio Baker, Rio Blanco (pictured) and Rio Pascua – with fellow kayak legends Nouria Newman and Ben Stookesbury tested Erik Boomer’s ability to switch between photographer and athlete modes. But can he chew gum at the same time, we wonder?

Instagram: @eboomer

ERIK BOOMER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

DAVYDD CHONG

Scan this QR code to watch a video of the team kayaking Patagonia’s three toughest rivers for the very first time

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ERIK BOOMER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

DAVYDD CHONG

LOFOTEN, NORWAY

Northern exposure

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

DAVYDD CHONG

Nature won’t be stage-managed. So when Norwegian photographer Emil Sollie was intent on capturing the holy trinity of perfect waves, clear skies and aurora borealis, it was a case of sit and wait. “Then, around midnight on the third day, the shoot was on,” recounts Sollie. “Half asleep, [Aussie surf doyen] Mick Fanning jumped in a wetsuit and ran into the water, screaming in excitement at all the stuff going on.”

This shot won Sollie a place in the final of global photography competition Red Bull Illume. Job done. emilsollie.com

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DAVYDD CHONG

ORCHID ISLAND, TAIWAN

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

Pressure drop Underwater is where the magic happens for Taiwanese photographer Wang Wei Chih. Every element of this dive image – a Red Bull Illume finalist – was executed beneath the surface of the Philippine Sea. This was particularly hazardous for freediver Ding Xi Xiang, diving from a depth of 4m with positive buoyancy still at play. “To perform this action, he must spit out air, which increases the risk,” says Wang. “Not only do you lose oxygen, but it adds pressure on the lungs.” redbullillume.com

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ADRIEN PETIT/RED BULL ILLUME

DAVYDD CHONG

HAUTE-SAVOIE, FRANCE

Take it to the bank

ADRIEN PETIT/RED BULL ILLUME

DAVYDD CHONG

For all but a few weeks each year, says photographer Adrien Petit, the Chéran river in eastern France is in full flow and inaccessible to snapper or skater.

But on his fourth try in three years he achieved his goal. “After the first failed attempt, I came back alone and took pictures of the site from all angles,” says the 2021 Red Bull Illume finalist.

“When I saw the reflection in the water, I knew this was the place to shoot.”

The man in the mirror is local skater Antoine Force. Instagram: @petio.74

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DANNY ELFMAN

An ear for fear The king of horrorfilm scores on chilling tunes to chill to this Halloween season

JACOB BOLL

MARCEL ANDERS

Danny Elfman’s West Hollywood workplace is named Studio Della Morte (Studio of Death) with good reason: it’s like a museum of horror and sci-fi memorabilia, mostly from films he scored. Since 1985, the 68-year-old LA composer has put music to more than 100 movies, created iconic theme tunes for TV shows including The Simpsons, and released non-filmrelated music, most recently his second solo album, the “chamber punk” Big Mess. Best known, though, are his film scores for director Tim Burton, including Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. For Halloween, the four-time Oscar nominee reveals his own favourite creepy film scores… dannyelfman.com

Franz Waxman

Bernard Herrmann

Various artists

Colin Stetson

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Psycho (1960)

The Shining (1980)

Hereditary (2018)

“I would consider this one of the greatest movie scores ever written. It was bold and imaginative, something that I’d never heard before, and clearly it made the [Alfred Hitchcock] film something else. Without [Herrmann’s] score, it would have been a different film. So, for any film composer, Psycho is going to be an extraordinary statement of what music can do for a movie.”

“Another brilliant use of music to image. [Director Stanley] Kubrick didn’t like using composers, so he went for classical music that already existed. [On this soundtrack] there’s Béla Bartók, Penderecki, and other composers he listened to. The music was put in there so perfectly that you feel like he’s designing entire sequences of his film around it.

And it was inspiring – so powerful and evocative.”

“This score is really bold and strong, and it changed the whole effect of this wonderfully creepy movie.

In fact, my son, who was 14 at the time, stopped being a horror fan after that.

[Laughs.] There was a point in the middle of the movie where he had to go out to the lobby to catch his breath.

It finally put him over the top. So it’s a must-see if you love horror.”

“I grew up on horror films and spent every weekend in theatres. I think [this would be] the first great horror score, because it was evocative, romantic, heavy, and there really was nothing like that before.

It was like inventing the language of orchestral film composition, developing what music could do for the images.”

THE RED BULLETIN

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Meet the Seattle street artist using paper cut-outs and stop-motion video to reframe reality and bring joy to the lives of others Many artists say they want their work to change the world, but few mean it quite so literally as Rudy Willingham.

The 35-year-old Seattle-based street artist transforms his surroundings simply by holding up paper cut-outs in front of real-world backdrops.

With Willingham’s tongue-incheek additions, a car-park barrier becomes a lightsaberwielding Darth Vader, a field of flowers a dress, and a sunset a basketball mid-dunk.

“I’m constantly looking for a chance to transform the world in some way,” he says.

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“To create little Easter eggs to brighten up someone’s day.”

After losing his job as a social-media consultant due to the pandemic, Willingham handled the stress of the first lockdown of 2020 by creating art. “I had my first baby coming in two months, no pay cheques on the way, and no idea what the fuck I was going to do,” he says. “That’s when I started putting my art on TikTok.” The response was overwhelming, with his posts rapidly gaining hundreds of thousands of views. “That’s when I realised I should take

Go cut creator go: Willingham’s ingenious stop-motion art has become a huge hit on his social media channels

LOU BOYD

Scissor kicks

RUDY WILLINGHAM

RUDY WILLINGHAM

my cut-outs and adapt them for video on the platform, which led me to stop-motion video. I print out 100 frames of a video, cut them out, then film the frames over a variety of backdrops to make a short clip. It takes a long time and is a pain in the ass, but it’s a cool effect.”

It was a stop-motion video of basketball legend Kobe Bryant on January 26 this year – the one-year anniversary of the tragic death of the LA Lakers star and his daughter – that brought Willingham’s work global attention. “RIP Kobe and Gigi Bryant. Thanks for inspiring the world,” he posted alongside the clip of Bryant making a slam dunk as a sunset shines through a cutout of his body. Bryant’s wife, Vanessa, reposted the artist’s post on her own channels.

More recently, US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles shared to her millions of followers a stop-motion Willingham made of one of her routines.

“Any time that the subject of my video reposts me it’s incredible,” says Willingham, “but the most meaningful was when Vanessa Bryant [did it].

Obviously, nothing could really help her in that situation, but for my art to give her a little bit of support meant a lot.”

Willingham’s art is primarily designed to make people smile and produce a feeling of “surprise and delight”, he says, but his motives are deeper than just good humour. “The message I try to put across is that you can view the whole world as art,” he says. “That’s the thing I love about street art – it empowers you to change your surroundings. When you walk around, you realise that the world is not static.”

It’s a state of mind he believes is innate in us all: “Look around – that pipe could be an elephant’s trunk. Reframe the world and your mind switches – you’ll start seeing everything as a beautiful object.”

Instagram: @rudy_willingham THE RED BULLETIN

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Photos: Ben Matthews Photos: Ben Matthews

New heights, heights, new New new warmth. warmth.

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Worth your salt This biomaterialist believes that human sweat holds the secrets to the future of our fashion, health and technology In the modern world, sweat is widely considered to be at best an inconvenience, and at worst a source of embarrassment. The beauty industry makes millions each year selling deodorants, antiperspirants and cooling sprays that cover up the fact we perspire at all.

But, says British artist and materials researcher Alice 20

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Potts, thousands of years ago sweat was held in much higher regard. Many of the oldest medicines were developed with human perspiration as a foundation, it was used to create pigments, and in ancient Greece women were even known to collect and bottle a champion gladiator’s sweat as a souvenir.

For 28-year-old Potts, sweat still holds a similar fascination. With an interest in biomaterials, Potts creates crystal-encrusted fashion by collecting sweat and applying it to sports and leisure garments. “When I started using sweat, I collected it entirely off myself by going to the gym wrapped in cellophane with my clothes over the top,

LOU BOYD

ALICE POTTS

JAMES STOPFORTH

Pointe of phee-ew: Potts encrusts clothing such as ballet shoes with crystals extracted from sweat

doing cardio, then running to the changing room and scraping all the sweat off into little canisters,” laughs Potts at her biotech workspace in London. “Then I realised that other people were interested in donating their sweat and excited about making crystals out of it, too.”

Potts grows her embellishments by distilling a person’s perspiration and rapidly dehydrating it to form the crystals, each of which contains the unique code of its owner’s physiology. “Sweat is so powerful – from it, you can see a pure version of a person and use it to identify many different things about them, from hormones to hydration levels,” she says. “We have a detachment from how amazing our bodies are, and that’s why I want to use sweat to push the concept of what fashion is.

Clothing is like a second skin, and this just makes that fact more obvious.”

One day, Potts’ endeavours might be used for much more than mere aesthetics.

Analysing sweat can reveal important medical information and could be used to identify diabetes and cystic fibrosis.

Collecting it could be helpful in countries where there is limited access to clean needles. Potts also believes that in the future the conductive properties of sweat could be utilised, too.

“It has the ability to generate and carry electricity, and I believe the future is a balance between human biology and technology,” she says. “I’m now trying to work out a way that you can use sweat as an energy generator.

Maybe one day your sweat will power your watch.” projects.alicepotts.com THE RED BULLETIN

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LOU BOYD CECILIA BLOMDAHL

Cecilia Blomdahl is an avid user of TikTok. However, unlike many influencers on the videosharing social network. she doesn’t dance, lip-sync or do comedy skits; instead, she posts clips of everyday life, from dog walking to grocery shopping. But she’s no less popular: a recent video she shared of her dog, a Finnish Lapphund named Grim, running to her neighbour’s house with a parcel earned more than 10 million views.

The reason? Blomdahl lives just a thousand kilometres from the North Pole, and her neighbour’s house is on the other side of a glacier.

On the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, temperatures soar to 6°C in summer and the sun shines all day, though in winter it can drop to -30°C, with whole days of darkness. Blomdahl and her boyfriend moved from Sweden to Longyearbyen – Svalbard’s largest settlement and the world’s northernmost town – in 2015, planning to stay a few months; her boyfriend left, but Blomdahl is still there and loving it.

Today, the 31-year-old lives 10 minutes outside town with her new partner, in a cabin with electricity but no hot water.

“We go to the village to shower, and we bring in water to do dishes,” she explains. “This lifestyle might be a hassle for some, but it’s worth it for us – we have a view of seven glaciers from our living room.”

It’s from this cabin that her TikTok stardom was born.

Blomdahl had already built up an Instagram following with her pictures of this stunning scenery when she downloaded TikTok in October 2020. “I liked the short format and that most videos weren’t a ‘production’,” she says. After posting her first public video, of the Northern Lights, she awoke the next morning to more than a million views. Followers and messages from news outlets flooded in. A clip of a shopping trip into town THE RED BULLETIN

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CECILIA BLOMDAHL

North star

Tired of doomscrolling through bad news? Here’s a social feed that can ease your anxiety and teach you a different view of the world

Above: Blomdahl shoots a majestic Arctic glacier close-up for TikTok; top: stepping out of Selbu, her cabin home in Svalbard

has had 2.7 million views; one showing Blomdahl walking Grim in pitch-black daytime, armed with a rifle in case of polar bears, has 7.8 million.

“I think people are interested because I show our very different lives in a relatable way,” says Blomdahl. And her own reward comes from the positive impact on others sharing the beauty of nature through her eyes: “People say my videos help them with their anxiety. To hear that people turn to my content to feel good, that’s the biggest compliment I can get.”

Blomdahl even posted a clip of herself at the local hair salon – during the pandemic. Seems that COVID never made it to Svalbard, and lockdown only happens during a blizzard.

TikTok: @sejsejlija 23

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Director’s cut Knife crime is something no one wants to experience.

But this filmmaker believes everyone should, via virtual reality, to better understand the human cost Open your eyes. You’re standing in a basketball court in south London on a cloudy day. Looking down, you see you’re wearing a T-shirt, jeans and trainers – you’re a teenage boy. Cars pass by on a nearby road. Across the court, another teenage boy walks towards you with his hood up. Suddenly, and seemingly without reason, he begins to stab you repeatedly 24

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in the abdomen. Your head drops, and you see blood soak through your T-shirt as you fall to the ground. You turn your head and watch the boy run away. Your eyes close.

This nightmare scenario is the opening scene of Virtually There, an immersive 360° VR movie by London filmmaker Leon Oldstrong that gives its audience a visceral first-person viewpoint of a knife attack and its aftermath. The scenes are fictional, but their subject matter is very much grounded in reality. According to official statistics, in the year ending March 2021 there were 44,286 recorded knife-related offences in the UK, and the rate of knife crime has risen by 78 per cent since 2015. Oldstrong views this

LOU BOYD

VIRTUALLY THERE

SOLARIS2

First-person perspective: Virtually There places the viewer into the heart of the story

as a public health issue, and his film places the violence into the context of inequality, identity, community and mental health.

“These days when someone has been stabbed, the first thing people do is get out their phone and film it,” he says. “Young people are getting violent reallife content on social media and have become desensitised to it. I wanted to take it off their phones and make it real again.”

Oldstrong has been making films about social injustice since 2016, tackling themes such as racial stereotyping, grooming by gangs, and young people being drawn into the illegal drugs trade. His 2018 short film That’s Not Ours tells the story of his younger brother, Ethan, who in 2017 was the victim of a knife assault. This incident also influenced him to make Virtually There. “Ethan was 17 and got stabbed seven times in an unprovoked attack, but it’s more than just our experience,” says Oldstrong, who was previously a primary school teacher. “Other young people I’ve known from around the area have been stabbed, and some have lost their lives.”

Virtually There inserts its viewer into not only the body of the victim, but also a paramedic, the doctor trying to save his patient’s life, the policewoman delivering the bad news, the grieving mother, and finally the culprit in anguish. “I want young people to experience the consequences of making that decision, without suffering the consequences,” says the filmmaker.

Having shown Virtually There on the film festival circuit, Oldstrong is now in search of funding to take it into UK schools. and is asking anyone able to support this to watch the film for themselves.

“This is an issue that’s affected me and a lot of people in my community,” he says. “Every one of us should use our skills to make a difference.” virtuallytheremovie.com THE RED BULLETIN

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Ashibah

Basketball prodigy, karate black belt, zookeeper, global house-music producer… Ashibah proves you can be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of one Words RACHAEL SIGEE

From DJing to composing and producing to recording her own vocals – all self-taught – Sarah Finne Christensen, better known as rising house-music star Ashibah, can do the lot. It’s fitting, then, that her recent single with London producer Saffron Stone, On the Line, includes the lyric: “Don’t break the rules, define them.” It’s a mantra she applies to life. As a teen growing up in Cairo, the Danish-Egyptian earned a black belt in karate, taught herself to DJ, and at 16 became the youngest member of the Egyptian national basketball team. Later in life, she also briefly worked as a zookeeper.

“Basketball was my dad’s biggest dream for me,” she says. “I wanted to make my parents happy, so I began playing as soon as I could walk.”

But, having written her first song – “about a crush” – at the age of just seven, music won out: “It’s the one thing that made sense to me, that calls the loudest inside me.”

Intent on a career in music, at 19 Finne Christensen returned to her country of birth, Denmark, where she built up a reputation on Copenhagen’s club scene. Following a brief relocation to Brazil in 2013 after the success of her breakout banger Circles, featuring Brazilian DJ Vintage Culture, Denmark is now her permanent home, shared with wife and writing partner Nikoline and their dog Pablo.

With dancefloor hits including We Found Love (her 2019 track with

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South-African deep-house producer Nora en Pure) and 2020’s Devotion to her name, Ashibah is riding high.

In August this year, she released her third track with Defected Records, My Eyes Only. And with lockdown restrictions relaxing, she’s back doing what she loves best, playing live at events that promote the causes she most values: diversity, equality and human rights. “We had WorldPride and Fluid Festival [both in Copenhagen in August],” says the 37-year-old. “[Fluid] is run by some amazing women. I got to close that stage and it was absolutely insane.

I’m ready to get out there again.” the red bulletin: How does it feel being on stage? ashibah: Completely euphoric.

No drug in the world could give you that. When that amount of energy is coming at me, it’s like rocket power. House music has a pulsing vibe you get totally drawn into. I remember the first time I went to a rave – the energy, the way that people were connected.

What I love about rave culture is that it’s about community. I was always very different, so it was hard to find a place where I felt at home, but I felt it on the dancefloor.

How did you cope in lockdown, being unable to play live?

I channelled all my frustration and energy into the studio, trying to make as much music as possible and develop as an artist, because when you’re on the road you don’t always get downtime to figure out the next steps. Usually when I make music I test it on a dancefloor, so I had to learn to trust my instincts.

Your 2018 track Intro Rework has had more than 140 million plays on YouTube. How does it feel to reach so many people?

Quite crazy. There’s a funny story to that one. Vintage Culture and [fellow Brazilian DJ] Bruno Be, who made that version, played it to me, and I was going to include it in my set. But I love to do live mash-ups, so I was in the north of Brazil and I put it on and was like, “Ooh, I think I got an idea,” and I just grabbed the mic and started singing. From that day, it went absolutely mad. The vibe was right, the energy was right, and that’s when you try things. Taking those risks is the best part of being in house music.

And a world away from zookeeping.

How did that come about?

I was on a trainee programme in Exeter for two months, and I picked up a lot of elephant shit. When I was younger, I wanted to be either a singer or a vet. As a musician, you get scared that you need something to fall back on in case it doesn’t work out, but I realised halfway through that it had to be this or nothing. I don’t want a safety net. Music is the only thing that makes sense to me. ashibah.com

CLIX PRODUCTIONS

Putting it all in the mix

For many years, dance music was a largely male-dominated scene.

What’s been your experience?

The same as for other female producers and singers. I’ve always used it as fuel, because I believe the work speaks for itself. Thank God, I’ve never experienced anything that crossed my boundaries. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in sessions where I’ve done everything and people are like, “Yeah, but who produced this?” “Me.” “No, but who made this?” “Still me.” But it’s changing, because there are so many amazing females out there showing we have a right to sit at the table.

THE RED BULLETIN

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CLIX PRODUCTIONS

“Rave culture gave me a place where I finally felt at home”

THE RED BULLETIN

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Giles Duley

Finding food for thought Conflict photojournalist Giles Duley reveals how losing three limbs to a landmine helped him discover a new passion: telling stories of war through food Words MIKE GIBSON Photography ALICE DENNY

Giles Duley’s story is one of reinvention. Accomplished with a camera from an early age, the south Londoner spent his twenties in the ’90s capturing the zeitgeist of the Britpop era, shooting bands such as Oasis, Pulp and The Charlatans for the publications of the day. Then he hung up his camera. But, in 2000, a powerful calling took Duley’s career down a new path: he became a documentary photographer in the world’s most dangerous warzones.

Duley’s change of focus earned him critical acclaim. But then, while on foot patrol in Afghanistan in 2011, he stepped on an IED (improvised explosive device) and lost both legs and an arm. His life had changed for ever. Now he had to rebuild himself and his career from the ground up.

The thing that kept Duley going throughout the recovery process was a lifelong passion for cooking, which, in 2017, he began to share – beautifully photographed, of course – on an Instagram page under the moniker The One Armed Chef. A forthcoming documentary commissioned by Vice sees The One Armed Chef head into some of the world’s most war-torn areas to join people at their dinner table, cook local food, and listen to stories of their lives. Here, Duley shares why his two passions are driven by the same desire: to connect with the world’s unheard stories.

the red bulletin: When did your talent for photography first come to light? giles duley: I’m dyslexic and I struggled at school, so when I was given a camera at 18 it was like I could suddenly see. I’m very visually led, so having this device that allowed me to communicate and made me feel the world was now interested in what I was saying… that changed everything for me.

How did you become a conflict photographer?

When I picked [photography] back up in my early thirties, I remembered how I’d felt at 18. I’d been influenced by [British photojournalist] Don McCullin and the photographers of the Vietnam War era, so I set out on that path myself. I was 31 when I moved to Angola and began to tell humanitarian stories.

Some of these stories feature in your photo project Legacy of War. Tell us more about that…

We tend to look at war as single conflicts. I wanted to find the themes that cross all wars. That’s really what Legacy of War is all about: that war doesn’t end when a peace treaty is signed. Whether it be physical injury, emotional injury or displacement, it passes on at least a generation, and often more than that. War has a legacy, and all these stories are interconnected.

How did the One Armed Chef documentary come about?

I realised that food had become as much a method of communication for me as photography. When I’m shooting in a warzone, the stories of

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the people in my photographs are incredibly moving and powerful, but that’s only one part: you don’t see us drinking and laughing and dancing as we’re making them. In the show, as well as the powerful stuff, you see people enjoying and celebrating life.

Where does the show visit?

We go to Congo, to the front lines in Ukraine, to Beirut, and it’s basically me sitting down with people and chatting over food. Too many documentaries feel like you’re being slapped in the face with the misery of the world. I’ve dedicated my life to telling these stories, but what I also find in them is an incredible joie de vivre. It shouldn’t always be this bleak thing – you need to be able to relate to these people. I think those who have lost everything celebrate life more than anyone.

On TV, food is often portrayed as aspirational. How do you view it?

I remember sitting in a refugee camp in Uganda and watching a woman counting beans, rationing how many the family would have that day, and yet she was trading some for a local kind of anchovy because she wanted to add flavour. When there are UN handouts, it’s always basic – survival food – but when I find people living in those situations, they always try to make it an experience. To prepare a meal, and to make every element as good as it can be, is a way to keep your dignity and elevate yourself.

Do you feel inspirational?

I’ve been asked to present shows, but always about disability. What was great about [my show] is that I happen to be a presenter who’s got no legs and one arm, but it’s actually my life, and you’ll see that I’m having a really great time. What I really hope is that people see it and say, “OK, this guy’s got his injuries, he’s got a disability he lives with, but he’s living the life I want.”

That’s the perfect outcome for me.

That’s the example I’d like to set. legacyofwar.com; Instagram: @one_armed_chef

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20.09.2021 12:38:50

“People living in warzones often have an incredible joie de vivre”

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20.09.2021 12:38:53

Timothy Olson

For this ultrarunner, running from Mexico to Canada in the fastest time ever recorded was not just an extreme physical challenge – it was part of a healing process, too Words TOM WARD

It was around 2.30am when Timothy Olson awoke to the sound of thunder. Poking his head from his bivvy bag, he saw a “breathtaking electrical sky” lit by purple sheet lightning. “It was so trippy, I was in awe,” the American ultrarunner recalls. Olson was about halfway through a 51-day, 4,268km quest to become the fastest person to complete the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT) from the Mexican to Canadian borders, and had stopped, 3,300m up, on the Muir Pass of the Sierra Mountains. A bad place to be in a storm. Pushing on, his gear soaked and with more than 1,600km still to go, a ghostlike figure appeared out of the darkness. “He said, ‘Timothy Olson, you’re doing awesome, keep it up,’” he remembers. “Then he was gone, almost like he was never there. But the feeling of love stuck.”

Love is important to Olson, whose then-pregnant wife and two young boys at home were at the forefront of his mind during the trip. More difficult for the 38-year-old from smalltown Wisconsin is cultivating self-love. The young Timothy Olson, he says, was a lost and anxious kid.

After turning to drink and drugs to numb his pain, his life spiralled out of control, and he ended up in jail for possession; then a friend took his own life in prison. “It was a dark time for me,” Olson says, candidly.

Beset with thoughts of suicide, he began the slow process of replacing his addictions with something positive. “I cleaned up through running, going for short runs and

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just throwing up and detoxing. I was so out of shape; it was horrible.”

Olson moved to Oregon, where his local trail literally fed into the PCT. With meditation as part of his recovery, he cultivated the mental fortitude to tackle 100-mile-plus (160km) races, taking several titles in the process. Then, in June this year, Olson decided to tackle the infamous trail, arriving at the Canadian border on July 22 after 51 days, 16 hours and 55 minutes, beating Belgian Karel Sabbe’s 2016 fastest known time (FKT) by almost 16 hours. Here’s what it taught him… the red bulletin: What part does meditation play in what you do? timothy olson: Running saved my life, and meditation taught me spirituality and how to connect to nature. Herman Hesse’s [1922 novel about self-discovery] Siddhartha is an important book to me. I read it before every 100-mile run. I’d see these runs as my vision quest. All the demons come up, so it’s about working on the things that don’t serve me. I learned to care for myself again. For an endurance event like this, I needed my mental game as good as my physical game. I wouldn’t think about 4,200km, I’d think, ‘How can I not step on a rattlesnake?’ I believed I could do it, but there was still the doubt – no one had done this. Meditating helped me find the space to resonate.

How has running helped you through trauma?

A couple of years ago, my wife had a miscarriage at 17 weeks. We felt lost and we struggled in our relationship.

I was tempted to turn to alcohol, and I felt suicidal again. But then I felt this grace, like I needed to keep living. Running and mediation

Did you prepare for how your body would react when you stopped?

Stopping felt like a car crash. Canada wasn’t open, due to COVID, so I had to go back 50km to where my crew was. My legs had been hurting the whole time, but that night it turned into a complete spasm that continued for four days. We almost went to a hospital to get me an IV. When we got home, I was on the couch because I couldn’t walk the 4m upstairs to bed.

It felt like my legs were being stabbed.

I should have been more prepared, but I couldn’t Google “What to do after you run 4,000km”.

How many pairs of shoes did you get through?

Around eight. Six of them, I think, were the Terrex Two Parley. It wasn’t the shoe I was planning to use, but with the sierra heat and all the water crossings, my feet were blistering and expanding, so I had to take care of them. That shoe was money. The cushion felt really good, and the upper expanded with my foot. I’d write the names of my kids and my wife on my shoes – I actually finished the PCT with the shoes that had my new baby girl’s name written on them.

What did achieving the FKT on the PCT teach you about life?

I wanted to show that you can hit rock bottom again and again but get back up and overcome it. The PCT is almost a metaphor for life. You go through the desert where it’s hot and dry and you think you might die. Then you get to the sierras where you’re on top of the world. Then the storms come.

There are fires and downed trees in the final section. Things keep coming and it’s up to you to get up every morning for whatever life has to offer. timothyallenolson.com; rtzhope.org ADIDAS

Trail therapy

helped me tremendously, and I wanted to continue to share that.

Unfortunately, we went through another miscarriage last year. As part of my FKT attempt, we raised money for Return to Zero: HOPE, a nonprofit that supports families enduring similar situations.

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20.09.2021 12:38:56

ADIDAS

“I wanted to show you can hit rock bottom but overcome it”

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20.09.2021 12:38:59

EARTHGANG and JID aren’t your typical Atlanta rappers. But the southern US city that’s transformed hip hop over the past decade is itself changing, and they’re about to show the world it’s time to catch up

No place

Code red: EarthGang (this page) and JID (opposite) are set to blow up

like home Words MAURICE G GARLAND Photography CAM KIRK

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“Music is communal; you can’t just work by yourself and expect people to feel it” JID

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EarthGang and JID

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old air-conditioning is a welcome guest at Cam Kirk Studios when it’s hot-as-hell o’clock in the afternoon in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia. While this isn’t the busiest area downtown, it’s still easy to get caught up here, as you are literally at the intersection of arrival time, a good time and hard times.

The entrance to the brick building the studio calls home is steps away from a Greyhound station where nomads loitering outside will ask you for loose change, food, a phone charger or, depending on the time of day, all three. The tall windows of the studio offer a bird’s-eye view of the legendary Magic City strip club that has now added ‘Kitchen’ to its name after its food offerings gained popularity when hometown favourite and NBA basketball player Lou Williams risked it all, breaking COVID protocols in the 2020 ‘bubble’ to stop by the notorious breast-and-thigh showcase just to get a plate of wings.

The backside of the building sits in the shadows of the Atlanta City Detention Center – or, as the locals call it, ‘the jail’ – which, in case you’re wondering, currently has a 2.4-star average on Google reviews, with the most recent comment saying: “Would not recommend”.

Knowing that, this isn’t necessarily a corner you want to get lost at, literally or figuratively.

Once you’re inside the building, though, it’s not difficult to find the actual studio. You can either follow

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EarthGang and JID

the sound of music that spurts out every time the door opens, or you can secretly trail the first twentysomething you see wearing something designed by Kanye West, Virgil Abloh or Travis Scott onto the elevator to the fourth floor. The walls of the studio are decorated with crisp, high-contrast photos of the studio’s long list of clientele, consisting mostly of Atlanta rappers who have defined the sound of rap – and, by default, pop – music for at least the last seven years. Migos, Gucci Mane, Lil Baby, Young Thug, 2 Chainz and 21 Savage are among the many featured. However, today’s client, who has also achieved a good amount of notoriety, has noticed he’s nowhere to be found.

“When you gonna put me on one of these walls, bro?” asks JID, jokingly but equally puzzled, as he greets the studio’s owner and namesake.

“Soon. We’re going to change that today,” replies Cam Kirk, laughing at the entourage of weed aroma that has followed JID into the space.

The omission, as unintentional as it is, does speak to the Atlanta rap scene’s representation at large.

Along with friends and Dreamville labelmates WowGr8 and Olu of EarthGang, JID is a founding member of the Spillage Village, an Atlanta-based musical collective also consisting of singer Mereba, rappers Jurdan Bryant and 6lack, and producers Hollywood JB and Benji. While these three Spillage Village members all have Grammy nominations and passport stamps congruent to most of the faces on the wall, they’re not always the first – nor the most – mentioned when it comes to the city’s current wave of rap artists. Each of them, at least, expect that to change when their new albums, EarthGang’s Ghetto Gods and JID’s The Forever Story, drop at different points this year.

“A lot of people, if they weren’t real fans of us like that, they wouldn’t even know we was from Atlanta,” says Olu, who, along with WowGr8, graduated from Atlanta’s storied Benjamin E Mays High School, which was also attended by all four members of legendary Southern hiphop group Goodie Mob. “Because we may not look like the typical Atlanta artist that is portrayed in the media.”

In this case, ‘typical’ falls into a colourful grey area, since just about every Atlanta rapper – no matter whether they’re trap (the city’s own distinct genre of Southern hip hop, associated with artists such as TI and Ghetto Mafia) or not – shares similar accents, hairstyles, fashion tastes, or that lingering desire to prove “the South got something to say”. But much like how reality television producers bypass the city’s rich heritage of Black accomplishments in the fields of business, politics, real estate, higher education, medicine and technology in favour of drink-throwing drama, coverage of Atlanta’s music scene tends to obsess over trap, while almost completely ignoring anything outside of it. Which wasn’t always the case.

Before TI’s branding of it, ‘trap music’ or anything street pretty much lived up to its title and stayed confined

in a specific set of neighbourhood borders, while combinations of positive (Arrested Development), player (Outkast) and party (Ludacris) music made it onto the TV music show Rap City, and thus to other cities in the process. But with the age of the internet, which came about at a time when Atlanta was rapidly becoming number one in income inequality in the US, information and tools became more accessible, and all that was considered underground or lowly found a way in and eventually to the top of the charts.

“I know n****s like them who are my friends,” says JID. “Their stories are real and representative of what I grew up seeing and admiring about my city. It’s real and authentic. Their stories will always be important and need to be told. I support that shit 100 per cent.”

“I’m from Atlanta, and if n****s from there don’t listen, it matters to me,” says Olu. “If we’re making music that don’t someway connect with them, we’re not doing it right.”

WowGR8 has a perspective that falls somewhere in the middle, with a hint of cynicism. “As much as I’m a product of the city, I’m a product of the internet. You can’t tell me you like different styles of clothes but not different styles of music.”

This is why, with Ghetto Gods, EarthGang are intentionally going in a different direction from their 2019 breakthrough album, Mirrorland. COVID is not being credited as an executive producer, but it did influence how the album was created. Between quarantine and live shows coming to a screeching halt, EarthGang couldn’t tour.

This gave them a chance to lock in at home and reconnect with the energy that fuelled the early part of their career.

“When you’re recording while travelling, you learn about the world but also a lot about yourself,” says Olu, admitting that the duo hadn’t recorded a project exclusively in Atlanta since signing to Dreamville – rapper and producer superstar J Cole’s label – in 2017.

“It was like showing a reflection of everything you saw in the world and the cultures you experienced.”

However, he also brings up a comparison that frequent collaborator and fellow Spillage Village producer Hollywood JB told him. “He said that with Ghetto Gods it feels like we understood the assignment and did what needed to be done, but with Mirrorland we were all over the place. It was so dense, but sometimes you need shit like that – something you can listen to for 10 years and still find something.”

Most, if not all the guest features on Ghetto Gods are fellow Atlantan artists, ranging from Yung Baby Tate to CeeLo Green, while the record’s producers include platinum prodigies such as JetsonMade and Big Korey, son of legendary Atlanta music exec Big Oomp. This album is pretty much their version of clicking their heels and saying, “There’s no place like home.”

“Mirrorland was like Atlanta: The Musical – a Broadway show,” says WowGr8. “Ghetto Gods is the movie, the reality show.”

“You can’t tell me you like different styles of clothes but not different styles of music”

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“We just wanted this album to sound like Atlanta” OLU (RIGHT), EARTHGANG

Changing goals: before going into music, JID (pictured here in his beloved Sly Stone T-shirt) had planned a career in American football, but this was cut short by injury

EarthGang Atlanta andTrap JID

“I’m just trying to grow my music, keep it fresh and prove my fans right” JID

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Altered egos: Olu (left) and WowGr8 first met at high school. Back then, they were known as Johnny Venus and Doctur Dot

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hen WowGr8 and Olu arrived at Cam Kirk studios today, they were too tired to be concerned about the pictures on the wall or why they’re not in any of them. The question they have is simply, “What are we doing here today?” To be fair, the photoshoot for this cover story is sandwiched between performing at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago the day before and the Gorillaz show they’re booked to appear at in London the day after this. So yeah, they are probably just looking at calendar invites at this point.

With suitcases in tow, there’s a good chance neither of them will get to spend any real time at home to enjoy simple tasks like cooking a meal, chilling with family and washing clothes. Which is why Olu is pondering just picking up some new clothes at Lenox Square mall on the way to the airport, and WowGr8 is negotiating a deal with the shoot’s stylist, D Mapp, to buy the leopard-print Saint Laurent shirt he’s having a hard time walking away from.

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The situation is a familiar one given that both EarthGang and JID have essentially lived on the road since going on their first tour in 2014, opening for Ab-Soul. From there, they would build reputations for being electric performers, featured on tours with Mac Miller, Bas and J Cole while also co-headlining their own Never Had Shit Tour.

“Ever since I’ve been on tour, I haven’t written a song without thinking about performing it,” says WowGr8, who also says he actually stopped writing altogether recently, citing that wordy lyricism should take a back seat to clarity that listeners can feel and understand.

“Some people get so caught up in the sport of it, trying to show they can hit the most backflips. That’s cool, but to a crowd of people? No one is going to remember that.”

It’s worth noting that the one exception is actually in his crew. JID – known for his microphone acrobatics and at times pausing after performing songs to catch his own breath – once almost made a stage and ceiling cave in due THE RED BULLETIN

EarthGang and JID

to synchronised stomping from the crowd during a show at Ithaca College in 2019. Surely someone remembered that.

“I have one last personal goal to achieve as an artist,” WowGr8 continues. “Arena tour. I don’t feel like I have to beat the sales game or streaming game, I have to beat the touring game. We just started headlining tours in 2019, so we should start doing amphitheatres next year and the arenas after that.” That goal doesn’t seem unobtainable considering that EarthGang have a strong enough reach to do shows at the bottom of the planet during the height of a global pandemic.

In December 2020, the duo damn near went viral when images of them performing to a mask-less crowd surfaced on Instagram. Some fans left comments asking if the pictures were a photo dump from past years, while others accused them of being reckless. What they were seeing was EarthGang performing for crowds of 7,000 to 15,000 people over the span of three days – outside – in New Zealand, which at the time was the safest country in the world, with zero positive COVID cases. The show was originally booked in 2019 for 2020, but we all know how that worked out.

“I’m playing Globally Monopoly, I keep trying to tell y’all,” their manager Barry ‘Hefner’ Johnson bragged in the caption of one of his posts showing the concert.

“EarthGang is the only hip-hop act in America doing festival dates currently, I’m pretty sure!” At that time, this was very true. Especially considering the dates were between December 31 and January 5, meaning that EarthGang flew into New Zealand two weeks prior to quarantine before doing the shows, sacrificing holidays with family and, in WowGr8’s case, missing Christmas with his three-year-old son.

“Missing Christmas is a big deal,” admits WowGr8, who is pretty open about how he’s the primary caretaker of his child. “But coming back with a bunch of money is also a big deal.”

Bouncing around like this is all a part of JID’s jittery personality. He talks in damn near the same cadence as he raps, short bursts with more words than you thought he could fit in there. But today he doesn’t have many words to offer about his new album. “I can’t tell you” is one of his responses when asked about specifics, and “It’s my favourite that I made so far” is what he says when asked about it in general.

“I’m just trying to grow it and keep it fresh and prove my fans right,” he says in one of the rare instances where he opens up about the new music on the album. “I want them to be able to brag on me, like, ‘This is a great body of work.’ That’s always the intense part, making something that someone’s never heard before.”

WowGr8 jokes that JID tends to over-rap with the “Eminem disease”, but that sickness has helped him build a healthy mixed bag of features on songs by artists including Doja Cat, Dua Lupa, Conway the Machine, Denzel Curry, Free Nationals, and even emerging Atlanta rappers Grip and Kenny Mason. While he’s tight-lipped on who will guest on The Forever Story, JID insists that it’s the product of an ensemble cast because that’s the way it should be told. “Music is communal; you can’t just work by yourself and expect people to feel it,” he says.

“You need some outside feedback.”

EarthGang share similar sentiments, revealing that a long list of people including Andre 3000 and David Banner stopped by during the recording of Ghetto Gods, although neither of the two is confirmed to actually appear on the album.

“I know a lot of n****s say you save money recording at home, because you can wake up and create,” says Olu. “That’s a beautiful thing. But I love going to the studio.

It’s like going to the gym to work out, or going to the court to play ball. You get a lot of that energy that you can’t get from being locked up at home in front of the computer. Even if you’re not making music, just being around the creative, that’s the real fun.”

Fun is something that both parties seem to be having as they – and the rest of the world – look forward to moving freely around the planet again. But as EarthGang and JID start to return to their road lives, the hope is that they continue to take the city with them wherever they go, even if it doesn’t fit the rest of the world’s idea of what Atlanta is; the city as it is, changing by the minute.

“Being here for the past last year helped me understand the world is coming here,” says Olu. “We gotta embrace that shit, but keep our essence, too. There’s a connection between the stories we tell and the shit people see.

Buildings have an expiration date; it’s about the spirits.”

“We just wanted [this album] to sound like Atlanta,” he adds. “Some stuff we do is so cerebral, which is cool and different. But n****s also need stuff they can’t stop looking at, too.”

Picture that, frame and hang it.

Instagram: @earthgang; @jidsv

“If we’re making music that don’t someway connect with Atlantans, we’re not doing it right”

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bunch of money and how one spends it is now the topic of discussion in JID’s dressing room.

The artist, who opted out of a shave from the shoot’s hired barber and brought some of his own clothes because “I stay camera-ready”, has pulled out a delicate, vintage Sly Stone T-shirt he packed into his Louis Vuitton duffel bag. He’s justifying spending $800 [£580] on it – the shirt, not the bag – because one, that’s his favourite artist; two, he’s never seen his face on a shirt before; and three, he “wears the hell out of it all the time”, including right now.

“Make sure you write that these pants are from the 1930s,” JID says, inferring that the patchwork trousers he’s rocking today also cost a pretty penny. But at the same time he’s trying to save a buck or two by asking the stylist, “Can I have these?” every time she pulls out a new pair of socks.

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Flipping the narrative

Since the age of 10, LILY RICE has used a wheelchair – to win world championships, become the first UK woman to pull off a backflip, shatter prejudices and inspire others.

For Rice, her chair represents freedom Words JESS HOLLAND Photography SPENCER MURPHY 42

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Riding high: at just 17, Rice has become a figurehead for WCMX in the UK and is active in promoting the sport worldwide

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Lily Rice

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ily Rice recalls positioning herself at the edge of the 4m vertical skate ramp – about the height of a garage roof. She was 15 at the time, her then-cropped pink hair hidden by a full-face helmet, and her neon-green manual wheelchair built to be light and shockproof.

Any skateboarder or BMXer will tell you that dropping into a vert ramp is one of the most terrifying things you can do at a skatepark. There’s a moment of sheer freefall before your wheels start riding out the curved transition and the momentum carries you back up the slope on the other side. When you’re poised on the deck, looking down, all you can see is the metal coping lining the top of the ramp, and then the flat ground metres

below. Riding vert in a wheelchair takes a whole extra level of guts.

Rice had already conquered that fear several times when on this occasion she met a film crew at a skatepark in Cornwall to document her skills. She has hereditary spastic paraplegia, which makes the muscles of her legs tight and weak, but her upper body is strong. With effort she can climb the stairs to the ramp’s upper deck while her dad carries her wheelchair. Hands gripping the rims that turn her chair’s back wheels, it takes one final push to roll over into empty space.

But that day Rice’s weight was a little too far forward, and she could do nothing to correct it. The crash was caught on film: she lands face-first on the bottom of the ramp with her chair on top of her. The sounds she makes are almost inhuman; she doesn’t move. Her best friend, skateboarder Daisy da Gama Howells, comes running over, convinced Rice is paralysed or worse. “I never want to hear that noise again,” Da Gama Howells says.

“There was blood everywhere.”

When Rice and Da Gama Howells tell this story a couple of years later, they laugh uncontrollably throughout, which gives some indication of their dark sense of humour. “It’s our coping mechanism,” Rice says. As Da Gama Howells recalls, Lily was drifting in and

out of consciousness, and as she waited for an ambulance – her teeth smashed, neck injured, damaged nerves in her face making it impossible to swallow – she mumbled surreally about mundane concerns, like whether her mum would tell her off for not wearing elbow pads, whether the fall was caught on film, and if the blood pouring from her face would stain the wooden ramp.

Rice recalls being in the ambulance: “I was… going. There was a light coming for me. I remember it so well. Daisy’s dad was there, trying to take a picture of me, and I was just trying to keep my eyes open so I wouldn’t die.” For two weeks, she could only eat chicken soup syringed into the back of her throat.

Da Gama Howells slept next to her to check she made it through the night.

But as soon as Rice could eat properly, she returned to school, and within a month she was back at the skatepark.

Traumatised by the experience, Rice’s body would freeze up if she tried to roll down even a low bank, but she was undeterred. Slowly, she rebuilt her confidence, practising flat-ground tricks like grinding ledges and bumping down stair sets. ‘Skating’ in her wheelchair had already transformed her life and dominated her plans for the future.

It didn’t cross her mind to quit.

“I don’t know where I’d be without this sport. It’s so good for your mental and physical health” 44

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Ramping it up: Rice is working with USA Skateboarding to get WCMX included in the Paralympic Games

Wheels of steel: Rice and her best friend, Daisy da Gama Howells, photographed at Haverfordwest Skatepark in southwest Wales

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s a little kid, Rice had always been the outdoorsy type, getting around with the help of leg braces and crutches. Encouraged by her dad Mark, who’s a paramedic and surfer, she climbed trees, rode bikes and hung out on the beach near her hometown of Tenby on the southwest coast of Wales.

The condition that affects her lower body worsens over time, and by the age of 10 she was using a wheelchair to make it easier to get around, but she hated the way it made her feel and struggled on without it. She’d hide it in a corner of her room, unable to reconcile the thought of being a full-time wheelchair user with her own sense of self. Then, at 13, she saw some video clips of Aaron ‘Wheelz’ Fotheringham, and everything changed.

Las Vegas native Fotheringham, now 29, was born with spina bifida, a condition of the spine that can cause paralysis in the legs. At the age of eight, encouraged by a BMX-riding older brother, he decided to try riding ramps 46

in his wheelchair, and began entering BMX competitions, adapting the other riders’ jumps, spins and balance tricks.

Sometimes this involves an assist from someone running behind the chair to add acceleration, but, like Rice, Fotheringham has a powerful upper body and can propel himself into, around and out of skate bowls and ramps with style and speed. Soon he was winning competitions and gaining worldwide attention for stunts so unbelievable that just watching them online provokes a vicarious rush of adrenalin and euphoria.

In 2006, he was the first person to land a wheelchair backflip, building enough speed to soar high above a ramp and land his wheels on the deck. Two years later, he joined the Nitro Circus actionsports team, which has a touring show of daredevil stunts, and in 2012, on a Californian ‘mega ramp’, he dropped into an 8m vert and jumped a 21m gap.

It was Fotheringham who coined the term ‘wheelchair motocross’ or WCMX –

a mashup of ‘wheelchair’ and ‘BMX’ – to describe what he was doing; the sport is also sometimes referred to as ‘freestyle wheelchair’. In 2015, the Alliance Skatepark in Grand Prairie, Texas, hosted the first-ever WCMX World Championships, which also included adaptive skateboarding and BMX by athletes with limb differences, visual impairments and other disabilities.

Fotheringham won gold in men’s WCMX that inaugural year, and at every World Championships since.

Rice says she was “stoked” when she saw these videos, which rewrote the script in her head about what being a wheelchair user meant. Her dad was stoked about the idea, too; he knew one of his friends’ kids, Daisy da Gama Howells, had just started skateboarding, so he put the two girls in touch. Another of his friends was Craig Brown, a postman, surfer and skater who played a key role in getting Pembrokeshire’s biggest skatepark built in Haverfordwest.

Rice and Da Gama Howells began meeting up at Haverfordwest Skatepark in the early morning to get to grips with the basics of rolling off banks and carving lines around bowls – concrete constructions meant to mimic the empty swimming pools that skateboarders repurposed in the 1970s. At first, people were surprised to see a wheelchair at the skatepark, and Rice says she gets more than her fair share of strangers telling her to be careful, but she soon felt accepted by the community. As they grew in skill and confidence, she and Da Gama Howells started showing up to the Tuesday night sessions where all the locals get together to skate and ride.

It’s on one such evening, in July this year, that Rice and Da Gama Howells are reminiscing as music drifts out of a sticker-covered speaker and into the summer air, mixed with whoops of encouragement, clattering boards, and the sounds of metal trucks grinding against coping. Among dozens of teenagers and adults is Brown, who whips about the bowl on a board, jokes around with kids that he refers to as family, and yells encouragement to Rice as she drops into the bowl and carves steeply around its deep end. When her run is over, Rice’s dad jumps in, runs behind his daughter, and builds up enough speed to push her up and out.

“The inclusivity here is something else,” Brown says later, sitting on his THE RED BULLETIN

Lily Rice

board, darkness starting to envelop the park. “Skaters are all a bit lost. We’re kindred spirits. Everyone’s got each other’s back. It’s how life should be.”

Rice fell deeply in love with WCMX. The first time she dropped into a tiny mini ramp, she says, “that was it for me”.

Fotheringham sent his old, battered WCMX wheelchair to her after she messaged him on Instagram, and she met him in person when Nitro Circus came to the UK. “It was crazy to meet someone you’ve seen so much online,” she says. “Watching him ride is just mind-blowing.” Since then, the two have kept in touch, riding together at US competitions for a few years prepandemic. “It has been unreal to watch her progress – it’s insane how far she’s come,” Fotheringham says of Rice. “She’s definitely been a [leading] light for WCMX. Not just in the UK, but all over.”

With her dad taking her to skateparks, and the support of local skaters such as Brown, Rice’s riding developed fast.

Just seven months after she first dropped into a ramp, she became the first girl or woman in Europe to land a wheelchair backflip. It took her six hours of practising flipping into a foam pit, then taking plenty of falls on a soft, bouncy

“No one tells you what to do in a skatepark. It feels like freedom” ‘resi’ ramp, but she finally got the rotation right, landing on her wheels and rolling out of it.

The event generated national press, and suddenly Rice was starring in music videos, travelling to her first World Championships, repping brands and winning awards. James McAvoy, the Scottish actor who plays wheelchair user Professor X in the X-Men movies, donated five grand to a fundraiser set up to finance her custom-made WCMX chair. Coincidentally, she then ran into McAvoy at the airport when her family were flying to a competition in California, and he invited them all to the premiere and afterparty for the 2019 X-Men film Dark Phoenix. As Rice recalls, it was bizarre to run into Katy Perry in the toilets, and take pictures with Jennifer Lawrence and Orlando Bloom.

With all this adventure and success in her mid-teens, one could forgive Rice for thinking the world owed her a favour and focusing only on herself. But while rapidly continuing to up her own game – winning gold in the women’s division of the WCMX World Championships in 2019 despite that disastrous fall earlier in the year – she also poured energy back into growing the UK scene and encouraging a new generation of riders.

I

n March 2019, Rice put on the UK’s first WCMX Jam in Northamptonshire to allow adults and kids to try the sport and ride together. For nine-yearold Imogen Ashwell-Lewis, who uses a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, it was a transformative experience. AshwellLewis participates in several other sports such as horse-riding and tennis, but she likes the way that riding skateparks doesn’t require wheelchair users to be segregated in their own space. It breaks down barriers, and she gets to shatter other people’s preconceptions. When she takes a hard slam and falls out of her chair, she says, “about five people will usually come running over” looking

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shocked and horrified. “I calmly tell them, ‘Yeah, it’s not that big a deal. Can you help me back into my chair? I want to do it again.’”

Rice knows that she’s in a position to change the lives of kids like AshwellLewis, and she takes this responsibility seriously. To help more people get into WCMX, Rice gives talks in schools, consults with skateparks on accessibility, and works with a wheelchair manufacturer that makes chairs for ramps. She has gone from being the only rider in the UK to creating a scene of around 50 people, all of whom congregated at another Jam she set up in Manchester in August this year.

Rice has also been working with USA Skateboarding to get the sport into the Paralympic Games. Skateboarding and BMX were added to the Olympics for the first time in Tokyo; it makes sense that adaptive versions of these disciplines could work just as well on a global stage.

Details such as scoring and qualification criteria would still need to be figured out, but Rice thinks there’s a good likelihood of WCMX being included in the 2028 Games in Los Angeles – the birthplace and spiritual home of skateboarding – with a possible demonstration during the Paris Paralympics in 2024. It might not be long before we see Rice, AshwellLewis and others in their growing community representing their country, with billions watching around the world.

As exciting as all this is, it’s not merely the competitive spirit or a hunger for recognition that drives Rice.

There’s a deeper reason she spends hours at her local skatepark, drives to skate spots around the UK with Da Gama Howells every spare weekend, flies out to competitions in the States, and risks injury daily. “I don’t know where I’d be without [WCMX],” Rice says. “Sport in general is so good for your mental and physical health. It has improved mine a lot.”

The morning after the Haverfordwest skate session, Rice spends an hour backflipping into a foam pit for The Red Bulletin, then returns to the topic while unstrapping her knee pads. “It feels like freedom,” she says. “There’s no one telling you what to do in a skatepark.

You can express yourself through movement, and everyone motivates you to be the best version of yourself.

I have a place there.”

Instagram: @lilyrice_wcmx 47

SAMO VIDIC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Breaking through: Italian pilot Dario Costa makes his world-record flight through the Çatalca Tunnels in Turkey

What flies beneath

Less than 45 seconds. That’s how long it took pilot DARIO COSTA to pull off one of the most ambitious feats in aeronautical history – the world’s longest underground flight.

But it’s a course he’s been charting since birth.

This is what it takes to spend your whole life preparing to put it all on the line for 45 seconds…

Words JUSTIN HYNES

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Dario Costa

I

t’s 4.30am on a chilly September morning in Istanbul. Dario Costa steps out of a caravan deep in the Çatalca Tunnels to the west of Turkey’s largest city. Usually bustling with traffic as part of the vast Northern Marmara Highway that links Europe to Asia, these twin bores carved through the hills are eerily empty right now. The roads are cordoned off, and vehicles have been redirected for 2km in all directions, in preparation for what’s to come.

Costa begins a slow bicycle ride along the half-kilometre length of the first passage, silently studying his surroundings. He slips into the moonlit stretch between the two tunnels, then enters the second 1.7km passage, noting for the final time the distance between the walls and the positions of ceiling fans, electricity stations and signage stanchions, before turning back to attempt something that until now has only existed in the comicbook imaginings of film directors and special-effects wizards. He will fly a plane through the hillside, just 75cm above the asphalt and with only enough space above him to stand an average-sized man.

“You see it all the time in action movies, but it’s always CGI,” says Costa with a wry smile. “Nobody has ever done it for real. I just wanted to see whether it was possible.”

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Costa has these possibilities covered.

The 41-year-old Italian is a world-class aerobatic and race pilot, the first from his home country to have competed in the Challenger Class of the former Red Bull Air Race World Championship, and one of just 12 pilots selected to fly in the top tier of that competition’s 2022 successor, World Championship Air Race.

Add in some moonlighting as a movie stunt-car driver – his most recent gig was filming with Tom Cruise on Mission: Impossible 7, out next year – and Costa is uniquely placed to turn a far-fetched action-movie trope into reality, and achieve a series of world records that include being the first to fly a plane through a tunnel, the longest flight under a solid obstacle, and two more pioneering accolades: “I’ll be taking off from inside the first tunnel, then flying through a second tunnel,” he explains.

“Why take off inside a tunnel? It would have been a shame not to try it.”

The challenges mount as details of the flight are considered. The Zivko Edge 540 aerobatics plane he’ll be flying is a tailwheel aircraft. “I’m sitting with the nose up and the tail down on the ground.

I can’t see forward. For the initial part of the flight I’m basically blind and have to be very precise, making sure not to go too far to the left or right or I’ll hit the walls.”

And the walls are close – mere metres either side of his wingtips. As Anthony

MARCIN KIN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

“You see this all the time in action movies, but nobody has ever done it for real”

Big ideas: Costa had been looking for a new challenge when Red Bull Turkey approached him about the tunnel pass

Top gun: a snapshot from the Italian’s early years working as a stunt pilot

in the balance. But this flight began long before that clock starts ticking – it stretches all the way back to his earliest memories of flying.

I

n 1979, amid the chaos of the Iranian revolution, Costa’s Persian mother and Italian father fled the country to Manchester, England, where Dario was born. Soon after, the family moved to Libya, where Costa’s father worked as an engineer and the one-year-old was first introduced to aviation. By the time the family settled in the Italian city of Bologna, the peripatetic lifestyle had sparked Costa’s fascination with flight.

“Flying was freedom,” he says.

“Whenever I was in the air, everything on the ground was switched off – it was

LITTLE ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE

The dimensions of Costa’s flight path Four road lanes wide, 1m-wide sidewalk on each side

Plane height: 2.25m

To ceiling fans: 6.72m

Tunnel height: 8.85m

Gap from either side of plane to wall: 4m

Tunnel width: 16m Plane width (wingtip to wingtip): 7.5m

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as if everything was possible.” The bedtime stories his grandmother read to him also fuelled Costa’s desire. “One was Aladdin. The story of this guy and the flying carpet pushed me all the way.”

But heady, rarefied hopes of a career in aviation were brought crashing to earth by the reality of a working-class existence in northern Italy. “I was told I was not born into the right family or with the right financial situation. It was always, ‘You can’t do that, find another path, it’s impossible for someone like you.’ It just pushed me even more to prove them wrong.”

Costa secured himself a place at the Istituto di Istruzione Superiore Baracca, a high school specialising in aviation technology, close to Bologna. There, his enthusiasm earned him the nickname ‘Aladino’, and he conducted his first solo flight at the age of 16. But, lacking the money to pay the huge expense of training for a commercial licence, Costa’s days in the sky seemed numbered. He refused to accept defeat. “I sold fish, cleaned swimming pools, worked as a gardener… Because of my family’s situation, I was able to go to university for free and learn physics. Then I got a job at my old high school. They needed someone to teach basic aerodynamics.

I found that I loved it.”

But even that wasn’t enough to finance the hours of flight time needed.

When the money inevitably ran out, Costa was forced to stop. But fortune smiled again. “The club where I was training needed a teacher – they asked if I would do it in exchange for flying hours. I cleaned the planes, fuelled them, did whatever I could. There was a scholarship, and I finished first, so they paid for half of my licence.” In 2003 Costa completed the course, but no sooner had he realised his career in commercial aviation than a greater destiny revealed itself.

“A friend showed me a video of the Red Bull Air Race. I was like, ‘OK, don’t bother yourself with airline jobs; that’s not what you’ve wanted to do since you were a kid. This is what you want to do.’ After that, everything I did was to get there.”

Costa obtained his instructor’s licence, then pursued an aerobatics rating, once again bartering his way to qualification, sleeping in the hangar, teaching Aviation English and continuing to rack up vital hours in the cockpit.

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EROS MAGGI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, SAMO VIDIC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Hill, Costa’s flight technician for the tunnel pass explains, there’s no margin for error. “The tunnel is 6.72m high, and when Dario’s plane is at flight level the distance from the bottom of the landing gear to the top of the tail is around 2.25m, so the level he has to maintain is about 75cm above the road,” Hill explains. “The tunnel is 16m wide and the wingspan is 7.5m, so there’s about 4m either side of Dario’s wingtips and 3.25m above the plane.

It’s all very close. And he’s going to do it at around 245km an hour.”

But Costa is used to tight spaces from his time in the Air Race. There, the 25m-high pylons the pilots were required to fly through were between 10-15m apart. Crucially, though, those inflatable pylons were designed to tear and collapse if clipped by a plane wing; the hazards in the tunnels are far less forgiving. “There are huge ventilation fans, lights, and emergency exits,” says Costa. “What’s making me more nervous is the limitation in height, because there’s no evasive exit for me – I can’t pull out if I have a problem. And I might hit the ground with the tyres and experience a ballooning effect, pushing me towards the roof. There are a lot of things to consider.”

He won’t have long to consider them: just 45 seconds. That’s how long it will take Costa from take-off until exiting the second tunnel, almost 2.4km away.

Forty-five seconds of his life hanging

LAURIE GREASLEY

Dario Costa

Top: Costa inside the tunnel. Thankfully, he had a bit more clearance than this when making the tunnel pass. But when you’re travelling at around 245kph, 4m either side of the plane and 3.25m above leaves no margin for error.

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Above: the Italian pilot consults with Garcia de Albeniz Mikel Lucas, head of engineers for the tunnel project at Bionic Surface Technologies.

Left: Costa in training.

Improving his reaction times was key to the successful completion of his flight

53

I

n Istanbul, Costa says he feels ready.

The risk is palpable, but he insists that awareness of the dangers and knowing how to handle them are the keys to success. “I’m scared of flying, every day – that’s what keeps me alive,” he says emphatically. “But I respect the fear. I take it, analyse it, try to mitigate

54

it. I do the homework. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with this project. Of course I’m scared, but I’m less scared of things I know more about. What’s important is that you have no big question marks.”

The process of removing those imponderables began in January this year, when Costa began an intense training programme at the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center in Thalgau, Austria. Helping to guide the pilot towards the levels of mental fitness required was York-Peter Klöppel, the centre’s head of mental performance.

“It’s extremely challenging, physically and mentally,” says the German sports psychologist. “We’ve taken care of the physical aspect with one of our strengthconditioning coaches and a physio. Over the last seven or eight months it’s been really beneficial. [Costa] has reported to us that when he’s been flying recently he’s able to pull more Gs, and that it doesn’t affect him so much. He’s made big improvements.

“On the mental side we’ve been focusing on improving his reaction time.

The system we’re using is called Sensory Station, developed by a company called Senaptec. What we’re able to do is set

Five aerial world records: Guinness World Record for longest tunnel flown through with an aeroplane: 1,730m First aeroplane flight through a tunnel Longest flight under a solid obstacle: 1,730m First aeroplane flight through two tunnels First aeroplane take-off from a tunnel

43.44 seconds

Last 150m of the tunnel is wider

SAMO VIDIC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL LAURIE GREASLEY

After moving to Milan, where he took on the role of chief instructor at Aero Club Milano, Costa finally found an opportunity to hone his skills to the competitive level required. “They had 40 aeroplanes and were flying thousands of hours per year, and they had a more performant plane for students, so I could improve myself using that machine.” After securing the Italian national championship in 2013, the call finally came… just not the one he was expecting. “Red Bull Air Race offered me a job as flight operations manager and development pilot,” he recalls, agonisingly.

Four years passed, with Costa watching the Air Race from the wings.

But his patience paid off – in 2018 he was at last called up to the series’ Challenger Class, the competition in which future Masterclass World Championship pilots proved their worth. In his second race, Costa finished on the podium. The following year, he claimed his first win in Hungary – the first Italian to do so.

“It took me 15 years, but I did it,” he says of finally achieving his ambition. But in that same year a new blow came – the championship was cancelled for good. “It was a massive shock,” he says, bluntly.

Costa continued to work as a display pilot and began talks with the promoter behind the next iteration of the Air Race, but bubbling back to the surface came the old dream – to take on a new challenge that would bring the intricacies of aviation to a wider audience. “All the projects I’d been thinking of had science involved, but that can be hard to understand from the outside; I was looking for something relatable. By chance, a guy at Red Bull Turkey messaged me asking if I would consider flying through a tunnel. I just responded to him, ‘Find me one and I will fly through it.’

He came back with the Çatalca Tunnels, which were under construction at that time. It was perfect.”

The tunnel walls are just metres from his wingtips THE RED BULLETIN

Dario Costa

Take-off at 6:43am local time (TRT) on Saturday, September 4, 2021

Take-off

26.37 seconds

31.93 seconds

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TUNNEL VISION

How to film an action movie in 45 seconds

BLACK SEA

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Costa’s subterranean flight set five world records in just three-quarters of a minute, but for the film crews tasked with capturing this moment in history, more world-firsts were required. Alongside cameras mounted on the tunnel floors, ceiling, entrances and exits, a racing drone chased Costa’s plane along the whole route and a cable cam tracked it from take-off – both aerobatic filming feats never attempted before. A bullet-time rig was also set up at the second tunnel entrance to capture a ‘slice’ of frozen action similar to that seen in the Matrix movies, and a tailmounted cam gave a 360° view of the whole flight. Due to the tight confines of the cockpit, only one

m

camera could be mounted in there, capturing Costa’s facial expressions, and his moment of tearful elation as he launched triumphantly out of the final tunnel.

Making the task harder, the Çatalca Tunnels are an operational part of the Northern Marmara Highway, fielding traffic 24 hours a day. Coordinating with the Turkish authorities, the team closed the highway at midnight before the flight, diverting vehicles for 2km ahead of the tunnel entrance, before working through the night rigging the cameras, then testing the set-up by racing a BMW M along the flight path. Adding to the challenge, no person was allowed to remain in the tunnels – except, of course, Costa. Every camera had to be activated ahead of time, then the crews hurriedly left via emergency exits. And that’s where the fun began…

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“I BLINKED!”

after the last, bigger bump at the shape change in the tunnel. It allowed me to avoid any change in attitude.

In normal flying, if you climb 2m it’s not a problem, but here 10cm could have been catastrophic.”

At 6.44am local time, on Saturday, September 4, 2021, Dario Costa became the first pilot to fly a plane through not just one tunnel, but two, and the first to take off inside one. It took him precisely 43.44 seconds to traverse the Çatalca Tunnels. He also earned a Guinness World Record for the longest tunnel flown through with an aeroplane (measured by the attending official at 1.73km). Here’s how Costa remembers it. Or, as is the case, doesn’t.

CROSSWINDS “They said we could go at sunrise and the wind was 1.7 knots. Perfect.

But in the minutes before I took off, the wind changed. They told me it was three knots, which is nothing, but I felt it. As soon as I came out of the first tunnel, I felt the plane wanting to move away, but I reacted to it – you can see that I move the wings to counteract that effect.”

IN THE FLOW “I have almost no memory of what I did. I was fully in a flow state – absolutely calm. Before, my heart was banging right out of my chest, but the moment I put the throttle in, my heart rate dropped. I was asking myself, ‘What if something is not as we calculated?’ But as I started to move, I was hypnotised. There was nothing else.”

FULL THROTTLE “I trained for a smooth take-off, but in the end I was very aggressive – I went almost full power immediately.

I was just eager to get airborne before exiting the first tunnel, to get that record ticked. The first thing I asked the technician afterwards was, ’Did I get airborne before the exit?’

He said, ‘Definitely, no problem.’”

EYES WIDE SHUT “I blinked. That doesn’t sound very important, but it really is. When we did the simulation with the reaction machines, I didn’t blink at all. We trained for me to blink at the exit of Tunnel 1, again at the entrance to Tunnel 2 – where we thought I would experience the first bump – and then 56

SUCKING UP “Into the second tunnel, I got the lift increase we’d calculated. I had to react to that within 250 milliseconds, but I started to feel a sucking from the roof and the sides. We’d expected four bumps, but this was all the time, sucking me towards the roof, so I had to counteract it. In the moment where the tunnel shape changes from round to square, it just stopped.

And then I was out.”

CRY FREEDOM “From landing to taxiing to where everyone was waiting for me, there was about 1.5km and two bridges to pass under. I had an emergency phone in the corner of the plane, so I stopped under the first bridge and FaceTimed my family. It was 5am for them, but they answered. I saw them and I just cried like a baby.

Then they started to cry, and I just gave them the thumbs-up because I couldn’t speak. Those 43 seconds were the best of the whole 14 months. They were the only 43 seconds where I was 100-per-cent sure that it was a good idea.”

SAMO VIDIC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Dario Costa on the minute that changed aviation history

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Dario Costa

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“We are not birds; our bodies weren’t made for flying.

Whatever we do, we have to learn it”

Flying art: Bike Life rider El Arte soars over Luis Banks as the duo mess around in New York’s Chinatown

Final soar: Costa’s Zivko Edge 540 plane exits the tunnels after 43.44 nail-biting seconds

Dario Costa

EROS MAGGI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, SAMO VIDIC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Mission accomplished: Costa experiences an overwhelming release of emotion following his intense, high-risk flight

a point-of-view video of the tunnel flight as a background, then a variety of things he needs to react to pop up on the screen. It’s a big touchscreen, so he has to physically hit them with his hands.

“When we talk about improving reaction time, it’s two parts. The first is what we call neuroplasticity – the more we do something, the better we get at it; the connections in the brain become stronger. The other part is related to his optimal mental state. We worked on breathing, thought control, emotional regulation, making sure that he can get himself into an optimal state just before he’s starting the reaction training. That really makes a huge difference.”

C

osta is convinced that the regime has massively improved his flying skills. “I’ve never done training like this. It’s not just how fast you react but how fast your brain elaborates the information it receives. The exercises are not just ‘lights on and touch the pad’.

It’s lights on, which colour or which shape, and you touch it or you don’t touch it. When I started, my reaction time was 450 milliseconds. Now I can reach 210 milliseconds.”

Costa’s attention to detail also involved anticipating how his plane might behave

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“When I start flying, nothing else bothers me” in the tunnels. For this, he enlisted the help of modelling expert Dr Andreas Flanschger of aerodynamics R&D lab Bionic Surface Technologies. “We used computational fluid dynamics employed in Formula 1 to model the effect of airflow on cars,” says Flanschger. We built digital versions of the aircraft and tunnels to see what would happen. The first was air temperature. The density of air is affected by temperature, and if there’s a huge difference [in air density] when exiting the first tunnel and entering the second, [Costa] will feel it as a bump and it could be dangerous. We can only generate numbers, but they’re crucial because on the day they will define whether we have a go or a no-go.”

It’s not just the space between the tunnels that affects airflow and, by extension, stability. Just as a train hurtling through a tunnel pushes air ahead of it, so too does Costa’s plane –

the displaced air causes small shockwaves to then return down the tunnel, potentially upsetting the balance of the plane. Flanschger’s simulations modelled where those upsets might occur.

“Dario will get four additional bumps inside the tunnel, but at specific times.

They get weaker each time, with the first being the heaviest. Aerodynamically they’re not really critical, but if the pilot doesn’t know they’re coming they could prove pivotal. Through modelling we’re able to predict when they will arrive and how big they are. Now he’s prepared.”

At long last, though, the time for investigation and calculation comes to an end and the only thing remaining is execution. After 14 months of painstaking preparation comes just 45 seconds of groundbreaking precision.

“What am I expecting from those 45 seconds? Peace,” smiles Costa. “That’s the reward. It’s just the last 45 seconds of one year of work for so many people.

I want to prove that the work everybody has done is worth it.”

It’s also just the latest 45 seconds in a career born four decades ago in a young mind filled with tales of Arabian Nights, and that will continue long after the plane escapes those Çatalca Tunnels.

“Every morning, I ask myself if I should fly or not. The important thing for me is that I have to learn something. The day I land, look back at the plane and say, ‘It was a useless flight today,’ that is the moment I will stop. Because you have to respect something we’re not born for.

We are not birds; our bodies weren’t made for flying. Whatever we do, we have to learn it. So the day when I stop learning is the day I will not fly again.

Because my ego will have become bigger than my knowledge.

“But at some point, I will stop flying and I’ll look back and say, ‘What did I do for the people? Did I entertain them enough? Did I help them to push for their dreams, like I did?’”

First, though, he has the task at hand.

“As soon as I start flying, nothing else bothers me. I want to see how it feels to fly inside a tunnel, but in those 45 seconds I don’t think I’ll have time to feel anything other than just quietness.

Just like when I was a kid, everything switches off. And everything is possible.”

Dario Costa achieved his tunnel pass dream on September 4. To watch his amazing achievement, scan the QR code

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Pop stars

BIKE LIFE is about movement, expression, artistry and athleticism.

It’s also a way of life, an act of protest and passion.

Marz Lovejoy has ridden with the New York City crews of this growing subculture. Here, she talks to them about what it means and why it matters Words MARZ LOVEJOY Photography BEN FRANKE 60

Back burner: Bronx-born Jae Milez rides his trademark one-wheeled machine in Washington Square Park, New York City

“Life became more fun riding around on one wheel. Every day, there’s a new face I get to put a smile on” JAE MILEZ 62

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Bike Life

I

Crossover appeal: a small crew of riders take the lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge with the skyline of Lower Manhattan looming in the background

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f you live in New York City, you may have experienced the thrill of being engulfed by a sea of bike riders. One minute you’re walking; the next, swimming in young Black and brown men on bikes. They can easily take up a few city blocks. Many of these young men showcase a myriad of stunts, from intricate wheelies to standing on saddles. Born in the Bronx neighbourhood of Fordham and raised across the river in Dyckman, 23-year-old Jae Milez rides solely on the back tyre of his one-wheel bike. It’s exhilarating to witness this impromptu, free, highly entertaining show of extreme talent.

As he and his fellow riders take off, you feel their freedom and joy, hear their laughter and genuine love for the athletic and artistic pursuit. You’re left in awe. Where are they all heading?

Where did they come from? Can I join?

And just like that – poof – they’re gone. Sprinkling another part of the city with their magic. New York is one of many American cities elevating this niche culture; Newark, Boston, Philly, Baltimore, Oakland and Los Angeles are also making marks. ‘Bike Life’ is a term that embodies both biking and living. It’s a subculture born out of pain, then turned into creativity, not unlike other social and culturally related activities. Riders flaunt their talent, continually creating new tricks and honing their bike skills.

It’s a way of life. One must be passionate about riding, maintain a positive mindset and be serious about having fun.

Though men dominate Bike Life culture, they’re certainly not the only ones ripping through the streets. In the past few years, more women have been joining the pack, turning out wheelies and tricks, riding out with flair and style.

Take Curly. In 2017, this native Lower East Sider was outside on her block when a few boys rode past with the front tyres high above their heads. “It was like destiny,” she says. “You know when something is meant for you. Now I’m just focused on keeping my wheel up.”

Curly admits it took hard work to craft her skills. “At first I was embarrassed, 63

Flying art: Bike Life rider El Arte soars over Luis Banks as the duo mess around in New York’s Chinatown

Bike Life

Spokes people: though Bike Life culture is fuelled by individuals with talents and hard-won skills, the lifeblood of the movement is the community of people who share a passion to ride

“I’ve seen gang members come together without violence, all for the love of riding” JAE MILEZ

so I practised alone in a parking lot,” she explains. “But I decided to step outside my comfort zone. This is not just a guy’s sport.”

A

rtistry takes time and talent.

Hailing from the Bronx, Obloxkz, also known as O, has been riding for almost four years.

In his second year of riding, O gained

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sponsorship from Throne Cycles, a Los Angeles-based street-bike company.

After witnessing O’s talent, one can see why. Zigzagging through traffic, jumping on and off pedals in motion, scraping his hand on the ground while his bike is in a vertical position, Obloxkz has the skill set of a professional athlete.

“People judge us from what they see,” he says. “I just wish they respected us like BMX riders.”

Bike Life is becoming more visible, commercial, politicised and, sadly, more policed. The broader issues around social justice and discriminatory policing have impacted the simple act of riding a bike on city streets. To put it bluntly, the data on how often young Black and brown riders are cited and ticketed in New York City is disturbing.

According to figures from New York’s Department of Transportation, more than 86 per cent of bike riders ticketed in the city through 2018 and 2019 were Black or Hispanic. Nearly half of all citations were received by riders aged

24 or younger. And Black men were issued 51 per cent of tickets. This hostile climate underscores the need for justice and equitable practises, including those for Black and brown bikers who are women, girls, non-binary people, in the LGBTQI+ community or living in impoverished neighbourhoods.

I am a Black woman nearing my thirties, and I’ve been biking for 10 years. I understand the risks, fears and trepidation of being Black and riding. Discrimination is real and it contaminates every aspect of a culture, and bike culture is hardly immune.

However, this is how change must happen.

In an article examining cycling’s racist, sexist and classist origins, Phoenix-based author and architect Taz Khatri itemises prevalent prejudices of race, sex and socioeconomics in biking history, noting that “cycling clubs explicitly excluded African Americans, Asian Americans, the poor and Native Americans”.

The staggering facts of what it means to be a Black or brown person on a bike 65

Wheel deal: YourBoyFromBK provides some complimentary action for lunchtime patrons in Manhattan’s SoHo district

only amplifies the need for more accessibility; this access will inevitably equate to social acceptance. Jae, Curly and O each describe the freedom, camaraderie and sense of purpose that riding bikes gives them.

Jae’s love of Bike Life pushes him to seek change. He supports the idea of indoor bike spaces to practise freely without weather issues, disgruntled drivers or policing. Jae is also talking to the chief of police in his neighbourhood because he understands the politics of it all. “Bikes unify everybody,” he says. “I’ve seen gang members come together with no violence, all for the love of riding.

This is a positive outlet that is much better than any video game or virtual reality.” He believes that once the focus is on the benefits, acceptance will show up in the application of public policy supporting biking-related initiatives.

Laws and behaviours will follow.

For me, biking was for many years a solo sport, largely because only two of my friends did it. That all changed in 66

“People judge us on what they see.

I just wish they respected us like BMX riders” OBLOXKZ

2016 when I (literally) crossed paths with Q on the streets of New York.

My husband and I were riding home from work when we found ourselves immersed in the sea of bikers, willingly and happily becoming (temporarily) part of their school. I took the opportunity to introduce myself to Q, vice president of Only The Rocketz, a New York-based bike crew. Suddenly I had a personal connection to Bike Life.

B

ut for everyone who rides bikes the pandemic changed everything.

With normal life disrupted – fewer people driving, gyms closed, and pandemic boredom in full effect – Americans began hopping on bikes in unprecedented numbers. Bike sales during spring and summer 2020 were up more than 80 per cent on the previous year.

However, like so much else in our society, Bike Life culture was shaped by both the virus and the US’ painful and long overdue reckoning over social justice. It turned my casual passion into something more. As a response to the heaviness of being a Black woman, contemplating police brutality and subsequent grief from the brutal and unjust murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and numerous other Black Americans, I helped launch the first annual And Still We Ride community ride-out to celebrate Black women. With the help of Q and a slew of volunteers, I orchestrated a large turnout of Bike Life enthusiasts as well as those THE RED BULLETIN

Bike Life

Bike Life is becoming more visible, commercial, politicised and, sadly, more policed

who have not been on a bike in years.

Jae Milez was in attendance and rode 50km on one wheel.

This was one of many ride-outs across the country. Around the world, allies rode out in solidarity. The People were galvanised, united and mad as hell, taking their feelings to the streets.

Using their bodies as acts of protest.

Disease, murder and mayhem pushed folks to spring into action – a bitter sweetness – changing us in one way or another. Out of tragedy came pockets of light: budding activists with newfound voices. People turning to community. Marginalised groups mobilising. And we are still riding out.

But, says O, many young people with little to no means of income struggle to acquire a bike to ride out on. “If I had 100 bikes right now, I’d give them out, easily,” he adds, noting that a good bike can cost anywhere from $700 to $1,000 [£500 to £700].

He enthusiastically expressed working with the private sector to hold bike giveaways and host content-creation classes. This is not rocket science – when youth have constructive and engaging outlets, that is where their

Correcting the balance: “This is not just a guy’s sport,” says Curly, who put in the hours to master her wheelie technique THE RED BULLETIN

time and focus will live. But it’s not only the cost of bikes keeping youth at bay; it’s the infrastructure in lowincome neighbourhoods. It’s not easy to build a cycling culture amid so many potholes, on streets without bike lanes or signage expressing the rights of riders to take the lane. Yet these dangerous conditions are the norm in many low-income neighbourhoods, when quite the opposite exists in affluent areas. No wonder riders feel the need to take over the streets to feel safe.

I was born in Minneapolis, one of the most bikeable cities in America; I’m currently living in Copenhagen, one of the most bikeable cities in the world. In 10 years of biking – mainly in Los Angeles and New York – I’ve experienced firsthand how there’s much to learn from cities that have invested in cycling infrastructure.

Minneapolis and Copenhagen have spent many tens of millions of dollars to improve bikeways, making large and strategic investments to encourage riding. These are already paying off.

In Copenhagen, for instance, residents who ride request fewer sick days, generate significantly less CO2 emissions, and save $1.16 [around 80p] in health benefits for every kilometre ridden.

The athleticism and artistic expression of Bike Life are profound, but the benefits go deeper and broader than that: a physically and mentally healthier society, reduction of carbon footprints, parking cost and vehicle savings, reduced crime, economic development opportunities, social equity benefits and a focus on quality of life.

Still, so many of the most profound benefits of Bike Life are deeply personal.

“To me, biking means community and family,” says Obloxkz. “It’s how we express ourselves. It’s how we bond.

Whatever you decide to do, even if it isn’t biking, always dedicate yourself.”

Curly sees it as a kind of active therapy, too: “It frees my mind,” she says simply.

Bike Life is being in the flow of movement – a movement, a culture, a way of life that inspires and promotes positivity and wellness. So, when you find yourself within a sea of beautiful bikers, ask yourself, “Where can I fit in?”

Watch the short film Bike Life: New York City’s Wheelie Scene on Red Bull TV by scanning the QR code

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VENTURE Enhance, equip, and experience your best life

MOVING FORWARD

MATT HARDY

Finding strength during Britain’s first ultra-triathlon

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VENTURE Travel

“No one had done Land’s End to John o’Groats via the largest lakes and highest peaks, so that decided the route for me”

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each country’s largest lakes and highest peaks, so that decided the route for me – the UK’s first ‘ultra-triathlon’. I hoped to complete it in 14 days; this was day seven.

My name is Frankie Tinsley. I’ve served in the British Armed Forces for 20 years, currently as an RAF Physical Training Instructor and before that as a paracommando in the Royal Marines. It would be fair to say my physical fitness is above average, but this would be something else.

Starting on August 7, I cycled up through Cornwall, Devon and Bristol – setting off at 6.30am each morning and clocking an average of 10-12 hours and 200km a day. Pelting showers meant I couldn’t capitalise on the downhill stretches, and after crossing the glacial waters of Lake Bala – 6km in length – on day four, I summited Snowdon in 100kph sideways wind and rain. Next came the 232km ride to Windermere. I knew that would be a huge challenge – three years ago, I could barely swim four lengths of a pool.

MATT HARDY, ALAMY

T

oday is not a good day. I’ve been swimming for around nine hours across the 18km length of Lake Windermere in Cumbria in the worst water conditions I’ve ever experienced – white horses crashing over my back, and all without a swim buoy due to it wrapping around my body. With one kilometre to go, I’m pulled into a boat, shivering uncontrollably in my wetsuit as the crew attempts to raise my body temperature beneath layers of towels and robes.

Delirious and hypoglycaemic, meaning my blood glucose has dropped perilously low, I’m in desperate need of calories, but my body is rejecting food. And the worst thing is, I have to get back in.

A week earlier, I’d set off from Land’s End to John o’Groats on this challenge we’ve called the Talisman Triathlon – 1,728km of running, cycling and swimming between Britain’s southern and northern extremities. During my research, I discovered no one had ever done it via

MATT RAY

Frankie Tinsley, RAF PT Instructor and former Royal Marines commando

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VENTURE Travel I have to keep moving. Not least because after this I have to scale England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, then cycle through Scotland to Loch Awe, which at 41km in length dwarfs Windermere, before running up to Scotland’s – and the UK’s – highest point, the peak of Ben Nevis.

But this challenge isn’t about me, it’s about two of my friends, Andy Morris and Andy Shepherd, who took their own lives in 2016 and 2017. It’s also about getting men to open up about their problems.

According to the charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), 125 people take their own lives every week in the UK, and 75 per cent of them are male.

I trained officers in the RAF with Andy Morris. He was a surfer, an Ironman, a musician, nearly a pro footballer, the life and soul of the party. He was making the most of his life and was the last person I thought was going through dark times.

His close friends tried to help him, and it must be hard for them wrestling with the thought of whether they did enough.

It’s something that weighs on me, too.

I met Andy Shepherd two years before his death. He was a details guy, meticulously organised. You’d think, “Wow, you have a stunning wife and

John o’Groats 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Land’s End

1

The Talismanic trail Tracking Tinsley’s ultra-trek up the spine of Britain Plucky talisman (clockwise from top left): preparing for a three-hour dip in Lake Bala; scaling Ben Nevis; the murky waters of Bala; riding from Carlisle to Glasgow

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1 BIKE Lands End to Lake Bala, 551km 2 SWIM Lake Bala, 6km 3 RUN Lake Bala to Snowdon, 63km 4 BIKE Snowdon to Windermere, 260km 5 SWIM Windermere, 18km 6 RUN Windermere to Scafell Pike, 29km 7 BIKE Scafell Pike to Loch Awe, 355km 8 SWIM Loch Awe, 41km 9 RUN Kinlochleven to Ben Nevis, 103km 10 BIKE Ben Nevis to John o‘Groats, 302km

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VENTURE Travel

Hard as rocks: staying spritely at Scafell Pike, and (left) the journey’s start at Land’s End

To donate, or for advice and support on suicide, visit thecalmzone.net

a two-year-old daughter, you have everything nailed down. Everyone looks up to you.” He seemed completely happy, and that’s hard for me to get my head around. I never stop thinking, “Should I have invested more time in him?”

On the first day of the challenge, I visited Andy Morris’ memorial bench in Falmouth. I peered down at the sea, and it was beautiful. Then I read the inscription on the bench, which had been written by his mother, and I was a sniffling mess.

Recent research has thrown new light on the true burden of grief from suicide.

According to the Centre for Suicide Prevention, each death affects at least 135 people, and the loss of Andy and Andy made me reflect on life. We’re all accountable to people around us, and this is part of what I’m trying to do with the 72

Going commando: gearing up for a 12-hour bike ride and 2,100m of elevation on day three

Frankie Tinsley is an ambassador for ThruDark, the high-performance clothing company co-founded by his brother and former British Special Forces operator Louis. On August 23, Tinsley made it to John o’Groats, completing his ultratriathlon in 16 days. To donate to his fundraising page, visit his Instagram: @talismantriathlon THE RED BULLETIN

MATT RAY

“I always say that I didn’t choose to do the Talisman, it chose me,” says Tinsley. “Five years ago, Andy Morris and I wanted to create a charity event that spanned England, Wales and Scotland.

After he died, it dawned on me that I would have to do this triathlon, and CALM was the ideal charity to support, while opening up the conversation around physical and mental health and hopefully encouraging others to find help. Since lockdown began, they’ve answered a call to their helpline every 61 seconds.”

MATT HARDY

Cause and effect The motivation to keep going

Talisman – spread a message while unpicking the decisions I have to make.

I’m not faultless, but going through that grief cycle and thinking, “It’s happened now, what can I do about it?”, I guess that’s where I draw on stoicism.

Men need to own not being a victim.

We all feel sorry for ourselves. I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself right now, but I put myself here for a good reason: the cause.

As soon as I can rob that pain of its suffering, it’s just pain. We need to become more self-aware, catch ourselves thinking negatively, and do something to find a positive in the situation.

As a Royal Marine, I was involved in the invasion of Iraq, and I saw an Iraqi soldier die in the thick of battle. Over the years, at random times, I had flashbacks of the soldier dying. There was no conversation about combat stress at the time, but what helped me was telling someone. The reality is that war is horrific. Your brain can never normalise what happens. I don’t have any answers, I just hope people who are struggling are able to reach out so that they can try to normalise it, accept it as a point in time, take what strength they can from it, and move forward positively.

I left Andy Morris behind at his bench, but his spirit is with me. And in Scotland I’ll pass the place where Andy Shepherd died, where I hope to see his wife and daughter. This project is about Andy and Andy, the big journey and everyone involved, and my part is to keep the story going so that it can keep being told.

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SKIING Foto: Innsbruck Tourismus / Vorhofer

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VENTURE Fitness SUCCEED

Get your GOAT on Downhill mountain biking is a brutal sport with no second chances. So how did Greg Minnaar win the World Championships four times across three decades?

On August 29, 2021, Greg Minnaar won the downhill title at the ITC Mountain Bike World Championships. It was his fourth time raising the trophy, and his 12th podium, which, added to 23 World Cup victories, makes him the most prolific winner in downhill MTB history. What’s even more impressive is that this November Minnaar turns 40.

The South African won his first World Championships in 2003, at the age of 21. But, in a sport requiring exceptional muscular strength, physical fitness, mental fortitude, razor reactions and highly technical skill, many assumed Minnaar didn’t have another title challenge in him. However, on the season’s gnarliest track – the Black Snake at Val di Sole, Italy – he answered that with a blistering display on the roughest part of the course.

How has Minnaar become stronger over time, even as new bike technology and a fresh breed of racers have changed the sport around him? “I’m a more balanced rider than I was 15 years ago,” says the GOAT.

Do the maths

On a course as challenging as Val di Sole, it’s striking how close the top five racers finish – tenths of seconds can separate them. “You’re never going to win by not riding 100 per cent,” says Minnaar, but he is also quick to stress they’re not just “a load of nutters who turn off and blast down”.

This is where his decades of experience come into play.

“Know where you’re going be slower and accept that it’s 95 per cent. Then find where you can push it to 105 per cent and make up for lost time.”

Keep your cool

Another quality born from experience is recognising your fears, but that doesn’t mean you can eliminate them. “I’ve always found it hard to relax in the start gate, because if it goes wrong it goes really wrong,” says Minnaar. Indeed, the day before his win, archrival Loïc Bruni had a huge crash, landing on the only

“You have to go back to basics to push forward”

clear patch of dirt. Had he fallen on a rock, Bruni said after the event, “my grave would have been up there, for sure.” For Minnaar, it’s about tempering those nerves: “If you’re not calm, you can’t attack the track and you’re never gonna win. The mental side plays a big part.”

Be adaptable

Downhill MTB is a different beast from a decade ago. With wider berms and bigger jumps, today’s tracks are faster than the boulder fields of old. And a new generation of riders has sought out stiffer suspension that returns more energy to the bike, making it quicker but less controllable. Fortunately, Minnaar is a gearhead who’s always tinkering with his rig, even before a race. “[In the qualifier] I was getting bounced out of these deep ruts; it was a bit uncontrollable.” So he changed his suspension set-up – effectively blind, with no way to test it before the final run. He was sure he’d blown it, running slower to the halfway point.

“Then suddenly the bike felt more controllable, and I found a good rhythm where the other riders seemed to be losing time.” The gamble had paid off.

Turning back time: age is just a number for Greg Minnaar, who, at 39, is still winning major titles

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For more about Minnaar and his Santa Cruz Syndicate team, go to santacruzbicycles.com THE RED BULLETIN

BARTOSZ WOLINSKI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Minnaar says he’ll know it’s time to retire when he can no longer face the slog of offseason training and intense workouts three times a week.

To meet the challenge, he prioritises social workouts.

Recently, British motocross rider Jonny Walker challenged him to run 39 miles in a week to mark his 39th birthday. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do 39km?’, and he messaged back saying, ‘I’ll do it by myself then,’ so I knew I had to do it.” Minnaar laughs.

But his secret remains the same as ever: “Analysing my body and working on weaknesses.

It’s funny, you get so far in your career and go back to the basics to try to push forward.”

MATT RAY

Know yourself

VENTURE Fitness

The Incus Nova Swim Run Bundle includes a Core Run T-Strap and Unisex FIIN Vest, both of which feature a pouch that places the tracker at the top of your spine

IMPROVE

Got your back TIM KENT

When a swimmer partially lost his hearing, he needed another way to communicate with his trainer. It created a new dialogue in fitness

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In 2009, Chris Ruddock was a 16-year-old competition swimmer and speed lifesaver when an ear infection led to permanent hearing loss on his left side. It changed his life, but not in the way you’d think. Unable to hear his coach from the poolside, and now with a degree in design engineering, Ruddock developed an activity tracker that would communicate more than a swimmer could ever say. This bedroom project won him a spot at MIT in 2015, and gave birth to his company, Incus, named after his destroyed inner-ear bone.

Most trackers are worn on the wrist, only measuring one side of the body, but people aren’t symmetrical – and less so

if you’re a para-athlete. When attached to the upper spine, Incus Nova monitors each limb separately, gauges body pitch and roll in the water, and it has now been upgraded to include running, measuring the cadence, power and pace of each leg.

An app translates this data into easy-todigest insights and objectives, something Ruddock says overcomes “paralysis by analysis”. Next up are features for cycling, turning Incus Nova into one of the most invaluable triathlon trackers in existence.

He may have partially lost his hearing, but Ruddock gained a sense of awareness of how we can all improve our physical performance. incusperformance.com 75

VENTURE Gaming allowed for more than just shooting people – give a glass of water to the wife, or not. How we receive information and act upon it is an ongoing process.”

Feeling the need

Developing vast permutations of human responses forced Antonio to study behaviour patterns, from “non-violent communication systems” to his own interactions with his child.

“When you have a negative feeling, it’s because a need is not being met, and we often find someone to blame. Let’s say you’re in a meeting that’s too long and you feel irritated.

You might say, ‘This isn’t important – could you cut this shorter?’ But what you really want to say is, ‘I forgot to eat.

Can I go and grab a sandwich?’”

The science of tension

Second chances This game forces you to replay the same moment again and again.

Sounds like torture, but it might provide enlightenment What if you could start again and do things differently? It’s a concept seen in time-loop movies such as Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, where the protagonist relives the same day over and over. It’s also a fundamental mechanic of video games: lose a life, try again, learn from your errors.

For Luis Antonio, this was an idea he needed to explore, but first he had to escape his own vicious cycle. The Portuguese artist was working for gaming giants Rockstar Games, but he felt unfulfilled. Then a gig as art director on 2016 indie puzzle adventure The Witness showed him the way: learn games development and realise your own vision. That became timeloop mystery 12 Minutes.

Drawing inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, film lover Antonio 76

created a claustrophobic thriller in which you play a husband enjoying dinner at home with his wife when a cop arrives and accuses her of murder. As you try to solve the mystery, the scene keeps restarting every 12 minutes. But there’s a twist: the main character remembers what has happened each time.

“I explored this concept of accumulated knowledge and

how to make that a gameplay element,” says Antonio. It became, he says, a “smallenvironment three-character piece, like theatre”, and he cast Hollywood actors James McEvoy, Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe to voice it.

Antonio’s choices have been vindicated by critical acclaim of the game. And along the way he’s discovered fascinating insights into human behaviour.

The language of action

“The game is a study on how to live in the now”

Although 12 Minutes is driven by dialogue, Antonio realised the learning process is not so different from action-based games, or life. “In a platformer, when a player misses a jump you want them to think, ‘OK, I should have jumped later.’ That applies to everything. How do you interpret someone when you know more about them?

I created interactions that

Originally, 12 Minutes explored beyond the apartment over a 24-hour cycle, but, inspired by a 1990 short film titled 12:01PM, Antonio scaled it back to add urgency. “In the film, a man is stuck in a lunchtime. He has an hour and discovers a machine that causes a break in time. But he’s hungry every loop. It’s so short you feel the frustration.”

Living in the moment

“We live in a society where we are constantly judging our past experiences or planning and worrying about our future,” says Antonio. “Accepting the present is what a lot of timeloop movies are about. These characters have luggage from the past. It became a study on how to live in the now.”

Enjoy getting lost

Antonio’s game is finished, but if he could change anything about 12 Minutes, would he?

“I’d add more elements that allow players to understand that what they feel is a lack of progress is actually progress,” he says. “But it’s not like I could go back in time and do it again.”

12 Minutes is on Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S; twelveminutesgame.com THE RED BULLETIN

TOM GUISE

DISCOVER

VENTURE Gaming PLAY

Positive returns Before beer pong, there was simply Pong. Raise your glass to the game that came before all the others and influenced what followed

Atari Mini PONG Jr features rotating control ‘paddles’, identical to those of the original arcade machine, to steer your ‘bat’ left and right

TOM GUISE

If you had entered Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, on November 29, 1972, you’d have found the drinking hole much the same as on any other night – patrons drinking, smoking indoors and playing pool – bar one difference. By the pinball machines was a yellow cabinet branded with the word ‘Pong’.

It was an inauspicious debut for the arcade machine that birthed video gaming. Pong’s simple graphics and gameplay – a dot bounces between two lines to simulate tennis – were designed by Atari’s Allan Alcorn in a training exercise. His genius was to add basic physics to the ‘ball’ rebound, and a gradual increase in speed. The game was so addictive that at the peak of ‘Pong-mania’ there were 35,000-plus cabinets in the US. A home version – one of the earliest games consoles – came out in 1975; it made Atari the first big name in video games.

The original Atari Corporation is long since dead, but Pong lives on. Its latest incarnation, Atari Mini PONG Jr, presents the original oneand two-player modes, retro sound effects and iconic graphics on a portable 30cm LCD screen. By some accounts, on that first night at Andy Capp’s Tavern patrons queued to play it. Others claim Atari filled the machine with quarters so the bar would ask to keep it. What isn’t in dispute is Pong’s enduring popularity and legacy. arcade1up.com

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Urban legends Adventures in the concrete jungle Photography EDD HORDER Styling JAMES SLEAFORD

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SANTA CRUZ Outline Fade Hand Hood, santacruz skateboards.eu; OLIVER SPENCER Fishtail Penton Cord Trousers, oliverspencer.co.uk; SUUNTO 7 Refurbished Watch, suunto.com; Bracelet, model’s own

BBCO Protect Our Wilderness Holster Cap, bbcoheadwear. com; PARAJUMPERS Caleb Sweatshirt, parajumpers.it; POLER Nowhere Tee, poler.co.uk; GLOBE Foundation Pants, eu.globebrand. com; DANNER Trail 2650 GTX Shoes, global.danner.com; BEARMADE Gouthwaite Backpack 18-23L, bearmade.co. uk; TISSOT Chrono XL Quartz EOL watch, tissotwatches.com; MIZU M8 All Stainless Bottle, mizulife.eu

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Photographer’s assistant THOMAS PIGEON Hair and make-up EMILY MERGAERT using Omorovicza and Mr Smith Models SIA @ W Model Management, ANTHONY BOSCO @ Milk Model Management, MAX LANCASTER at Supa Model Management

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VENTURE Calendar

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to 31 October RED BULL TIMELAPS Most of us look forward to the clocks going back in autumn for the extra hour in bed, but for those competing in this one-day, 25-hour cycling event, it’s just more time to race.

This year, the contest is virtual, allowing indoor and outdoor riders to log on via Strava, tracking their positions on a live leaderboard.

Aside from that, the challenge is the same: a ‘Power Hour’ is activated when 2am reverts to 1am again, with riders’ efforts doubled for 60 minutes, boosting their place on the circuit. redbull.com

6 November BC ONE WORLD FINAL Last year’s BC One World Final was one of many usually live events streamed online, with breakers competing in front of a green screen, and supporters tuning in from home. It was a success, but with its MCs, hype men and hollering crowds, breaking is a sport that comes alive with an audience present. This year, the spectators are back, heading to the Polish coastal city of Gdansk to see the world’s best breakers – including, for the first time ever, a full line-up of 16 female breakers — represent their country.

Watch Red Bull TV to find out who will be crowned the 2021 champions. redbull.com

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November MINISTRY OF SOUND CLASSICAL Opened in London’s Elephant & Castle in September 1991, the Ministry of Sound brought the vibe of US house-music venues to the UK’s rave scene.

And it quickly stole a march on its rivals; according to co-founder Justin Berkmann, the Ministry emptied clubland stalwart Tramp of its celebrity clientele for three weeks after launch. Thirty years on, the world-famous dance-music brand is tapping into yet another established audience: classical-music lovers. This show sees legendary DJs including Paul Oakenfold, Judge Jules and Brandon Block team up with a 50-piece orchestra to reimagine dance-music classics as, well, classical music. The O2 Arena, London; theo2.co.uk 88

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VENTURE Calendar

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October to 2 December REGARDING FORESTS

LITTLE SHAO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, DARREN WHEELER, HIGH FLYING DRONES SHOTS

In 2019, photographer Chrystel Lebas travelled to two forests – Hoh Rain in Washington State, USA, and Yakushima, Japan – homes to some of the world’s oldest living trees.

The photos she captured, along with ambient sounds recorded on location, make up a multisensory installation in the Grade I-listed North Wing of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London.

The exhibition offers a restorative experience to patients, staff and the public as part of the Wellcome Collections’ On Happiness season.

Adding to the immersiveness is the scent of ‘petrichor’, or the forest floor after rain. St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, wellcomecollection.org

12 October THE CURIOUS TALES OF ÍTALO FERREIRA ​​ one expected the world’s first Olympic men’s surfing gold medallist to be from No a small coastal city in north-eastern Brazil, but ever since Ítalo Ferreira exploded onto the surf scene he has been challenging everyone’s expectations and blowing his more recognisable opponents out of the water. This new film takes a look at the notoriously fast and chaotic surfer’s upbringing in tiny Baía Formosa, talking to locals about how an angry young man became the community’s proudest export. As he sets his sights on a second championship title at the upcoming World Surf League, follow Ferreira’s journey from local boy to surfing’s number-one athlete. redbull.com THE RED BULLETIN

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to 31 October BRICK LANE BIER FEST Hankering for Oktoberfest, but not quite ready to immerse yourself in the crowds of around six million who join the booze pilgrimage to Munich each year? This may be more up your street. The 650sq-m warehouse will host around 1,000 revellers, with premium German pilsners, a bespoke cocktail bar, comedy, cabaret and, of course, bratwurst on offer. Brick Lane Tap Room, London; bricklanetaproom.co.uk 89

Winter love

Austrian Tirol is a place renowned for its beauty. A place where the people and the towns are moulded by the immensity of the mountain landscapes that line every side. But while the views are stunning whatever the season, Tirol is truly a place with winter in its soul. Whatever you’re looking for in a trip to the mountains, you can find it in Austrian Tirol…

PROMOTION

RESORT INFO

Iron giant: the iconic Bergisel Ski Jump is a popular landmark in Innsbruck

TVB PAZNAUN-ISCHGL/INNSBRUCK TOURISMUS, TOM BAUSE

Nearest airports: Innsbruck (100km); Zurich (235km); Munich (304km) Number of lifts: 45 Total piste length: 239km Elevation: 1,377m–2,872m Highest mountain: Greitspitze, 2,872m Huts and restaurants in ski area: 15 Cross-country tracks: 73km Ski schools: 7 Difficulty of runs (total): Blue 47km (20%); red 140km (59%), black 37km (15%), ski routes 15km (6%) ischgl.com/en

Paznaun-Ischgl

Innsbruck

The legendary ski town of Ischgl will look a little different this year

This city occupies a unique place in world snowsports

In Ischgl, a town known for its multitude of tabletop après-ski bars, this season the focus will be back on skiing – and doing it in style. But Ischgl has much more to offer than the famous nightlife and après ski.

It’s home to not only more four- and fivestar hotels than any other resort in Austria, but also to 10 toque-awarded restaurants, adding to its reputation as the culinary mecca of Austria (outside Vienna, at least).

The family-friendly ski resorts of Galtür, Kappl and See are also just around the corner. The resort is carbon-neutral, and it’s also huge – there are 239km of slopes to choose from. And thanks to the altitude and snow security, it’s able to open from November through to May, too.

Highlights include skiing to the Austrian-Swiss border on the 2,752m Flimjoch, or a long red from the Piz Val Grondabahn cable car that drops 1,000 vertical metres. Ischgl’s JEEP-sponsored snowpark is also one of the best not just in Austria but in all of Europe. With two separate lines for varying abilities, it’s perfect for a day of lapping.

Off the slopes, enjoy a horse-drawn sleigh ride, or spend an evening tobogganing and reward yourself afterwards with fondue at a traditional wooden lodge. You are in Tirol, after all.

Innsbruck is a bustling city – students, historic attractions, nightlife and all – but with all the mountain access and beauty of a far-flung resort.

The SKI plus CITY pass grants access to 13 ski resorts and 291km of slopes. A 20minute gondola from the city centre takes you up 2,637m to the Nordkette and 32.4km of shred-ready slopes. The 7.5km Olympia Run in connecting Patscherkofel is one of the most stunning in Tirol, lined with trees and with city views. The pass gets you into 22 sightseeing spots around Innsbruck, too, from the Olympic Ski Jump to the Imperial Palace and Tirol‘s most visited attraction, Swarovski Crystal Worlds. Swimming pools and a sightseeing bus are also included.

There’s a free local ski bus service, plus another great free bus that takes you to Stubai, where your pass grants access to Austria’s largest glacial ski area. The 10km Wilde Grub’n ski route is a beautiful run, and Stubai’s ‘Powder Department’ have mapped out 13 perfect off-piste freeride runs for those who love to splash snow. Families flock to Kühtai-Hochötz, one of the sunniest spots in Austria, or to Axamer Lizum, but there are so many options for all abilities.

Innsbruck is a proper city, with proper mountain access. It’s having its cake and eating it, too.

RESORT INFO Nearest airports: Innsbruck (5km); Memmingen (116km); Munich (125km) Number of lifts: 111 Ski resorts: 13 Total piste length: 291km Elevation: 820m–3,212m Highest mountain: Schaufelspitze, 3,332m Difficulty of runs (total): Blue 102.10km (35.13%); red 148.40km (51.07%); black 40.10km (13.80%) innsbruck.info/en; ski-plus-city.com/en

Ötztal The Ötztal Super Skipass boasts 363km of pistes between six ski resorts, including two glacier mountains and three mountains that cross the three-thousandmetre mark The glaciers can be found in Sölden, a location that Daniel Craig’s James Bond visits in the film Spectre. In the movie, 007 meets Léa Seydoux’s Dr Swann at the mysterious Hoffler Klinik.

In reality, that clinic is the gourmet restaurant ice Q on the Gaislachkogl Mountain. Grab a meal and a cocktail there – though we can imagine the staff

As well as 144km of slopes, Sölden is the only ski area in Austria with three connected 3,000m summits

Perfect pistes: Ötztal caters for beginners and seasoned skiers alike

are tired of the ‘shaken not stirred’ gag.

As well as 144km of slopes, Sölden is the only ski area in Austria with three connected 3,000m summits. This means big mountain panoramas, and over in the stunning Obergurgl-Hochgurgl there’s more of the same. From the Top Mountain Star, a 360° restaurant at 3,080m, you can look out from the Ötztaler peaks to the Italian Dolomites.

Hochoetz is a great stop for beginners, and there are other small family resorts that are perfect for learning on the pass.

Off the piste, Lake Piburg is the ideal place to sample natural lake ice-skating under views of the majestic Acherkogel mountain, and Hochgurgl offers winter hikes illuminated at night. Stuck for a spot to propose? Look no further.

RESORT INFO Nearest airports: Innsbruck (97km); Salzburg (276km); Zurich (292km) Number of lifts: 90 Total piste length: 363km Elevation: 1350m–3440m Highest mountain: Wildspitze, 3,774m (the second highest mountain in Austria) Huts and restaurants in ski area: 79 Cross-country tracks: 143km Ski schools: 26 oetztal.com/winter.html

PROMOTION

OETZTAL TOURISMUS/ALPBACHTAL TOURISMUS, GABRIELE GRIESSENBOECK

Typically Tirol: the village of Alpbach is famed for its picturepostcard beauty

Ski Juwel Alpbachtal Wildschönau From the tree-lined slopes to the picturesque villages of the high valleys of Alpbach and Wildschönau, it’s not hard to see why Ski Juwel AlpbachtalWildschönau attracts so many return visitors Alpbach is considered by many to be the most beautiful village in all of Austria, and Wildschönau – meaning ‘wild and beautiful’ – is certainly appropriately named. Narrow roads and sloped wooden farmhouses frame the valleys. The architecture is quintessential Austria.

The Wildschönau Valley is made up of four villages: Niederau, with the

Markbachjoch behind; Oberau, with its 250-year old baroque church and views of the Schatzberg; Thierbach, which is the highest village in the Kitzbühel Alps; and Auffach, the portal to the Ski Juwel.

While the towns are small and cosy, there’s nothing small about the pistes. On offer is 109km, with 45 lifts – from an extensive map for beginners to black runs and off-piste that would challenge even the most accomplished skier. But skiing is not the only activity on offer – there’s also tobogganing, ice-skating, romantic winter walks by day and night, the Alpine Coaster, and more.

If that sounds a bit hectic, then it shouldn’t. Stress isn’t a word often used in the Ski Juwel. In Alpbachtal Wildschönau, it’s all about great views, great vibes, great community and great skiing – at your own pace and on your own terms.

RESORT INFO Nearest airports: Innsbruck (81km); Salzburg (137km); Munich (161km) Number of lifts: 45 Total piste length: 109km Elevation: 830m–2025m Highest mountain: Wiederbergerhorn, 2,025m Huts and restaurants in ski area: 25 Cross-country tracks: 100km-plus Ski schools: 10 Difficulty of runs (total): Blue 26km (23.9%); red 54km (49.5%); black 13km (11.9%); freeride 16km (14.7%) skijuwel.com/en/winter

SkiWelt Wilder Kaiser-Brixental If you’re an eco-conscious skier who loves long days in the snow, you’ll be hard pushed to find a better spot than the SkiWelt SkiWelt has put sustainability at the front and centre of its priorities. In 2008, the resort opened the world’s first solar-powered lift, the Brixen “Sonnenlift”. Now, all 90 ski lifts in the resort are operated by ecoelectricity and equipped with sustainable high-tech innovations.

Sounds good, right? And we’ve not even got to the skiing yet. There’s a lot of it – 288km to be precise, much of which has stunning views of the Wilder Kaiser mountain range and more than 70 peaks over 3,000m.

Simply put, this resort is huge, and there are various add-ons to make it even better – from early-bird skiing that lets you onto the slopes first to night-skiing under floodlights on freshly groomed descents.

It’s a snow-sure resort amid nine idyllic alpine villages, where you could ski a whole day without repeating a single lift or run. With a cool igloo village, mountain huts on every slope, and a day trip to the old town and fortress of Kufstein easily done, there’s a whole lot here to love.

RESORT INFO Nearest airports: Salzburg (79km); Innsbruck (84km); Munich (148km) Number of lifts: 90 Total piste length: 288km Elevation: 620m–1,957m Highest mountain: Fleiding, 1,892m Huts and restaurants in ski area: 80 Cross-country tracks: 148km Idyllic alpine villages: 9, offering authentic Tirolean accommodation of all categories Difficulty of runs (total): Blue 126km (43.8%); red 127km (44.1%); black 35km (12.1%) skiwelt.at/en/ skiwelt-wilder-kaiserbrixental.html

St Johann in Tirol St Johann in Tirol may not have the bulk of its neighbours, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in charm

Dream town: St Johann in Tirol has historic charm

Based around a historic town centre, St Johann in Tirol provides the ideal getaway for those seeking a familyfriendly stay without compromising on those big Austrian mountain views.

Located in the Kitzbüheler Alps region, this cosy resort has 20 huts along 43km of slopes. The family ski areas in Kirchdorf and Erpfendorf are excellent for beginners. The slopes are long, wide, and don’t get too busy.

The ski area in St Johann in Tirol is the place to go for those a little more advanced. Skiing the snow-assured side of the 1,996m Kitzbüheler Horn, you’ll have memorable views of the distinctive Wilder Kaiser mountains in particular. And if you do want to visit SkiWelt or Kitzbühel at any point?

They’re only a few minutes away.

RESORT INFO Nearest airports: Salzburg (66km); Innsbruck (97km); Munich (161km) Number of lifts: 17 Total piste length: 43km Elevation: 659m– 1604m Highest mountain: Kitzbüheler Horn, 1,996m Huts and restaurants in ski area: 20 Cross-country tracks: 250km Ski schools: 6 Difficulty of runs (total): Blue 16km (37.2%); red 23km (53.5%); black 3km (7%); freeride 1km (2.3%) tyrol.com/places/ a-st-johann-in-tirol/ ski-snowboard

PROMOTION

In Zillertal, four ski areas are combined to offer a gargantuan 542km of pistes

RESORT INFO

TVB RAURIS, FRANZ GERDL/SKIWELT WILDER KAISER BRIXENTAL, TIM MARCOUR/ZILLERTAL TOURISMUS, TOM KLOCKER

Good to go: with awe-inspiring views of 3.000m peaks and 288km of pistes, SkiWelt has the lot

Big and beautiful: Zillertal is a go-to destination for all snow lovers

Nearest airports: Innsbruck (51 km); Salzburg (96 km); Munich (125 km) Number of lifts: 180 Total piste length: 542km Elevation: 529m–3,250m Snow and funparks: 8 Huts and restaurants in ski area: 80 Cross-country tracks: 125km Ski schools with private courses: 25 zillertal.at/en

Zillertal The Hintertux Glacier is the only year-round ski area in Austria, but it’s also just the first snowflake in the blizzard of snowboarding and skiing ready and waiting in Zillertal Zillertal is an enormous and typically beautiful Tirol valley that combines four ski areas to offer a gargantuan 542km of pistes on one aptly named Superskipass.

Those ski areas are HochzillertalHochfügen-Spieljoch, Zillertal Arena, Mayrhofner Bergbahnen (famous for hosting winter festivals including Snowbombing), and Ski& Gletscherwelt Zillertal 3000.

The whole region is fantastic for freeriding, and all freeriding areas are easily accessible by cable car.

In a good powder week, it’s possible to ski seven days straight without sampling even half the terrain. That said, beginners, intermediates or those who just prefer to carve need not worry – with 542km of slopes, there’s room for everyone.

The valley skiing is second to none in Austria. The 10km piste in Zell am Ziller is actually the country’s longest run, dropping 1,930m over its duration, and Zillertal is also home to the steepest run in all of Austria – the legendary Harakiri run, which has a 78-per-cent incline.

With one ski pass covering four huge ski resorts (including all of the above), Zillertal really is able to accommodate all kinds of skiers, from families to those powderkicking freeriders.

If you love winter in the mountains, then you’ll love Zillertal – it really is as simple as that.

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The Red Bulletin is published in six countries. This is the cover of our Austrian edition for November, featuring triathlete Lucy Charles-Barclay, as photographed by Rick Guest For more stories beyond the ordinary, go to: redbulletin.com

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

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Semi-Rad Adventure philosophy from BRENDAN LEONARD

“My friend Lee, who taught me almost everything I know about rock climbing and mountaineering, also shares my sense of humour and sarcasm – and the belief there’s no time that’s not a good time for a joke. We’d often find ourselves carrying heavy backpacks for long miles to get to a climb, or rappelling off something in the rain or high winds, or postholing [sinking and getting stuck with every step] in deep snow on what could have been a perfectly relaxing Saturday morning. One of us would always joke that we should have taken up golfing instead of climbing, and the other would reply, ‘Totally – and not even playing golf, which is too much effort. We should have taken up watching golf on TV.’ Of course, we never did end up watching any golf, ever.” semi-rad.com

The next issue of THE RED BULLETIN is out on November 9 98

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GIVES YOU WIIINGS. ALSO WITH THE TASTE OF CACTUS FRUIT.

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