The Red Bulletin US 12/19

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

U.S. EDITION DECEMBER 2019, $4.99

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

HEROES 2019

THE RED BULLETIN 12/2019

Four years after a scary crash left him paralyzed, PAUL BASAGOITIA is charging ahead—and the subject of an inspiring new film SUBSCRIBE

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EDITOR’S NOTE

BRAVE HEARTS

This “Heroes” issue contains no Olympic champions, no celebrities, no Purple Heart recipients. Instead, it honors ordinary folks who’ve done extraordinary things to assist and inspire people in need. “Trailblazers” (page 48), for instance, profiles Coloradans who’ve helped Hispanic girls, adjudicated youth and victims of sexual assault feel the healing powers of mountain biking. And “Movers & Shakers” (page 38) presents people impacting their world through dance, food, hip-hop and marine biology.

CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE

NEAL ROGERS

“I met Paul Bas right before Any One of Us premiered at South by Southwest,” says the Boulder, Colorado-based writer, a contributor at ESPN and editorat-large at CyclingTips. “I found a young man at a crossroads, a world-class athlete coming to terms with his post-injury reality and learning to embrace a new role within the spinal cord injury community that he would never have chosen for himself.” Page 24

DEWEY NICKS

The keystone of the issue is “Recovery Ride” (page 24), the riveting story of Paul Basagoitia, the pro freerider whose life was forever changed by a crash at Red Bull Rampage.

His poignant response to that ordeal is the subject of the new documentary Any One of Us, which speaks volumes about finding courage and strength amid life’s greatest challenges. His drama is a testament to how real heroes overcome something to become something great.

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“I was inspired by the gravitydefying fun Paul has on his bike and watching him fly around me,” says the Santa Barbara, Californiabased photographer/filmmaker on shooting Basagoitia. “But I was most struck by Paul’s relationship with his wife, Nichole—their shared commitment to each other and their teamwork in getting Paul back to good health.” Nicks’s work has appeared in GQ, W and Vogue. Page 24 DEWEY NICKS

Blown-up prize-winning checks from Basagoitia’s professional freeriding career adorn the walls of his home gym, which he hits every day with the same tenacity and focus that made him so successful on the bike.

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CONTENTS December

FEATURES

2 4 Heroes: Paul Basagoitia

After a life-changing crash, the former professional mountain biker shares his struggle to reclaim his function and identity.

24 JOY RIDE

Four years after a devastating spinal cord injury, Paul Basagoitia’s recovery has surpassed doctors’ expectations.

3 8 Heroes: Movers & Shakers The change agents we need: Versa-Style Dance Company, hiphop curator Syreeta Gates and conservationist Cynthia Smith.

4 8 Heroes: Trailblazers

In Colorado, a handful of the most passionate mountain bikers are also the most philanthropic. Meet four true sports heroes.

6 0 Frozen Secret

Beneath a fjord in Greenland, freediver Anna von Boetticher explores an underwater realm with a sky made of icebergs.

7 0 Danny MacAskill

The Scottish trials-riding legend revisits his career highlights.

DEWEY NICKS, TOBIAS FRIEDRICH, CHRISTIAN ANWANDER

44 THE INNOVATOR Syreeta Gates, the founder of Yo Stay Hungry, aims to cultivate the next generation of respected chefs.

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THE

DEPARTURE

Taking You to New Heights

09 A Denver artist pushes the

boundaries of mixed media

12 High water mark: A drone’s-

eye view of kayaking

14 Scientists and endurance

athletes come together

16 The aftermath of a wipeout

in Teahupo’o

18 Fully loaded: Freewheeling

with the van-life movement

20 Sampa the Great: Zambia’s

queen of conscious rap

2 2 Garden-themed tracks from Metronomy’s frontman

GUIDE

Get it. Do it. See it.

81 Travel: Las Vegas 84 Fitness tips from WNBA

star Breanna Stewart

86 Dates for your calendar 87 This month on Red Bull TV 88 Holiday gift guide 96 The Red Bulletin worldwide 98 Kickflipping in the USA

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COLD COMFORT In the icy depths beneath Greenland, freediver Anna von Boetticher finds peace in an underwater canyon.

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LIFE

&

STYLE

BEYOND

THE

ORDINARY

THE

CHIP KALBACK

BRIGHT FUTURE

A new interactive show by the groundbreaking Denver artist Thomas Evans, aka DETOUR, pushes the boundaries of mixed media while raising questions about who we are—and who we will be.

Detour’s new exhibition opens November 8.

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magine it’s the year 2119, and you’re attending a retrospective of an iconic band in a Graceland-like museum. The exhibition is dedicated to their art, showcasing not only their music and story but the society in which they exist: transportation, media and even social protest.

This peek at a possible future comes courtesy of a new show from one of Denver’s most creative artists, Thomas Evans, known as Detour. His work—playful, multimedia and often interactive—defies easy categorization. One recent project is a two-part abstract mural with strings tracing one of the massive zig-zag color blocks; the strings create tones when touched, so viewers can play a duet.

“I’ve never seen any other artists work in the kind of space he’s in,” says JC Futrell, education director at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, where Detour’s 5Pointers show will debut in November. “His curiosity is more like an engineer or scientist than a standard visual artist.”

Futrell met Detour in the mid-2000s, when Evans was in college, moonlighting as a DJ and figuring out what to do with art. An army kid, he grew up “around everywhere; I don’t think I spent more than a year in one place.” That itinerant backstory matches

his journey to becoming a professional artist: He got an MBA from the University of Colorado Denver, did a stint at an ad agency (“I hated it”) and an equally short one in the military, ended by a torn ACL. All that led to Evans moving to Tanzania in 2013 to work with an education nonprofit. “It’s really simple,” he recalls. “Not a lot of distractions, just thinking about what I wanted to do when I got back” to Denver.

Like a lot of cities, Denver was in the midst of rapid change, and a friend of Evans had purchased a building in Denver’s historic Five Points neighborhood and offered him a studio space. Evans gave himself a year to make art full-time and had a solo show within months.

Detour’s work takes many forms: portraits with bold, saturated hues, dazzlingly kinetic outdoor murals and spartan abstracts. He also works in sculpture, music, video and photography. But maybe his biggest talent is combining them all. “He’s forging his own path,” says Futrell. “There isn’t an academy or degree you can get in what he’s doing right now.”

That means he’s heavily self-taught. For 5Pointers, Detour learned bookbinding and woodworking from sources like YouTube. “I want to expand my skill set and make it my own way,” he says.

Perhaps Evans’s most arresting art is what he calls his “interactive sound works”: visual installations that play music when touched. He uses

“I’VE NEVER SEEN ANY OTHER ARTISTS WORK IN THE SPACE HE’S IN.” 10

elements like electrically conductive paint and MIDI controllers, with synthesizers and speakers embedded unobtrusively in the artwork.

They come alive when touched, playing tones, beats, even melodies. Touch a new spot and the music changes.

“One of my big pet peeves going to [art] shows is [seeing] people have their backs to the painting, talking to each other about what they’re going to eat next week,” he says. Sound works solve a challenge: “How do I get people to actually have a conversation with another individual about what’s happening in the piece?”

Just as vital: What is that conversation about? A strong theme in Detour’s work is minority and urban culture; the characters in 5Pointers, for instance, are all based on local musicians like Venus Cruz, DJ Check One and Carl Carrell, who also collaborated on the music that will play when audiences interact with the installations. But audiences won’t just hear the music of the future and learn about who creates it; they’ll experience the culture and history that produced it, right down to the name of the show.

Detour’s studio lies in Five Points, one of Denver’s oldest neighborhoods and a longtime center of the city’s black culture, which is rapidly being gentrified (many newer Denver transplants know the area only as River North, or RiNo). One of the plot points in the show’s story revolves around the Rossonian, a local hotel and jazz club that once hosted musicians like Duke Ellington.

It’s just one of many threads that showgoers can experience as they explore the 5Pointers’ story and Detour’s riffs on the future, not only of music but transportation, language, sports and the rest of the world in which the 5Pointers live. (Lived? Will live?) That timeline is, of course, up to the audience to interpret. —Joe Lindsey

CHIP KALBACK

TH E DE PA RT U R E

Thomas Evans at work in his studio in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood.

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TH E DE PA RT U R E

Little White Salmon River, Washington

IN FULL FLOW

“Drones have changed the world of photography and film by allowing people to document and create images from places they could not physically get to.”

So says Karim Iliya, the Hawaii-based filmmaker and photographer behind this incredible aerial shot, taken in slow exposure by drone as kayakers Knox Hammack and Adrian Mattern held their place in an eddy. “You now have a threedimensional space where the only limitations are your imagination and your ability to operate the drone,” Iliya adds.

Instagram: @karimiliya

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TH E DE PA RT U R E

Adventure Science

MENTAL FITNESS

For more than a decade, endurance athlete and geologist Simon Donato has brought together people who can handle scientific exploration in extreme environments—gathering vital data that could help preserve precious lands.

W

hen Simon Donato was working on his Ph.D. in geology 15 years ago, some of his more laborious field work involved surveying a coastal lagoon in the Middle East, where he had to slog his way through 8-foot-deep water and stop every 100 yards to take sediment samples. He had a lot of ground to cover during that three-week field season, so he focused on moving as fast as possible. Most researchers would need around six weeks to properly survey the 30 miles of lagoon he traversed; Donato, a longtime endurance athlete and ultramarathon runner, did it in four days.

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“I realized that the fitness that served me well when I was racing also served me well in the field,” the 43-yearold explains. “I was able to do so much more than my peers when it came to field work, especially in tough environments. That was really the Eureka moment, where I just said, ‘OK, there’s something here.’ ” He gave that something a name: Adventure Science, a way to pair endurance athletes with purposeful, sciencebased projects. It was also a way to justify the years he had spent training at an elite level.

“I was so focused on running and training and being the best I could be. For what, though? I wasn’t going to the

Olympics. I wasn’t making a living doing that,” says Donato, who previously worked as a geologist for ExxonMobil in his native Canada and now runs a gluten-free oatmeal company he co-founded. “Adventure Science added meaning for me; it was a way to give back.”

Since officially launching Adventure Science as a nonprofit in 2008, he’s led volunteer teams on expeditions to various remote, often uncharted destinations ripe for exploration, where their research has centered on environmental studies, humanitarian causes and conservation efforts. These athletic overachievers, unfazed by extreme conditions, not

Many Native American artifacts can be found at the Bears Ears monument.

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Simon Donato and members of his Adventure Science team in Utah.

Until the 13th century, Ancestral Puebloans inhabited the mesas and canyons of the Bears Ears region.

LUIS MOREIRA

“THE FITNESS THAT SERVED ME WELL WHEN RACING ALSO SERVED ME IN THE FIELD.”

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only get the job done but get it done faster, reducing their human footprint.

Most recently, Donato spent 12 days leading two groups through the dry, desolate canyons around southeastern Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.

The culturally rich area, sacred to many tribal nations, is brimming with Native American artifacts, archaeological sites and wildlife. It’s also under attack by the Trump administration.

Less than a year after President Obama declared 1.35 million square acres part of a federally protected national monument, his successor slashed its size by 85 percent. Many accounts

point to lobbying efforts by uranium companies with area mining interests as the impetus, and advocates warn that the management plan for the remaining swath is also shamefully weak.

During the Bears Ears exploration last spring, on what is now unprotected land, Donato and 15 volunteers logged a staggering number of habitation sites and artifacts, with some dating back 8,000 years. The data went directly to local conservation nonprofit Friends of Cedar Mesa, one of the plaintiffs (along with other environmental groups and several tribes) in a lawsuit challenging Trump’s proclamation. “Knowledge is power,” says Donato. “We view our work as providing ammunition for the frontline activists and litigators to continue their fight to conserve and protect their lands.”

Throughout most of Adventure Science’s existence, Donato has focused largely on unexplored regions, like Oman’s isolated Musandam Peninsula, staffing trips with an upper echelon of athletes from his inner circle. But lately, he’s expanded to projects in less remote areas like Bears Ears, opening them up to a larger pool of people and

giving weekend warriors a meaningful incentive to train.

“Sometimes in the crucible of life, training’s an easy one to toss out,” he says. “But if you’ve got a project that combines interests, then it sparks a fire inside people and they really fall in love with it.”

Brianna Traxinger is one of them. She grew up longdistance running and crosscountry skiing and later took up mountaineering and rock climbing. The 29-yearold joined the Bears Ears expedition to blend two beloved activities: endurance sports and research, all in the name of protecting our embattled environment. “To lend my time and hike all day and be able to put that to use for science and conservation was really exciting,” she says.

While Traxinger is studying immunology, a science background is not necessarily required, according to Donato, who accepts a limited number of applicants for each project.

“At the end of the day, the most important aspect is a positive attitude and a desire to be out there and learn.

That’s followed closely by fitness,” Donato says. “Once somebody has those and they’re hungry to participate, it’s really easy for me.”

—Lizbeth Scordo 15

TH E DE PA RT U R E

Teahupo‘o, French Polynesia

SHOCK WAVE We’re used to seeing what happens when surfing goes right, but what about when it goes wrong?

Here photographer Ben Thouard captures a terrifying moment in March this year when Hawaiian surfer Ryan G had to fight against the tide underwater following a serious wipeout.

“Things don’t always go as planned,” said Thouard in the accompanying caption on Instagram. “@bigizlandryan escaping the washing machine!”

Instagram: @benthouard

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TH E D E PA RT UR E

Van Life

THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

Surf, jam, live in a van—rock climber and blogger Kaya Lindsay offers tips on how to lead a vagabond adventure lifestyle and stay happy.

W

ould you ever consider selling your house, giving away your belongings to charity and starting a new life on the open road? This is #vanlife fantasy— the widely publicized social media movement where people liberate themselves from daily constraints by converting a vehicle into a moving home and driving into the sunset in search of adventure, with the aim of living and working off-grid.

Rock climber and blogger Kaya Lindsay has lived the majority of the past three years in her 2006 MercedesBenz Dodge Sprinter van after giving up her apartment in California and going freelance. Visitors to her YouTube channel will find

not only van-conversion tips— her time-lapse video of a full build has had more than 1.6 million views—but profiles of fellow female van-lifers, too.

Of her own conversion to the lifestyle, Lindsay recalls, “I met this girl who told me she was buying a van, turning it into a house and spending the entire summer rock climbing, and it blew my mind. So I got my own used van for around $10,000 that I could both lie down and stand up in, and I converted it in about five months. Most of the conversion I did myself with my ex-boyfriend by copying YouTube videos.”

Here, Lindsay shares five tips on how to convert your own adventure vehicle and live the van life, too. onechicktravels.com

Ventilate and seal your van properly “Rust and mold are the two most damaging and difficult things to catch and fix in a van. Be really careful about how you seal your vehicle when you ventilate it.”

Read Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up “Get very specific on what you want to bring with you. I got rid of everything except for three drawers of clothes and some toiletries.”

Be flexible “You have to be able to absorb any catastrophe. Being resilient and able to cope with things going wrong unexpectedly is an essential quality when living in a van.”

Be respectful of the space around you “I see people dumping coffee grounds in parking lots, or spitting their toothpaste onto the ground.

You need to be mindful of where you are and what’s appropriate.”

Find something that you love to do and make that your journey

Living in a van down by the river doesn’t look so bad in 2019.

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LOU BOYD

“There’s a perception that van life is always romantic.

To be happy, however, you need a reason to be on the road; something powerful enough to keep you there.”

“TO BE HAPPY, YOU NEED A REASON TO BE ON THE ROAD.”

Sampa the Great

HOMECOMING QUEEN Born in Zambia and based in Australia, the rising star of conscious rap explains how returning home can shape your future.

I

n March last year, Sampa Tembo, better known as Sampa the Great, won the Australian Music Prize for her mixtape Birds and the BEE9.

Winning the accolade—which is awarded for creative excellence rather than album sales—is a prestigious achievement for any musician Down Under. The thing is, Tembo isn’t Australian; she moved there from her home country of Zambia in 2014 to study audio production.

However, when the rapper’s first release, 2015’s The Great Mixtape, began gaining positive attention, many Australian magazines conveniently named her one of their own. The topic of home runs throughout the 19 tracks on her official debut album, The Return, released on U.K. label Ninja Tune. Here the 26-year-old explains why she shot the video for her single “Final Form” in Zambia, and how she overcame her insecurities. the red bulletin: What inspired you to shoot the “Final Form” video in Zambia and feature your friends and parents in it? sampa the great: I’m based in Australia and started my professional career there, but at the same time I’d never performed at home, never had a song on radio [in Zambia].

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All of a sudden, I’m being played on the radio in Australia, doing live shows there, and people are calling me Australian. And Zambians are like, “How come she never performed here in front of us?”

What does returning home mean to you? Does it make you feel more grounded?

The way we were raised, there was no space to be big-headed.

As soon as it happened, my parents were like, “Cut that down.” Going home reassures your growth. It’s like, this is where you came from and this is what you’re doing. That’s important, because sometimes we forget to look back and see how much we’ve grown.

How have you grown in the past few years?

The assurance within myself has grown a lot. I’m doing what I know I was born to do.

In the beginning there was so much doubt, because no one in my family had attempted a career in music.

Now that I’m doing it—and enjoying it—there’s a bigger sense of assurance. Within the process, confidence and selflove have grown as well. And also the willingness to learn and work on my weaknesses, instead of just being like, “Yeah, nah!”

How did you overcome any doubts you had?

Definitely through conversations with people.

The one thing that creates insecurity is the feeling that you’re going through

something alone. Whoever I meet, I always want to converse with them about life, because it helps you to appreciate that we all share many fears and insecurities.

When you see these are common things that people struggle with, you know that it’s OK to feel that way and to seek knowledge to get better.

You once said a good student not only tries to master the things they’re good at but also the things they’re really bad at. What have you attempted to master while working on The Return?

So many things. For time’s sake, I’d say perspective. With The Return, it was like, “Oh, I can’t get to go home, because of this and that.” I was consumed by it, until I met people in situations where they couldn’t go back home so they had to create a new one for themselves. I had to step back and see that the small discomfort and displacement I was feeling was nothing compared with theirs. My perspective of how I’m blessed was definitely challenged.

Did you take any action as a result of that realization?

I asked myself the question: “What do you do with this privilege?” For me it’s like, if I have an opportunity to go home, I’m going to share what I know. If I have the opportunity, I’d like to teach Zambians who’ve never been there about our home and culture. It’s that perspective of knowing that you have something someone else doesn’t, which they would [gain] value from. It feels like a duty to the diaspora, being able to teach these things.

The Return is out now on Ninja Tune; sampathegreat.com

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T HE D E PA RT U R E

BARUN CHATTERJEE

FLORIAN OBKIRCHER

“IT FELT IMPORTANT TO TELL PEOPLE THE STORY OF WHO I AM.”

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Playlist

HANGING OUT IN THE GREEN ROOM When he’s not writing indie-pop anthems, you’ll find Metronomy’s Joseph Mount in his garden. Here he picks four horticultural tracks.

F

“It’s a pun, isn’t it? It’s about pulling up the roots when you’re gardening. It’s what you’ve got to do with, like, potatoes. In gardening, I’m sort of the muscle, and Mariam, my girlfriend, is the more creative gardener. So I do things like rotovate, which is turning the soil. I get rid of weeds, do big destructive work. That’s my speciality.”

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THE KINKS “THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY” (1968)

STEVIE WONDER “COME BACK AS A FLOWER” (1979)

MILES DAVIS “CONCIERTO DE ARANJUEZ (ADAGIO)” (1960)

“Gardening is about seeing yourself, seeing the human cycle and the seasons and things like that. This is a good track to play when you’re literally getting ready to garden. It gets you in the mood to grab your trowel and put on your gloves. It also reminds you about the futility of what you’re doing, which is essentially trying to fight nature.”

“This is about wanting to come back as a flower when you die.

Which is a nice idea, but one thing I’ve learned is that growing flowers is actually one of the least gratifying things. It’s an incredibly laborious task, because you’re always having to split them and reseed stuff.

It’s super-involved so I don’t really do that. I destroy things.”

“As a teenage boy, I’d have breakfast at 11 a.m. on weekends.

I’d be listening to some Miles [Davis] and watch my parents in the garden. I couldn’t really understand what they were doing, but this track is 16 minutes long, so it’s a good one to get you into some kind of zone. Like, if you have a long task—weeding, that kind of thing—it’s nice.”

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GREGOIRE ALEXANDRE

TALKING HEADS “PULL UP THE ROOTS” (1983)

MARCEL ANDERS

ormed in 1999, Metronomy have created their own idiosyncratic synth-pop style over the years, influenced by everything from ’60s psych-rock and electronica to Prince and N.E.R.D. The British band regularly show up on music magazines’ bestof-the-year lists, and their albums have gone top 10 in France as well as the U.K. For their sixth album, Metronomy Forever, founder Joseph Mount found inspiration in his own backyard. “Gardening is something I’ve become very involved in,” says the 37-year-old songwriter, and this passion has had an impact on his personal playlist. Here are four of his green-fingered favorites.

Metronomy Forever is out now; metronomy.co.uk

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H E R O E S 2019

RECOVERY RIDE

As documented in the new film Any One of Us, Paul Basagoitia’s life was forever changed by a crash at Red Bull Rampage. The former professional rider’s struggle to reclaim his function and identity has been epic—and yielded inspiring progress that no one could have imagined.

Words NEAL ROGERS Photography DEWEY NICKS

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“I won’t have to look back—I’m going to keep looking forward,” says Basagoitia, who was photographed in Minden, Nevada, on August 2.

H E R O E S 2019 Slicing down a trail near Truckee, California, Basagoitia shows how he’s back in the flow.

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AUL BASAGOITIA IS RIDING his

mountain bike up a dusty track in the Mount Rose Wilderness, halfway between Lake Tahoe and his home in Reno, Nevada.

The incline on the Upper Thomas Creek Trail is steady but never steep, and he’s traveling at a solid clip. On a hot June day, it’s a relief to weave through shaded forest.

A casual cyclist might notice that he’s pedaling an electric mountain bike. An attentive observer might notice that he’s wearing a custom brace on his right ankle. Virtually no one would guess how he’ll struggle to walk unassisted when he dismounts his bike.

Basagoitia, 33, assumes the role of trail guide, steering through switchbacks, pointing out obstacles, informing his guest of what comes next. From the outside he appears to be at home, but navigating through the trees wasn’t his jam during an 11-year career as a professional mountain bike rider. Instead, Basagoitia’s riding life was spent on the razor’s edge. When he wasn’t competing, he was out finding the steepest, gnarliest terrain imaginable—then blasting downhill and into the air.

It was that type of riding—first slopestyle, on man-made jumps, and later at big-mountain events—that brought Basagoitia a degree of fame and fortune.

He was an acrobat on a bicycle, earning a paycheck for pushing boundaries. And it was that type of riding that left him with a life-altering injury to his spinal cord at the Red Bull Rampage in October 2015.

Now, four years later, a documentary about his ongoing rehabilitation is

poised to bring him a new degree of fame. Any One of Us will break hearts and inspire courage in equal measure.

More than anything, the film presents a stark, honest depiction of what it’s like to live with a spinal cord injury (SCI).

After a spring and summer making the rounds on the film festival circuit, the Red Bull Media House–produced documentary was picked up by HBO and is set to premiere on October 29, almost exactly four years after his accident. Back on the bike now and surpassing his doctors’ expectations, Basagoitia has become an inspirational figure for the SCI community.

It’s a bittersweet development for a relatively private man who never sought fame but rather found solace from a turbulent childhood on the bike.

Basagoitia wanted to be known for progressing the sport, and he’s understandably agitated by the thought of being remembered for one small but consequential mistake.

“I’m a little overwhelmed thinking about the HBO release,” Basagoitia says in August. “I still have a lot of friends and family members who haven’t seen the film. I didn’t hold anything back, and I went through some things that these people don’t know anything about. So I guess I’m both excited and nervous.”

Yet the injury is not the endpoint of his story. Pedaling on that dusty trail in the Mount Rose Wilderness, Paul Basagoitia is just another bike rider, flowing through the trees. And for that, he is eternally grateful.

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H E R O E S 2019

THE BACKSTORY

THE CRASH

The Red Bull Rampage is a competition like nothing else in cycling. Pro surfing has its big-wave contest at Mavericks.

Rock climbing has the solo ascent of El Capitan. Big-mountain riding has Rampage, among the desert cliffs near Virgin, Utah, an event that draws slopestyle riders, downhill racers and natural-terrain freeriders. It’s held in a rugged and exposed natural amphitheater where 60-foot canyon jumps must be landed within inches of perfection and a light wind can turn glory into anguish.

For Basagoitia, Rampage presented a particular challenge. He’d come from a BMX background and made his name performing BMX-style tricks on a mountain bike. He first competed at Rampage in 2008, finishing 12th. As the sport progressed, he tried to evolve with it. When a new generation of riders began outperforming him, he became the first rider to do a double backflip on natural terrain. But he also grew tired—of the injuries, the pressure and the neverending hustle for sponsorship.

By putting together a unique run at the edge of the venue, Basagoitia finished a career-best ninth at Rampage in 2014. He felt he could’ve done better, though, perhaps finished in the top three.

So that became a final career goal—stand on the box, use the prize money to buy an engagement ring for his longtime girlfriend, Nichole, and retire.

That was the plan heading into the 2015 edition. And even though all competitors had been forced to accelerate their preparation due to an impending storm, for the first half of his run, everything was on track. He’d nailed 28

a backflip over a canyon at the top, the toughest part, followed up with a 270 for flair, then landed a massive step-down.

But he overshot his landing. Not by much, but enough to change his life.

While trying to correct, his right pedal hooked a branch of trailside sagebrush.

That launched him over an 8-foot ledge, onto his back. Though it was a heavy crash, it didn’t look out of the ordinary

by Rampage standards.

Lying on the ground, his first emotion was anger; he’d thought he was on a winning run and had finally put it all together. He’d have a second run—one more chance to win Rampage and retire.

“I’ve taken many harder slams in my career and walked away,” Basagoitia says.

“But for some reason I landed exactly on the 12th vertebra, enough impact to shatter it into my spinal cord. I couldn’t move my feet or my legs, and that’s when I knew I was in big trouble.”

Next came a tearful, seemingly endless helicopter flight to the hospital. After CT scans, he was told he would require surgery. That procedure, to remove bone fragments from his spinal cord, lasted more than 10 hours.

He awoke living in what he calls his “new body.” He was classified as a T12 paraplegic. His spinal cord had not been completely severed; he was “incomplete,” meaning there were nerve signals below the injury. Still, doctors told him he might spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

The mountain bike community was in shock. There had been bad crashes at Rampage before, but no one had ever suffered a life-changing injury.

And now Paul Basagoitia was paralyzed.

Basagoitia, who rode a bike before he could walk, was an internationally ranked BMX racer as a kid.

THE RED BULLETIN

RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE, COURTESY OF PAUL BASAGOITIA

This photograph captures Basagoitia hitting a huge step-down at the 2015 Red Bull Rampage, seconds before the crash that changed his life.

Basagoitia pedaled a bike without training wheels when he was 2. He started competing in BMX races at 6. By 10 he was ranked among the top BMX riders in the world. His childhood was spent on the bike. This formative experience laid the foundation for his adult life, but it wasn’t always joyful.

His mother, Jackie, drove him to races and paid his entry fees. But she also pushed him, haranguing him when he didn’t win. “The days I wasn’t doing so well she would scream at me,” Basagoitia says. “As a child, you don’t want to hear that from your mother.” Later in life, he’d be estranged from her for years.

The pressure was intense. Everything at home was intense, including his parents’ fighting. Home was a “beat-up motel with the roof falling off ” that his parents bought when Paul was 9. When he was in the eighth grade they divorced, and his mother stopped taking him to races. His father, Gabriel, moved into a separate room in the motel, where Paul also lived for several years.

His BMX racing days ended at age 14, but his mountain bike career was about to take off. At a skatepark in Minden, Nevada, Basagoitia met a kid from Reno named Cameron Zink, who was doing BMX-style tricks on a 26-inch-wheeled mountain bike. They became fast friends.

Basagoitia’s come-from-nowhere victory at the inaugural Crankworx slopestyle event in 2004 is the stuff of legend. He’d saved money earned all summer working as a plumber to make the trip to Whistler, British Columbia.

He borrowed Zink’s bike and won with a backflip onto the final obstacle and a

tailwhip off at the biggest slopestyle competition in North America, beating freeride legends like Cedric Gracia, Wade Simmons, Darren Berrecloth and Richie Schley. Finishing third that year was Kyle Strait, who, like Zink, would go on to become a star of the sport and one of Basagoitia’s closest friends.

“I really don’t know any of the riders,” Basagoitia said in an interview after that victory. “I guess I beat a lot of big names.

I would like to thank my sponsors, but I don’t have any sponsors, really.”

The following year he returned to Crankworx and defended his title, this time fully sponsored by Kona Bikes. His life would never be the same.

From 2005 through 2009, Basagoitia was among the biggest names in extreme mountain biking. He became the first person to land a 720 on a mountain bike.

He performed tricks for baseball fans while aboard a barge floating on San Francisco Bay outside AT&T Park. He bought a property outside of Minden, where he built a slopestyle course and installed a foam pit. He recognized the future of freestyle mountain biking and began converting his slopestyle tricks to big-mountain terrain.

In 2010 he reconnected with Nichole Munk, a blonde cheerleader from his high school days. She attended a party at his house, a private slopestyle contest of sorts. They’d gone to school together but ran in different circles. She was outgoing with an easy smile, the daughter of a police officer and close with her parents; he was a reserved bike park kid from a broken home. He’d had a crush on her back then, but she hung out with football and basketball players. At his house, though, surrounded by friends, Basagoitia was in his element, a well-paid professional athlete living every kid’s dream. They’ve been together ever since.

“THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF HAVING A SPINAL CORD INJURY ARE LITERALLY THE WORST TWO WEEKS OF YOUR LIFE.”

H E R O E S 2019 Now that Basagoitia is getting airborne once again, he’s become a regular at local bike parks.

“I THINK HE’S FOUND THIS NEW LOVE FOR RIDING THAT HE’D PROBABLY NEVER EXPERIENCED.”

CRANKWORX/YORICK CORROUX, RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE

Riding a bike he borrowed from Cam Zink, Basagoitia flew from virtual unknown to rising star after a surprise slopestyle triumph over a bunch of big names at the 2004 edition of Crankworx at Whistler.

As Basagoitia found stability in his personal life, he faced professional instability. The sport that had paid for his home and made him a household name within his community was evolving.

Production films made way for web edits.

A new crop of riders was developing new tricks. He was no longer winning events; he wasn’t even finishing in the top 10.

In an effort to keep up, he was getting injured “left and right.” Though cognizant of BMX rider Stephen Murray’s fall while attempting a double backflip in 2007 that left him paralyzed, Basagoitia decided to attempt it on 26-inch wheels. In 2012, while sponsored by Teva and Kona, he pulled off the first double backflip in natural terrain on a mountain bike. He’d made history, and suffered a concussion, but it wasn’t enough to keep his sponsors.

By 2013, Basagoitia was more or less unemployed. He signed a deal with Scott Bikes, bought some camera equipment and began producing his own web edits.

In 2014, he made the finals at Rampage.

THE INJURY

Friday, October 16, 2015, was finals day at Rampage. Organizers made the call to move the finals up one day due to thunderstorms in the forecast. Basagoitia woke up that morning confident but also stressed. He hadn’t yet ridden his entire line, but it was his fifth Rampage, and every rider was in the same situation.

THE RED BULLETIN

“There was weather coming in,” Basagoitia says. “Instead of waiting it out, they pushed it up the day before and nobody had their lines done. The night before the finals, jumps were not even halfway finished and people were still trying to guinea-pig their lines and falling left and right.”

Basagoitia was among many who crashed that day. Helmet-cam footage, shown in Any One of Us, captured the moment when Nichole reached him on the ground—the moment their lives changed forever. “I can’t move my feet,” he said, a panic rising in his voice.

He was flown to the hospital in St. George and given a grim diagnosis: He might never walk again. He would have problems with bowel and bladder function, as well as sexual function, possibly forever. In addition to the emotional and physical stress of the injury, he was in a constant state of sleep deprivation; he was woken up every three hours for catheterization and was given blood-thinner shots every eight hours to avoid clotting. In a daze, his mind shifted from thinking about winning Rampage to wondering if he’d ever ride again.

He felt lost and thought he might be able to produce something that would be helpful to others with an SCI. He also hoped he would be able to document his progression. The notion of Red Bull Media House being involved didn’t come up until nearly a year later.

“Here I am in the hospital bed, thinking about how I am going to pay for these bills,” Basagoitia says. “I started shooting my progress and I figured I’d just make a little video, sell it on iTunes or something, and whatever I raised would go straight toward medical bills. I would document everything. I wanted to see my improvements over time. Living in it, you don’t see it. You have to visualize it; you have to see it to have the encouragement to keep going.”

There’s a scene early on in Any One of Us that leaves a mark. Alone and naked in a bathroom just weeks after his injury, Basagoitia inserts a 14-inch catheter into his penis in order to empty his bladder.

It’s raw—and all the more remarkable considering he shot the scene on his own. “That whole catheter scene, people tell me that is the heaviest part of any documentary they’ve ever seen,” he says.

Prior to that point in his recovery, Basagoitia had a catheter that remained inserted at all times and was emptied by nurses. When they removed it, he was under the false impression that he’d be able to urinate on his own.

When handed the catheter stick, his reaction was understandable: That thing’s not going up me, no fucking way.

“I remember doing it the first time and I just fucking cried. Two weeks earlier I was competing at the highest level in Rampage on national TV—a celebrity, whatever you want to call it—and I went from that to learning how to insert a 14-inch catheter.

It caught me off guard, heavily.”

THE DOCUMENTARY

Lying in his hospital bed, Basagoitia had time on his hands—as well as a new DSLR video camera, a GoPro camera and many unanswered questions about his injury.

After his crash, Basagoitia was airlifted to St. George, where he underwent 10 hours of surgery.

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Basagoitia and Nichole Munk, who have been together since 2010, at their home in Minden.

Before Red Bull Media House got involved in the documentary, Red Bull was involved in Basagoitia’s recovery.

He’d been a sponsored athlete for years and forged a friendship with athlete manager Aaron Lutze. Lutze was there in St. George when Basagoitia came out of surgery, and he helped arrange for Basagoitia to spend 12 weeks at Craig Hospital near Denver, a top facility for treating spinal injuries. Months later, Lutze visited Basagoitia at home in Reno.

On his couch they watched the 2013 HBO documentary Crash Reel, about pro snowboarder Kevin Pearce and his recovery from a traumatic brain injury. “I knew Paul was filming his recovery, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with it; it was not obvious it was a movie,” Lutze recalls. “When Crash Reel ended, Paul said, ‘I want to make something like this but for spinal cord injuries.’ ” After a few phone calls, it was approved.

Early on it was understood that all proceeds from the film would go to Wings for Life, the nonprofit foundation started

by Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz focused on finding a cure for paralysis.

Basagoitia flew to Los Angeles and met with Fernando Villena, a feature-film and documentary editor who had been tapped to make his directorial debut. From there, Basagoitia began juggling two lifealtering realities—living with his injury while living with a film crew.

Asked about bringing a film crew into a home environment rebounding from a catastrophe, Munk admits it was hard.

“I wasn’t seeing this as an opportunity for a movie,” she says. “But Paul had an idea from the very beginning—he wanted to make a difference and turn his camera on. He wanted to start filming his recovery, and his journey. I remember hearing ‘We might make a movie out of 32

this,’ and I was thinking, ‘What are you talking about? This is insane.’ ” The documentary focuses on Basagoitia but also highlights the range of accidents and experiences that define living with an SCI. Through intermittent vignettes, 17 individuals with SCIs share their stories.

Internally, the production team calls them the film’s chorus.

“The film originally was all about Paul’s story—his recovery, his experiences,” Villena says. “But as you see in the film, his recovery is pretty miraculous—it’s mindboggling. The idea was this: It’s great that Paul is recovering, and it’s cool for the film, but there is a much larger story. What about people who don’t recover, who can’t move anything, let alone walk with crutches? There is a broader story, about how people deal with the injury.”

Among those featured is Australian Sam Willoughby, a two-time BMX world champion who broke his neck in 2016.

Also featured is Jesse Billauer, a surfer who broke his neck on a shallow sandbar in 1996, at the age of 17. And there’s Annette Ross, who was given the wrong fluid in an epidural during childbirth in 2000, burning her spinal cord, and Steph Aiello, who was in a car crash in 2010 that left her paralyzed from the waist down.

“It was all in service of Paul’s story,” Villena says. “His story benefits from those other voices to add context, to say the things he can’t speak to at that point in the film. Not only does the chorus broaden the

scope, but it also gets deeper into what he was feeling and going through.”

One of the film’s toughest moments comes after Basagoitia is home from Craig Hospital, battling depression as he adapts to his new circumstances. He’s using a walker to reach his mailbox. The scene is juxtaposed against footage of him in his prime, flying through the air, making the impossible look effortless.

The sequence ends with him stuffing a stack of medical bills into his back brace.

Any One of Us closes with Basagoitia taking his first ride since the injury. It also shows several members of the chorus making the most of life with their SCIs— forming a dance troupe, riding waves, playing basketball and walking across the stage to receive a high school diploma.

It’s an uplifting end to a heavy film that leaves viewers with a deeper appreciation of their own mobility, as well as insights into the lives of those with paralysis.

LIFE AFTER THE DOC

It’s February 24, the day of the 2019 Academy Awards. In a few hours, Free Solo, the film about Alex Honnold’s attempt to become the first person to climb El Capitan without a rope, will win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

I tell him I believe Any One of Us could be nominated for an Academy Award.

A year from now, I suggest, he could be in L.A., wearing a tuxedo.

“That would be very humbling,” he says. “But at the end of the day, as long as it helps somebody with this injury and we can bring some funding into finding a cure and helping people with the situation, that’s a home run for me.”

I tell him about an article I’d read about Free Solo that said Honnold’s friends cried as he began his ascent of El Cap because they thought they might never see him again. There was a quote from Honnold’s mother, who said that when he’s free climbing he’s truly at peace. “Who would want to take that away from him?” she asked. Though it could kill her son, she saw it was what brought him joy.

Free Solo demonstrates how when you push up against the edge, ultimately you find the edge. Sometimes that edge

IN ONE OF THE FINAL SCENES IN THE FILM, HE DITCHES HIS CANE, WALKS TOWARD HER UNASSISTED, TAKES A KNEE AND POPS THE QUESTION. THE RED BULLETIN

“I get a little skeptical on things because sometimes I’m insecure about my injury,” he says.

“There are things I still can’t do.”

H E R O E S 2019

Every day Basagoitia does an intense 90-minute workout focused on core strength and balance.

HIS GLUTES MAY NEVER AGAIN WORK PROPERLY, SO HE’S DOING EVERYTHING HE CAN TO STRENGTHEN THE REST OF HIS BODY. means certain death. Sometimes it means a shattered T12 vertebra and paralysis.

Basagoitia nods. Two of his closest friends, Cam Zink and Kyle Strait, have won Rampage and continue to compete.

Zink, 33, is married with two children; he won the event in 2010 and finished second in 2014 and 2017. Strait, 32, was only 17 when he won Red Bull Rampage in 2004; he won it again in 2013. Both have told Basagoitia they’re delaying retirement to try to win it once more.

“It’s a lot more terrifying watching it now, and especially with guys like Kyle and Cam, really close buddies of mine,” he says. “It’s hard to see them compete, and the last thing I want any of them to do is to follow the same footsteps I did. I don’t think the reward for them is worth taking 34

that risk. But that’s the crazy thing about being an athlete. You always want more.”

That said, Basagoitia doesn’t feel Rampage is too extreme. Changes have been implemented since his injury, including extended time to build lines, a mandatory rest day, a two-day weather window to determine when conditions are safest and the elimination of the qualification round. Organizers have also modified the judging panel to include only former Rampage competitors, increased the prize purse and added minimum travel budgets to apply toward dig teams.

“I think it’s important to have Rampage for big-mountain riders,” he says. “If it wasn’t for Rampage, a lot of these big-mountain riders would not have half the endorsements they have today.

Rampage brings a lot of exposure, and it’s the only event that exists today for bigmountain riders. So obviously I’m for it.”

With spring looming, Basagoitia’s life is changing dramatically (again). He’s a few months into a new job, with upstart mountain bike footwear brand Ride Concepts. He’s managing the brand’s global athletes and helping on the creative side. He’s already assembled a team of sponsored athletes that includes Strait and the all-star Atherton siblings.

The following week, he’s headed to South by Southwest for the premiere of Any One of Us. In April he’ll travel to the Sea Otter Classic, the largest cycling event in the United States, where he’ll be working the Ride Concepts booth. It’s a lot to look forward to, though that’s not how he would describe it.

“I get a little skeptical on things because sometimes I’m insecure about my injury,” he says. “There’s a lot of things I still can’t do. We went to this little zone in Utah last week and we had to jump over a fence and throw the bike over, and obviously I can’t do that on my own, so I had to have the whole crew help me. So when I think of Sea Otter I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to walk up all those stairs and back down those stairs.’ I’m already thinking about the struggles that are going to be in front of me.”

These are the things one contemplates living with a spinal cord injury. These are the things one contemplates living in a “new body.”

For Basagoitia, living with an SCI means a 90-minute workout every morning, focusing on core strength, building muscle and cardio. He’s come to terms with the reality that he may never regain sensation below his knees, and his glutes may never again work properly, so he’s doing everything he can to strengthen the rest of his body. Because he can’t use his glutes, he carries his weight in his lower back and relies on his hip flexors to facilitate walking. The end result is frequent soreness and occasional muscle spasms.

One of the final scenes in Any One of Us shows Basagoitia back on a bike. He can use his quads and his hamstrings, the two key muscle groups for pedaling, but he can’t feel the pedals; look closely as he’s riding and you’ll notice that he’s constantly checking his foot position. And while the film ends with his first ride, he’s now much farther along, riding a pedalassist electric bike on trails, occasionally boosting a small jump.

Munk says that seeing Basagoitia on a bike again has been transformative—for THE RED BULLETIN

both of them. “It brings a whole new happiness for him,” she says. “I think he has found this love for riding that he’d probably never experienced. I think his time on the bike before was competitive.

Now the only person he competes with on a bike is 100 percent himself and I think he is finding so much joy in knowing he can push the limits. It’s healing for him. Now he’s jumping, which makes me a little nervous, but the joy he’s getting from it, what he’s posting, he’s on this crazy high, and I want to keep him on that high.”

The ability to soar through the air was already taken away from him once. It’s when he’s happiest; when he’s at peace.

THE SCI COMMUNITY

As Basagoitia adapts to his new life, he must adapt to a new role in the SCI community. He receives emails “at least once a week” from someone coping with a life-changing injury. In Reno, a friend who works in the trauma center contacts him whenever there’s a new patient with an SCI. At film festivals, he’s approached by people sharing intimate details of their challenges—everything from dealing with SCIs to depression to addiction.

Suddenly, people want to confide in him.

“Paul is giving a lot of people a lot of hope, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that you’ve got to keep pushing,”

Using a pedalassist electric mountain bike has let Basagoitia reclaim an elevated riding life.

Munk says. “When the injury happened, I think his identity was stripped from him.

He’s gotten to share that you can reclaim your life and your identity. He’s been such an inspiration to so many, to not let these injuries define who you are. It’s been so cool to see that unfold. I don’t think that was part of his plan, but I think he gladly provides so much for so many people, and he doesn’t even realize it’s happening.”

Basagoitia acknowledges it’s a role he is learning to embrace, even as he struggles with it. Answering emails, or questions after a screening, is one thing.

But walking into the ICU and meeting someone who just learned they may never walk again is something else.

“I let them know about my situation and what I did, and I try to give them encouragement,” he says. “I find it fulfilling, but it’s hard, too, because it brings back memories. The first two weeks with a spinal cord injury is literally the worst two weeks of your life because you’re in so much pain, you can’t move, you can’t feel. The future is unknown. I tell them ‘Just keep plugging away. Keep your head up. You never know what could happen. It’s gonna be a long road.’ ” This advice can be applied to his own life as well. “I struggle with it, too,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Fuck, is this really me for the rest of my life?’ Reality sets in sometimes. I get in these dark moments like, man, I did not visualize my life being like this. I struggle thinking about that, and then the other side of my brain is like, ‘You’ve come so far. You’re still able to pedal your bike. You’re fully independent; you don’t rely on anybody to help you with anything. Be blessed.’ So I have that.”

With Any One of Us set for widespread distribution, Basagoitia and Munk’s visibility inside and outside the SCI community is about to explode. “Ideally, I hope that nothing really changes drastically,” Munk says. “I love my life and our lives together. I know that this is bigger than us, and I’m so grateful for that. But it’s also very important to stay humble, and also, there are so many people that have sustained a spinal cord injury, and they haven’t been given the opportunity to share their story.”

UP IN THE AIR

Paul Basagoitia is afraid of heights.

That might sound like dark humor coming from a man whose former career involved 60-foot gap jumps, but it’s the truth—which makes it all the more interesting that he’s now pursuing a pilot’s license. A close friend is a captain

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H E R O E S 2019

for SkyWest Airlines; after Basagoitia’s accident, he took him flying in a Cessna Skywagon. Up in the air, Basagoitia took over the controls. He banked a few turns and was hooked. His injury doesn’t prevent him from using the foot pedals; though he lacks dorsiflexion, he’s able to slow down the plane with his heels.

And in another journey, Basagoitia has reconnected with his mother. They hadn’t spoken for several years prior to his injury, and that continued well into the first year of his recovery.

“She was concerned, but I was just so focused on my recovery, I didn’t want to try to fix our relationship at the same time,” Basagoitia says. “But at the moment we chat once a week, maybe every other week. It’s a lot better now than it’s been in quite a few years.”

Perhaps she’ll attend his upcoming wedding. Soon enough, Basagoitia will be a married man. He proposed to Munk in October 2017 in Malibu, two years after his injury. In one of the final scenes in the film, he ditches his cane, walks toward her unassisted, takes a knee and pops the question. They initially discussed getting married in Tulum in Mexico but instead decided on Lake Tahoe, in part because his father doesn’t fly. They set a date of February 20, 2020—02/20/2020— though that may not happen as planned.

“We’re going to be together until we die, God willing, so there’s no real rush to tying the knot,” Munk says. “We’re still coming down from the filming, and the film festivals. We just haven’t been able to make it a priority to plan a wedding.”

And while he might be using a cane, when the day comes, Basagoitia will be walking, not wheeling, down the aisle.

And what about the long-term future?

What about having kids? For now it’s a maybe—and still a possibility—as one of the lighter, more uplifting scenes in Any One of Us makes clear.

“We always talk about whether we’re going to have kids or not,” Basagoitia says. “Right now, we don’t see us having kids anytime soon. But it doesn’t mean that we won’t. When I was hurt, the last thing I wanted was to have a child and not be able to show them how to ride a bike, or walk around the park. That

would kill me, not holding your own kid, throwing him up in the air. It was scary at one point, knowing that that might never happen. I could show them how to ride a bike, though—I can still do that. Maybe not throw him up in the air, but I could definitely show him how to ride a bike.”

THE LEGACY QUESTION

We’re back to the bike ride in the Mount Rose Wilderness on a hot day in June.

We’ve reached the top of the climb. We’ve stopped to catch our breath and enjoy the view. The hardest part is now behind us.

It’s like Paul Basagoitia’s life in this moment. The hardest part is behind him.

But it will never be easy. It’s all a matter of perspective at this point, reconciling what he used to have with what he has now— and with what might have been. On one hand, he’s an elite athlete who used to fly through the air with grace. On the other hand, he is able to walk with just one cane.

And he can ride a bike again.

“My dad always joked that I was able to pedal a bike before I was able to walk,” he says. “It was true, and it’s true again.”

Part of maintaining that perspective is reconciling his new identity with who he was prior to his injury. “This injury is going to be tied to me for the rest of my life,” he says. “Even when I post a video or a photo of me riding bikes, people are like, ‘Oh, I’m so stoked to see you back on a bike again.’

I’ve been on the bike for the last two years, three years. Yeah man, I’m back on the bike. I’ve been on the bike for years.”

That seems like a natural and wellintentioned comment, I counter. What would be a better thing for them to say? “ ‘Nice riding style,’ ” he says. “Or ‘Looking good on the bike.’ I don’t know the right answer, but every time I post a photo of me riding, it’s just ‘Stoked to see you back on the bike after your injury.’

It’s always related to the injury, everything I do. I could see like the first year or two years, but now we’re on three years.

“And that was one thing about this film. I have accomplished a lot of cool things in mountain biking. I’ve really done some bitchin’ things in this sport.

But my legacy is going to be known for this fucking accident. People forget about

BEFORE HIS INJURY, HE SCRATCHED AND CLAWED AND BEAT THE ODDS. AFTER HIS INJURY, HE DID THE SAME. 36

“Paul is giving a lot of people a lot of hope, that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” says Munk.

the Crankworx title. People forget I was the first person to do a 720 on a mountain bike. People forget all of that. I’m going to be known for making one big mistake.

My legacy is going to be known as the kid who got paralyzed at Rampage.”

But it’s all part of the same legacy, I tell him. It’s all tied together. Before he was injured, Basagoitia inspired people.

After his injury, he still inspires people.

Before his injury, he scratched and clawed to beat the odds. After his injury, he did the same. He didn’t accept his fate. He fought back. He overcame the odds.

That, I assert, is Basagoitia’s story.

“I think that was the story of my whole life,” he says. “Growing up, living in a hotel room, showing up to the biggest event, Crankworx, with a borrowed bike, no sponsors. I’ve been an underdog my whole life. With this injury, with the likelihood of me to ever recover as much as I did, I was definitely an underdog. So if I was known for that—‘That dude got dealt some shitty cards but he always made the best out of the situation, he always fought back’—then I’ll be happy.”

Ultimately, whether he likes it or not, that will be his legacy. The page turned when he suffered a spinal cord injury.

But it was not the last chapter.

“I won’t have to look back,” he says.

“I’m going to keep looking forward. One of my buddies gave me the best advice.

He said, ‘You can’t always look back in life, Paul; all that does is gives you a sore neck.’ And that’s so fucking true.”

And with that, in a cloud of dust, Basagoitia is gone, gracefully flying down the trail at an impressive rate of speed.

All the rest—the film festivals, the new job, the physical therapy, planning a wedding—will wait. In the moment, he is back in his natural flow state, fully at peace. For the moment, he is not looking back. He is looking forward.

THE RED BULLETIN

To dig deeper into Basagoitia’s journey, watch Any One of Us, currently streaming on HBO.

H E R O E S 2019

MOVERS & SHAKERS

Versa-Style Dance Company co-founders Leigh Foaad and Jackie Lopez

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GEORGE SIMIAN

Real champions don’t win medals or fame— they change the world around them. Here we celebrate the empowering dance troupe VERSA-STYLE and two more inspiring heroes.

H E R O E S 2019

THE MENTORS

For the past 15 years, Foaad (center) and Lopez have built an esteemed dance company that has toured the world.

GEORGE SIMIAN

Jackie Lopez and Leigh Foaad empower a new generation of dancers by teaching the gospel of hip-hop.

E Versa-Style has a robust community outreach program.

very Friday evening, Jackie Lopez and her husband, Leigh Foaad, lead a flock of 15- to 35-year-olds on the dance floor. It’s like church. Everyone turns up religiously to learn from these two hip-hop choreographers who co-founded the Versa-Style Dance Company. After two hours in praise of hip-hop and house, they leave euphoric. And similar to church, Lopez and Foaad have a mission—to empower and mentor others, the way they were mentored.

At Evolution Studios in North Hollywood, this congregation is made up of all stripes in terms of race and ethnicity, reflective of L.A.’s multiculturalism. They gather to celebrate hip-hop, diversity, creativity and perseverance. Sermons are given on the finer points of hip-hop’s indelible moves: popping, whacking and locking. Dancers are well versed in the history of these moves—just as ballerinas know the pas de deux and demi-plié. Some of the dancers have been coming every Friday for more than 10 years but most will average at least five, often after attending a Versa-Style workshop in a Title 1 school in an underserved area of East L.A., South L.A. and the San Fernando Valley.

“These are communities that do not get the opportunity and resources that a normal-privilege person does—to come to a studio like this, pay $25 and do a class,” says Foaad, 37, who studied ballet in his mother’s dance studio as a teenager. And these Title 1 schools—referring to federally funded schools with a higher number of impoverished families and minorities—have not seen their arts and music programs reinstated since they were slashed from the curriculum during the last recession.

These Friday night sessions are vital and just one way that Lopez and Foaad are spreading the gospel of hip-hop to L.A. Versa-Style has a robust community outreach program visiting schools and conducting free workshops and residencies. They also have created a pipeline for committed dancers to turn professional and achieve a college degree in the process— opportunities not ordinarily afforded to them.

For the last 15 years, Lopez and Foaad have built an esteemed professional dance company. Versa-Style has performed internationally in Italy, Israel and India, as well as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Back in the States, they’ve toured and taught hip-hop on a multicity tour in Alaska and been invited back four times to the Shakespeare Festival in Oregon. But they understand that none of this would have been possible without mentors. And they are paying it forward.

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Lopez (center) says Versa-Style’s biggest mission is to give kids a different lens to view their lives.

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takes one person to change anyone’s life,” says Lopez.

“I’ve created a ripple effect. Together we are like this army of folks doing something for the community.”

Lopez is heartened by the youth, who understand the delicate dance between art and politics. “Recently, one girl said something I will never forget,” Lopez recalls. “She said, ‘Life is politics; everything is politics; everything means more than just the dance.’ Now dance is just the tool to help us navigate what’s going on.” Issues such as Black Lives Matter, immigration and education weigh on her mind. But she is ready for the fight. “I am very honored to be in this position— with music and positivity—to change lives.”

“Dancing is easy; more challenging is helping to raise these kids.”

GEORGE SIMIAN

“I had four adults who were mentors,” says Lopez, who was a single mother of a 4-year-old son when she teamed up with Foaad to start Versa-Style in 2005.

Each mentor served a different purpose at different points in her life. “I just turned 40,” she reveals, “and these four individuals still mean the world to me.”

One of her earliest mentors was Kevin Kane, her teacher at Marshall High School in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kane was the first to believe in her. He exposed her to the arts and seeded the idea that she should go to college. Prior to that, she wasn’t a strong academic student and had an alcohol-addled father at home.

While studying at UCLA, Lopez and Foaad met choreographer Rennie Harris—a pioneer at bringing street dance to the stage who also choreographed for the prestigious Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Both Lopez and Foaad have traveled the world as professional dancers with Harris’s hip-hop dance company, Puremovement. “Rennie Harris used to say it

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This she does by just being herself. She recalls her bittersweet first excursion to the theater. “It was all beautiful . . .” She pauses. “All pretty, light-skin, skinny girls. I thought I was never going to dance,” she explains, dejected. “Then I saw Rennie Harris. The show opened with four black girls—and it changed my whole life.” As is often said, representation is everything. “It’s all we need,” she intones with a smile.

“This is America.”

But it wasn’t always easy to envision this future.

Apart from being brown and not from a privileged background, Lopez also had the issue of her size.

“Hip-hop was the only dance culture that accepted me for me: As a full-figured woman of color,” says the commanding dancer, whose hip-hop moniker is Miss Funk. “I felt like I was heard. I felt like I could express myself in ways that I couldn’t with other dance styles.”

She refers to modern dance and ballet, where she felt routinely judged on how she looked. “I was always too round, too dark, too short—whatever the terms were.”

THE RED BULLETIN

oday, Lopez is a lecturer at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures and director of its Summer Dance/Performing Arts Intensive. She was born to immigrant parents who fled El Salvador; her mother arrived in the U.S. eight months pregnant with her. Against all odds, she fought to be the first in her family to graduate high school, then summa cum laude from UCLA in 2004.

She met Foaad, aka Breeze-Lee, a Beat Boy three years her junior, when she recruited him to perform in her graduation show exploring the origins of hiphop. They’ve been inseparable ever since.

“It was a very organic experience,” recalls Foaad, who is an adjunct lecturer at UCLA. “From the beginning we shared something in common—the passion, the love for dance, and we just had the drive to keep dancing with each other.”

Foaad, who was raised by a single mother, explains that Lopez took a job as a middle school teacher after graduation to help raise her son. “The principal allowed her to teach dance as part of PE. And soon she was becoming a mentor for all these kids.” As her own son grew, so did Lopez’s undeniable need to get back on stage. When Harris offered her the opportunity to tour with Puremovement, she took it but was loath to leave the kids. “We thought, let’s step it up and find a rental space, every Friday night,” says the soft-spoken Foaad. “Then these kids can come dance with us. That’s where we came up with our Friday night classes.”

In 2017, Foaad and Lopez finally tied the knot, but Foaad has helped raise Lopez’s son from the very beginning. Now 19, he is a double major in dance and political science at UCLA and aspires to one day be involved in politics. The couple still discuss having their own child, but Foaad adds quickly: “We already have 45,” referring to the many under their wing who often need guidance away from the dance floor.

“We’re dealing with a lot of personalities that are coming from underserved backgrounds, rough neighborhoods, rough families,” explains Foaad.

“The dancing is easy; more challenging is helping to raise these kids.” It’s a delicate line for them to walk.

“Sometimes, they’ll tell us we’re ‘up in their business’ too much and they get offended,” admits Lopez. But the duo are unwavering in their commitment. They can see the fruits of their labor at work.

In 2009, company dancers Ernesto Galarza and Anthony Berry, who both met Lopez and Foaad while still in secondary school, were motivated to start a junior company called Versa-Style Next Generation.

They also attend Friday night sessions, which serves as a fertile ground to recruit new VSNG dancers. Lopez and Foaad are proud to see VSNG continue their work in inspiring a younger generation.

Versa-Style’s biggest mission, Lopez says, is to give these kids a different lens to view their lives. And when they run with these opportunities, the couple is filled with pride. “I think life is about giving back, I really do,” Foaad smiles. “When I see their eyes light up as these kids talk about dance and these opportunities, it’s so rewarding to me. Money can’t buy that.” —Celine Teo-Blockey 43

H E R O E S 2019

THE INNOVATOR

Syreeta Gates became an agent of social change by celebrating the intersection of hiphop and food.

“I’ve been a hustler,” admits Gates, who was shot in New York on October 7.

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CHRISTIAN ANWANDER

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et it be known that Syreeta Gates adores hip-hop.

As our conversation about her work as a community innovator begins, Gates jokes that she digs my name, and then starts reciting every hip-hop lyric that includes it. Her energy is explosive. She’s amazingly alert given that it’s right after lunch, a time when many people are catatonic from their meal. But if you’re in charge of corralling New York youth and introducing them to the unique intersection of food and rap music, you have to be in high spirits. You have to presume your enthusiasm will rub off.

Gates is the mind behind Yo Stay Hungry, a culinary competition that blends food, beverage and hip-hop. Each young participant works with a seasoned chef to make a dish inspired by a rap lyric.

It expands their knowledge of music and food—and encourages a sense of community. Yo Stay Hungry has given scholarships to a few top contenders, allowing hip-hop, a musical genre sometimes criticized for its worldview and assumed momentary nature, to enrich the lives of Generation Z youth.

Gates is based in New York City, which has multiple districts that qualify as food deserts—meaning that (especially in the poorest neighborhoods) locals have to walk at least a mile to procure nutritious meals.

This primarily affects black and brown people—the same folks who created hip-hop out of extreme turmoil nearly 50 years ago.

“I remember waiting for my mother to get home.

I was watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network and I was like ‘Yo, this dude got mad juice—he has all the charisma,’ ” Gates muses in her unmistakable Queens accent. “I couldn’t cook because my moms wasn’t home and I wasn’t old enough, but I would set up the menu and [write down whatever items I needed to cook].”

Ever since then, Gates has been cultivating a relationship with food. In high school, she began selling homemade cakes and lasagna to her peers.

“I’ve been a hustler in every aspect,” she says. When she was ready to pursue a university degree, she chose Hunter College because it granted her the autonomy to craft her own major—she graduated with a degree in Urban Youth Culture.

When talking about the Yo Stay Hungry initiative, Gates notes how food and eating habits become legacies. After all, it’s common for teenage New Yorkers to end a long day at school with a vegetablefree bodega sandwich, a Tropicana Twister and

With Yo Stay Hungry, she aims to cultivate the next generation of respected chefs. maybe a small bag of spicy chips. Which is fine until it becomes a daily ritual, and young people enter adulthood and realize that they don’t know how to cook for themselves. “We’ve had so many young people that’ve never made steak before,” she says.

The innovative twist in Yo Stay Hungry was how Gates tied the concept back into rap. “We have a database of over 40,000 songs that mention food or beverage, specifically hip-hop lyrics,” she says.

Gates doubles as an archivist, focusing on the journalists of hip-hop’s golden age and the legacy magazines for which those writers worked. With Yo Stay Hungry, she aims to cultivate the next generation of respected chefs, just as those magazines bred an expansive team of skilled writers. Near the end of our conversation, Gates quips, “Young people don’t know that they could be food photographers, food writers . . . or mixologists.” She wants to show Generation Z what all they are capable of and show them how to break the fetters brought on by years of poverty and poor eating habits.

When asked about the goal of Yo Stay Hungry, Gates simply states that she always wanted to “do what was missing.” She identified a gap between the culinary arts and hip-hop—even though memorable lines like “fish, which is my favorite dish” have literally added flavor to rap since its mainstream inception. Gates plans on expanding to include adults in her cook-offs, but for now she’s content to serve the youth, one plate at a time. —Brooklyn White

Gates plans to expand Yo Stay Hungry to include adult participants.

H E R O E S 2019

THE CONSERVATIONIST Learn why Cynthia Smith is called the “Jane Goodall of the marine world.”

“We just need action,” says Smith, who was photographed in San Diego on October 2.

ANDY J SCOTT

n the documentary Sea of Shadows, teams of elite marine biologists and veterinarians join forces to rescue the endangered vaquita porpoise, native to the Gulf of California. The species has dwindled to no more than a couple dozen after getting decimated by illegal nets meant for the totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is lucrative on the black market.

A plan is hatched to capture vaquita, keep them safe and breed them until most of the nets are pulled.

Against all odds, one of the mammals is located, captured and placed in a sea pen. The Vaquita CPR scientists, led by Dr. Cynthia Smith of the National Marine Mammal Foundation (NMMF), breathe sighs of relief and give each other cautious high fives.

The celebration is short-lived: The vaquita suddenly declines and, in distress, circles back to the veterinarians, even after they release her to the open water. “Come on mama,” Smith murmurs as the vaquita is intubated. “Come on sweetie, come on pumpkin.”

Then, Smith whispers an F-bomb. Minutes later, the vaquita dies and the captive breeding plan is aborted.

It’s heartbreaking to watch a part of the planet’s history slip away, to feel the veterinarians’ grief. It helps that the vaquita is a cute-looking creature nicknamed the “panda of the sea,” but the film— directed by Richard Ladkani and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio—doesn’t shy from the thorny global issues complicating vaquita conservation.

Jane Goodall has supported Sea of Shadows and the quest to save the vaquita. “There’s no other Jane,” says Smith. “So many people, especially women, identify with her—her determination and willingness to break boundaries and speak her mind.”

Lately Smith has been referred to as “the Jane Goodall of the marine world.” She grew up in Florida, where her father worked for the Apollo space program, a time when science was extraexciting. As a child, she loved watching dolphins and spending time by the water, but after college her father developed cancer, and so she felt a duty to attempt a path in cancer research. But then she changed course. “All these people are doing amazing, important things, but in my heart, I know it’s animals,” she recalls thinking. “I need to figure out how to do something as big as I can for animals.”

After veterinary school she became the first female vet in the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program, which trains bottlenose dolphins and sea lions to locate, mark and recover underwater objects—like aquatic patrol dogs. There, Smith began delivering cuttingedge care to cetaceans in their own habitat.

After pioneering imaging technology for marine mammals, Smith saw the potential to use these tools on a broader scale. In 2009, she joined the world of conservancy, co-founding the NMMF. Ten years later, the organization has grown to employ 150 staffers, assisting with marine animal rescues and innovating technology to evaluate marine mammal health. The NMMF gives ultrasounds to pregnant dolphins in the wild and helped develop finFindR, which is like facial recognition but for dolphin fins. In one high-profile project, the NMMF received grants to send a team into Barataria Bay (located off the Louisiana coast) to gauge the effect the Deepwater Horizon disaster had on the area’s dolphin population.

Smith, who became pregnant with her first child soon after she began working with the Navy, has felt a duty to create a place to work that is welcoming to female scientists and conservationists. “I’m trying to surround myself with strong women, and do my best to mentor the women that are coming behind,” she says.

During production of Sea of Shadows, Ladkani promised the Vaquita CPR team that he could capture their work without getting in the way, and Smith says she sometimes forgot the cameras were there, even when the crew was in the line of violence. “Our land facility in San Felipe was threatened; some angry fishers were mobilizing to burn it down.” That threat dissipated, but there was a riot at one of the Mexican Navy buildings. Through it all, a security detail helped ensure that Smith’s team worked safely.

Smith relished the opportunity to use storytelling in the service of conservation; when she saw a final cut, she had mixed emotions watching the vaquita slip away once again. “It was the most heartbreaking moment in my career.” She chokes up remembering watching the scene at Sundance. “It was the first time I saw it on a big screen and I reexperienced that heartbreak with a bunch of strangers.”

Today, a couple years after filming was completed, fewer than 20 vaquitas are believed to be left on the planet. The good news is that Smith thinks the species has the genetic strength to recover, as did the California condor—but only if the species breeds.

“We heard from a scientist in the field that they’ve sighted at least six, and one is a baby,” says Smith.

“We know they’re still reproducing and they’re still out there—we just need action.” —Claire Zulkey

Sea of Shadows captures “the most heartbreaking moment in my career.”

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TRAILBLAZERS In Colorado—a hotbed for mountain biking—a few of the most passionate riders happen to be the most philanthropic. Meet a handful of true sports heroes, honored here for their work with minority youth, juvenile law offenders and victims of sexual assault.

Words TRACY ROSS

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Photography GREG MIONSKE

olorado may be best known for its acres of lift-lined slopes, accessing some of the most prolific powder runs in the U.S. But ski season only lasts seven months of the year, and once mud season ends in early May, the state’s other sport takes over.

Mountain biking is huge here.

According to the nonprofit bike advocacy group Bicycle Colorado, 73 percent of Coloradans own a bicycle and 25 percent own three or more. Forty-two percent of Coloradans took a recreational ride last year (that’s 48 percent higher than comparable national averages). And

Coloradans spend $425 million annually on bikes, bike maintenance and other bike-related things.

But the hard truth is that for the most part, mountain biking is geared to the white, wealthy and recreationally advantaged. That’s tragic because it frees us, gets (and keeps) us in shape and puts us in nature, which Thoreau entered and “came out taller than the trees.” As a state, Colorado wants to get more people on bikes. That’s why we’re celebrating the work of the following four heroes—each of them leveraging mountain bikes to help those in need right now.

One of our heroes, Heather Russell, photographed riding near Carbondale, Colorado, on September 23.

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HEATHER RUSSELL

How one survivor helps women overcome sexual assault one ride at a time.

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ver several periods of her life, Carbondale, Coloradobased cyclist Heather Russell has ridden hundreds of miles of singletrack over some of the most beautiful and challenging terrain just to quiet the barb-limbed octopus of anxiety thrashing inside her body. Often she’d pedal, seize and feel as though she was about to crash, curl up and die. “There was a part of me that thought maybe I would never calm down,” admits Russell, now 48. She had a physiological reason to feel that way. To this day, when she closes her eyes, she can still see the pigtailed 4-year-old girl she was when a man she didn’t know sexually abused her. Her life afterward, like so many of the estimated 50,000-plus children who are sexually abused annually in this country, has been largely impacted by that moment.

Except for when she’s engaged in a particular activity—cycling. She did it as a kid, with her brother, Rob. They’d pedal around the neighborhood “on pavement for hours,” she says, and it evoked two distinct feelings—of being free and in charge. But it would take years before the bike became the North Star that would guide her into a mission that would help others like her who’d also been the victims of sexual violence.

By the time she was in high school, Russell’s experience had manifested in her body—in weight she

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piled on, and then later in anorexia and bulimia. Back then she didn’t realize the cause; “I just had this uncomfortableness, this feeling of shit inside my body,” she says. Day after day, she’d wake up thinking I am not prepared for this. “The eating disorders were just so confusing,” she says. But during her freshman year of college, she bought a mountain bike, which began to open her eyes to the power and beauty of nature. That led to a new life out West, in Utah, and eventually more eye opening, on the flower-lined trails around Salt Lake City and the tacky dirt of Moab. She lived in the Beehive State until 2002, when she relocated to Ridgway, Colorado.

But there, Russell’s bulimia came storming back.

She finally decided to address it and entered a 12-step eating disorder program. “I delved into this whole world to help heal myself, and for the most part it helped,” she says. But with her disorder “calmed down,” she started to have flashbacks of her abuse.

“You hear this a lot from women in their 30s and 40s.

Their lives calm down. Their kids leave. They have the space to feel things and [their abuse] can surface.”

Her challenges continued when she entered a master’s program in transpersonal counseling psychology at Naropa University, but fortunately, she was now mountain biking every day in Boulder and the surrounding mountains.

Riding fed her. “You find the flow state and you don’t want to stop,” she says. “There’s definitely something empowering about getting your body strong enough to do that.”

She kept pedaling, and now with her degree, started working the rape hotline at a Boulder-area nonprofit for sexual abuse and assault survivors in 2013. “Troubled people call in to get aroused,” she says. She did very little work with those who’d been raped, and she didn’t know if she was making a difference. So she embarked on an internship for a

A victim of sexual abuse herself, Russell has long felt the healing powers of cycling.

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All participants get free use of a high-end bike for the whole fourmonth session.

Group rides are a key piece of Sacred Cycle, but clients also get personal coaching, one-on-one counseling and other therapies.

psychiatric hospital in Denver. “It was mostly people with severe mental illness. Our job was to stabilize them, determine if they were at risk. I would have to interview everyone, and one of the questions was ‘Do you have a history of sexual trauma?’ Almost every person that came in there did.” That experience would dictate what Russell did next.

One morning she went on a 50-mile training ride for a 24-hour mountain bike race. As she pedaled, she thought: Fuck. I need to do something. She wanted to help the vast numbers of people who’ve experienced sexual assault by combining therapy, support and cycling. A year later, this materialized into Sacred Cycle, an organization she founded based around mountain biking, therapy, community building and raising awareness about sexual assault and violence.

With scholarships for survivors, the program starts in early June and goes through mid-October.

Prescreened clients (who must apply) are chosen based on need, willingness to participate and a desire to heal. Once in, they get a Specialized mountain 52

Each session ends with a three-day retreat to celebrate the participants' accomplishments.

bike to use for the session, one-on-one mental health counseling, group rides, a personal cycling coach, extra therapies—art, equine, rolfing—a community to check in with daily and a three-day, culminating retreat, at which “clients are spoiled as we celebrate their accomplishments,” says Russell.

Take Anna Wiltse. Now 28, she was raped twice in college. For years after, she says she felt “cut off from her body.” At 27, she took time off from her job as a nurse to enter a residential treatment program for survivors. After months of doing EMDR—an intense psychotherapy protocol that helps patients alleviate distress related to trauma—she says she “just kind of loved myself for the first time. I woke up. I felt like I was in charge.” Some months later, THE RED BULLETIN

“There’s something about mountain biking that lowers your guard.” her doctor encouraged her to continue her healing process, just as her psychiatrist received a pamphlet from Sacred Cycle. After reaching out to Russell, Wiltse entered the Sacred Cycle program.

At the time, Wiltse had only been on a mountain bike twice in her life, and, she says, “I had the hardest time regulating my breathing.” Like so many people who’ve seen mountain biking but never tried it, she also thought there was no way she could do it. But with the help of Russell, as well as personal coach Lauren Gueriera, Wiltse soon was opening to the experience. And before long she was confidently pedaling singletrack.

“There’s something about mountain biking that lowers your guard,” she says. And with help from THE RED BULLETIN

Sacred Cycle, Wiltse says her “outsides” now match her “insides.”

There are visible changes, too. She’s shed 40 pounds of weight she thinks she gained to “guard herself.” And now, Wiltse says, she has an “alignment of outer badass and inner badass.”

Cycling has also given her the courage to start “dating herself” instead of jumping into relationships.

“I know that sounds so cliché,” she says, “but it’s been extremely freeing.” A word to guys who might encounter her when she starts dating again: You’d better be a mountain biker.

Russell is still riding, too, because on the bike, the octopus of anxiety grew quiet and a life’s purpose came into focus.

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BRETT AND TAM DONELSON A couple closes the diversity gap by getting Hispanic girls on bikes.

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rett and Tam Donelson both believe that the best way to empower the large population of Hispanic girls living in Colorado’s Summit and Eagle counties is to give them bikes . . . that they can keep . . . if they commit to riding and racing them from the time they join The Cycle Effect until they graduate high school.

That’s why the husband-and-wife team—he’s from Upstate New York; she’s Australian—started their pilot program in 2011. She was racing—and winning—Xterra triathlons; he’d coached world-class skiers. But at a certain point, he got “sick of being in snow,” and his hopes turned into fate after he met a philanthropist at a ritzy Westin Hotel gym—who started talking to him about the beauty of charitable giving in an area with hundreds of miles of singletrack and an “adventure gap” between the white and Hispanic populations.

Here’s an overlooked fact about the region surrounding the $200-a-day lift-ticket resorts of Vail and Beaver Creek. The demographic most often featured is white, wealthy and recreationally advantaged. But some 50 percent of the population here consists of Hispanic families, many of whom lack a cultural context for Colorado-style outdoor recreation.

Traditionally, mountain biking has been a “white” sport. As such, Brett noticed, rare was the sight of a Hispanic kid on a full-suspension bike. The philanthropist (who has requested anonymity) told Brett that they could partner in filling the gap, as 54

long as the focus of the effort would be on girls, not boys. “I fell in love with that,” says Brett.

“Because if you get girls involved [in a sport like biking], automatically the boys and dads think they can do it, too. But if you invite the dads and brothers into the sport, all of a sudden the girls won’t do it.”

Some people have given him flack for creating a girls-only team. “Really?” he responds. “Sons have had it good for thousands of years. That’s why I stuck to my guns.”

In 2011, with a pilot program, Brett solidified the organization’s demographic. And in 2013, he officially launched The Cycle Effect, with one other “volunteer,” Tam. They bought a trailer, secured sponsors, grappled with logistics and found a handful of coaches.

They also built relationships with the school district, other youth-serving nonprofits, a local race series and the Colorado High School Cycling League.

So many times at the end of a hard day, Brett would collapse at the kitchen table and tell Tam, “We can’t do this anymore; it’s too emotionally and financially stressful.”

But Tam believed that everyone should have the opportunity to ride a bike, “for the fun, the adventure, the freedom, the empowerment and the human connection.” She was passionate about leveraging these qualities to girls who lacked the financial means to get them. So she told Brett, “It’s super hard, and if you want to be done, it’s fine. But riding with the girls is the best part of our lives. It’s what we talk about when we come home. So if we stop, we’ll have to find something else just as fulfilling.”

“That was almost every month for the first three years,” says Brett. But they decided to stick with it.

Along the way, The Cycle Effect became a thriving nonprofit offering benefits that were practically

Brett and Tam Donelson, shot near Vail with their dog, Zeke, have exposed hundreds of Hispanic girls to the joys of mountain biking.

H E R O E S 2019

All girls who complete three years in the program and graduate high school can keep their Liv bike.

unheard of. By 2014, it was providing a $5,000-to$6,000 learn-to-mountain-bike program for each girl who signed up at a cost of $140. The year-round program included professional coaching, loaner bikes, all clothing and accessories, travel to races and payment of race entries. In The Cycle Effect’s first year, 18 Hispanic girls signed up.

One of them was Coco Andrade. “All of us were going through something, and Tam and Brett took the time to understand our cultural and social challenges,” she says. Over time, she learned the proper techniques to ride a mountain bike, but more importantly “to look ahead and examine what’s in front of me before taking action,” she says. Now a 22-year-old pursuing a master’s degree in social work at the University of Denver, she volunteer coaches several times a week.

When Brett offered to pay her, she replied, “No. You’ve already done so much for me.”

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But while the girls fell in love with cycling right away, their families were another matter.

Culturally, having girls on a bike team was a big leap. For one thing, girls in Hispanic families haven’t traditionally been as encouraged as their brothers to do sports. Secondly, they’re often in charge of caring for siblings after school and on weekends. And as far as racing goes, events sometimes happen on Sundays, often saved for church and family engagement.

Another obstacle Brett didn’t foresee: Resistance from families to fill out certain forms. “Some of the parents don’t speak English, and others simply don’t want to complete the forms because they fear the current political climate,” says Brett.

But by this fall, The Cycle Effect had grown from those original 18 girls to 175, with teams in both Summit and Eagle counties. The program is different from other youth cycling nonprofits, which give kids THE RED BULLETIN

The Cycle Effect covers the cost of races, allowing riders to focus on having a meaningful, fun time.

Parents note that the program helps the girls gain valuable problem-solving skills and establish new friendships.

free bikes but never teach them how to ride. “There might be 1 percent of kids that continue to use a bike without a mentor or a coach, but when I applied for sponsorship with a bike company—that shall remain nameless—I was told that the company didn’t give bikes away because the majority of kids will sell them,” says Brett. One company (Liv) bought in, however, and any Cycle Effect girl who participates for at least three years and graduates high school gets to take her bike—plus all of the accessories—with her.

While the team started with 90 percent Latina riders, The Cycle Effect has tried to accommodate non-Latinas as much as possible. “Both of our counties had two young middle school girls die by suicide, and that was the point where we knew that we had to create a clear space on our application that made room for any girl, no matter what their income or demographics,” says Brett.

THE RED BULLETIN

The Cycle Effect has grown from 18 original members to 175, with teams in two counties.

He also used to welcome seventh graders and up; he now welcomes girls in elementary school. One of the youngest is Angelie Regalada, who joined the team in fourth grade. Angelie’s mom, Jocelyn, says Angelie comes home from rides “with lessons that help her through any kind of problem. She’s made friends, the coaches are great, and she feels supported.”

That’s why Jocelyn took Brett up on an intriguing offer. In August, he started a biweekly pedal for the mothers of Cycle Effect riders. That quickly morphed into a ride for any local Latina. The first week he had 22 committed participants and a wait list of 60.

Jocelyn was out there, though she’s ridden a bike just twice in her life. She says she doesn’t know “what she’s supposed to be doing” and that cycling “burns her thighs.” But like Angelie, she’s expanding her world through cycling. And she has Brett and Tam to thank, for seeing a need and answering it.

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H E R O E S 2019

GREG TOWNSEND

A coach using tough love and bikes to give juvenile offenders a future.

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reg Townsend has had countless dramatic moments on a bike, like this one: In 2013, he sat on a canyon rim overlooking the San Juan River at Goosenecks State Park in southern Utah, trying to keep one of the athletes from his cycling team from leaping to his death.

The kid was mid-breakdown. Townsend and his team—12 young men from Ridge View Academy’s school for adjudicated youth near Denver—had been road biking for several days. He was leading them on yet another of the ultra-long-distance rides he sponsors as the school’s mountain bike, road bike and Nordic ski coach, from their medium-security boarding school down through Colorado and into

Utah, covering a whopping 600 miles, en route to the Grand Canyon.

The wind on that particular day had been howling at 60 miles per hour. The kids, all students at Ridge View because they were criminal offenders, were struggling. There’d been scorching sun and endless road, leading to screaming fits and fistfights. But now at the canyon’s edge with a kid who literally wanted to leap hundreds of feet, Townsend was in his full power.

In the steady voice he’s adopted from 35 years of teaching, mentoring and coaching youth offenders, he talked the kid off of the ledge. Then, sternly but lovingly, he walked him back to camp. The next morning, the kid got up, saddled his bike and rode on.

Ridge View houses 140 young men whose crimes range from substance abuse violations to gangrelated offenses. (Across America, roughly 75,000 kids live in similar “out of home placements.”) When kids come to Ridge View, says Townsend, many have already weathered difficult childhoods and past incarcerations, leaving them feeling angry or hopeless about themselves and their futures. Ridge

With Greg Townsend’s help, scores of kids with criminal records have found peace and a purpose through riding.

Ridge View’s road cycling squad for 17-to-18-year-olds podiumed kids in a 2018 state time trial.

View, run through a parent organization in Nevada called Rite of Passage (ROP), “reforms” them but also offers them a new start academically.

A $52 million facility run through a partnership between Denver Public Schools, the Division of Youth Corrections and ROP, Ridge View offers all the normal high school classes plus a full slate of traditional high school sports. But everyone from Townsend to a host of psychiatrists say that endurance sports like Nordic skiing and cycling are especially good at helping kids overcome mental and emotional challenges by improving their mood, reducing anxiety and allowing them to handle stress more effectively. With cycling in particular, says Townsend, 54, “you have [at least three] processes going on simultaneously—your body is moving, your aerobic systems are working and your brain is processing steering and balance.” As a person rides, the body releases the “feel-good” chemicals endorphins and serotonin and something called “brain-derived neurotrophic factor,” a protein shown to help reduce the symptoms of depression.

Mirroring high schools across the country, Ridge View kids who choose cycling over football are few and far between, and this year, Townsend has just 10 competing in both road and mountain biking.

Nonetheless, his road bikers have podiumed in the Bicycle Racing Association of Colorado’s 17-to-18 age group. His mountain bike team has had challenges, because of the “transitory nature” of kids in state custody, their length of stay at Ridge View (some go “AWOL” says Townsend), struggles with behavior and too few training miles. But when a kid commits, he rides 10 to 12 hours per week and races on fall weekends in the Colorado High School Cycling League.

Fifteen-year-old 10th grader Emanuel L. (ROP withholds students’ last names) came to Ridge View six months ago. “I’ve fallen in love with the cycling program,” he says. “It is one thing I look forward to each day. Being on the team has taught me teamwork and given me self-confidence.”

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Endurance sports like cycling are good at helping kids overcome mental and emotional challenges.

Townsend helps the kids by dedicating himself to their progression in cycling (with support from his wife, kids, BRAC and others—including three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond—who’ve given students “time, friendship, sense of place and belonging,” he says). But he’s also preparing them for their futures. Through Townsend, Ridge View offers a for-credit class in bike mechanics, covering everything from chain fixes to carbon-fiber frame repair.

That gives them a valuable skill to help them enter the workforce once they graduate—an especially valuable skill in Colorado, with its hundreds of bike shops and estimated 4.1 million riders.

But the wrenching could set them up for something larger. In 2018, Townsend started a helicopter construction business that operates on the Ridge View property. Now, kids who take metal manufacturing and bike mechanics can work on the choppers.

When they need a break, they hop on a bike and go for a ride.

Townsend teaches a class in bike mechanics, giving the boys a valuable skill that might help them after graduation.

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FROZEN SECRET

Hidden beneath a frozen fjord in eastern Greenland lies an underwater realm with a sky made of icebergs. That might be some people’s worst nightmare, but freediver ANNA VON BOETTICHER sees it as a form of therapy.

Words SABRINA LUTTENBERGER Photography TOBIAS FRIEDRICH

Von Boetticher gently touches an iceberg at a depth of 40 feet. Down here it’s 28°F; above the surface it’s -16°F.

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nna von Boetticher can hold her breath for 6 minutes and 12 seconds— longer than anyone else in her native Germany. But when the 49-year-old isn’t underwater, she can barely catch her breath as the words gush out in unbridled enthusiasm for freediving, a passion she discovered only 12 years ago. Since then, she has set an impressive 33 diving records in her homeland, as well as one world record, and earned three world championship bronze medals. But for Von Boetticher, the big wins aren’t defined by titles or trophies—it’s all about diving in unusual locations. That’s what she was doing in Greenland earlier this year, plunging into a frozen fjord with diving partner and photographer Tobias Friedrich. the red bulletin: You could dive anywhere and yet you chose an icecold location. Why? anna von boetticher: I’d just been through a turbulent time and needed peace of mind, and the best place for me to find that is in the extremes of nature. It was in the minimal world of Greenland that I was forced to expose myself mentally and physically; everything else stood still.

Your base camp was in Tasiilaq— a place engulfed in ice for half the year. What challenges did you face?

The main one was keeping warm when the outside temperature was -16°F. It’s better to freedive on an empty stomach, but I knew that wouldn’t work if I was standing in the cold for seven hours and didn’t want to freeze. I had to eat an extraordinary amount of high-energy food: peanut butter, porridge, sugar. I wore layer upon layer of clothing and made precise estimates of how long I could stay in the water. It was at the very limit of the demands you can make on yourself.

How do you know when you’ve hit those limits?

You’ve got to be honest with yourself.

Of course I want to go a meter deeper, and I do get annoyed when I don’t do better than last time, but what physical 62

condition are you in? What are the external factors and how do you react to them? Only then can you make an objective decision not born out of feelings or ego. Having that sort of control is one of the secrets to safe and successful freediving.

How do you push yourself further from there?

It takes great self-awareness of what’s happening inside your body. Freediving requires you to resist the natural urge to breathe—do I really have to breathe now or is it a false alarm? You realize you can override an instinct and do a lot more than you’d have thought. So the next time you’ll face a new situation with greater self-belief.

Do you ever panic when you’re deep underwater?

I get scared, but I’ve never panicked.

I always react calmly to any problem and set the fear aside for later. Anyone can learn this: You just need to expose yourself to new things. This way, you learn to deal with the feeling of unease we all experience, then proceed in spite of it. Anyone who deliberately exposes themselves to stressful situations will eventually acquire greater peace.

Is there any part of your sport that still surprises you?

Experiencing the underwater world is intense, beautiful and different every time. It’s hard to compare it to anything else. As humans we don’t belong in it, and yet we can adapt to a sufficient enough extent to be able to spend time there. That never ceases to fascinate me.

Instagram: @freediveanna

“In Greenland, I was forced to expose myself mentally and physically.”

WORLD OF THE ICE GIANTS On the way down, icebergs and floes block the view above before long. This isn’t just psychologically unpleasant; it also impedes use of the usual safety rope.

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Greenland

Nuuk

Tasiilaq

FJORD DIVING Pictured left: The ice near Tasiilaq, with a main triangular hole in the center and three smaller holes—emergency exits for the divers—fanned out above it. When Von Boetticher lost her bearings at one point, one of these exits saved her life.

A good tip for Greenland: Get undressed at the last possible moment.

Von Boetticher defrosts her frozen feet with hot water.

She has to move fast—the ice hole constantly freezes over.

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TEST OF NERVES Von Boetticher lights her way through the underwater canyon. The gorge in the fjord near Tasiilaq is about 65 feet long and far from the ice hole. It’s a risky move requiring all her experience and mental strength.   69

In 2009, 23-year-old Scottish cyclist DANNY MACASKILL released Inspired Bicycles —a five-and-a-half-minute film on YouTube that contained probably the best collection of street trials riding [the mountain bike discipline of maneuvering across obstacles without a rider’s feet touching the floor] ever seen. The film, which has racked up more than 39 million views to date, transformed MacAskill into a global superstar. Here he looks back at his greatest moments of the decade that followed.

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ADIDAS OUTDOOR/DAVE MACKISON ADIDAS,FRED MURRAY/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Danny’s Decade

Imaginate (2013) I’d made a few films outdoors, but for Imaginate I wanted to try something different: to re-create my childhood bedroom floor and ride these giant toys.

We had a $5 million Formula One car and a real tank.

The loop-the-loop was Hot Wheels-esque and I’d never attempted one—they’re disorientating, and if you watch anyone try on the internet, it always ends badly. I’d been off my bike for a year after my back operation, so my riding wasn’t where it needed to be.

Each morning I’d go into the warehouse, do eight flip step-downs onto a giant Dandy comic and build up to the loop. Eventually I got it dialed.

“We went all-out when we filmed Inspired Bicycles.”

Inspired Bicycles (2009) This [opposite page] is me launching off the roof of Macdonald Cycles in Edinburgh, where I worked from 2006 to 2009. Every day I’d stand across the road with my lunch and look at the gap between the bike shop and the copy shop. When [director] Dave Sowerby and I started filming Inspired Bicycles, I set my sights on bigger and bigger goals. This gap was one of those. Before I tried it, I gapped the curb below—that’s the way I eye up gaps sometimes. The first time I tried, I overcooked it and landed on my back on the roof. You can’t overshoot it too much or you’ll fall onto the rails below.

It was so satisfying when we did it; one of the standout moments of the film. Good bang for your buck!

Dave is such a good filmmaker, so with Inspired Bicycles I felt I had this big opportunity. We went all-out with it: The riding was new, and the way he filmed and edited it to that music [“The Funeral” by Band of Horses].

This tree [above] in the Meadows in Edinburgh is quite famous among BMXers, and I dreamt of doing a flare off it for Inspired Bicycles.

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I signed with Red Bull at the end of 2009, and the idea for this film came up during one of our first meetings.

I’m from rural Scotland—the Isle of Skye—so locating man-made concrete in my homeland appealed to me.

In this shot [above], I’m at the foundations of an old railroad track on the Isle of Raasay.

I remember being a bit disappointed by Way Back Home at the time. I had ridiculously high aspirations because of the bar I’d set for myself with Inspired Bicycles; I even had a plan to jump 140 feet off the Skye Bridge and into the sea. Dave and I worked so hard to film some of the crazier ideas, driving 18,000 miles in six months to get to locations when the sun was right. Looking back, I’m really pleased with the film. This shot [below] sums it up: We’ve got wheelbarrows, and there’s a microwavable meal in the oven. That was our life back then.

The Olympic Torch (2012) This was a slow year for me. I had a back operation on a disc I’d torn in 2009, so it was more of a planning year. One of the cool things that came out of it, though, was getting involved in the Olympic Torch relay. I was intending to do a big bike part with [film director] Danny Boyle in the opening ceremony, but sadly it fell through because of my health. However, getting to carry the torch outside Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum was cool. It was me, the actor James McAvoy and the curler Rhona Martin. I remember it being quite random, riding my bike in this white suit with a flaming torch. I practiced outside my flat with a pump beforehand to see if I could do any tricks. I did a couple of manuals in the end.

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DAVE SOWERBY, PA, FRED MURRAY/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Way Back Home (2010)

Epecuén (2014) This film has a sad story. There was a town on the edge of this salt lake in Argentina, and in the late ’70s it had a long drought. Villa Epecuén was reliant on the tourism the lake attracted, so a canal was built, connecting it to other lakes at higher elevations. But then, when the rains returned years later, the town was flooded. I wanted to make a film that was sensitive to the residents. The town was eerie but so beautiful.

All the walls are covered in a layer of salt, which makes the landscape quite uniform. You never knew how good the structures would be—you could stand on a huge block of concrete and it’d snap in half—so it was probably one of the most dangerous films I’ve made.

“Epecuén was probably one of the most dangerous films I’ve made.”

The Ridge (2014) My friend Stu Thomson, from Cut Media, and I decided we’d make a little mountain bike film on the Cuillin [mountain range] on the Isle of Skye. I hadn’t spent that much time there, because it’s so severe you need a proper guide. The first day was a 23-hour shift. Drone technology wasn’t what it is today—we had these massive, heavy batteries. Apart from burning serious calories, it was one of the easiest projects I’ve filmed. Compared with technical trials riding, this was so within my comfort zone and just a lot of fun: rowing, chasing seals, a couple of more technical tricks like the front flip over the fence. The success of The Ridge was as much of a shock as Inspired Bicycles was: It got about 20 million views in a month, and half of it is me bloody rowing a boat!

STU THOMSON & CHRIS PRESCOTT/CUT MEDIA, DAVE MACKISON/GOPRO

“The feeling I had was that I was only going to clear the rocks by a tiny fraction.”

Cascadia (2015) This is me doing a front flip off some scaffolding we built in El Roque in Gran Canaria. I’d wanted to do a rooftop video for a while. We walked around Las Palmas and El Roque, knocking door to door, asking if we could look at people’s rooftops. It’s such a chill country they were like, “Sure, come in!” Next thing we’d be on their roof. This was the final shot. I was actually overly confident about the setup, because I’m not really scared of water compared with the risks you take on concrete. And it was only 60 feet—I could belly-flop and I still wouldn’t die. But when I turned up, the run-up wasn’t very big and the rocks carried on under the water. The feeling I had was that I was only going to clear the rocks by a tiny fraction. It was quite a stress, but I sent it and it was maybe the most cushty banger I’ve done. As soon as I went off the lip, I felt total relief.

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Wee Day Out (2016)

FRED MURRAY/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Wee Day Out was a film I’d wanted to make for a long time.

The Ridge opened up this whole new world of mountain biking for me, but this time, rather than relying on scenery, I really wanted to up the technical difficulty of the riding. The cool thing about riding a mountain bike is that people’s perceptions of what you can do on it, compared with a trials bike, are a lot lower.

I wanted to take my trials-riding skills and put them on a mountain bike—like one of my heroes, Chris Akrigg, had done.

When I worked at Bothy Bikes [in Aviemore, Scotland, in 2003—his first job], this steam train used to go past my house every day. So this was a trick where I would gap from the railway platform onto the line.

I thought the probability of it working was very, very low, but I actually landed it in an hour and a half—about 100 goes—which is pretty good for me.

The grind on the log [right] I probably tried 150 times on the first day and didn’t come close.

We ended up trying that for another three days. My friend started rubbing the log down with Vaseline, because it was getting so grippy. Skateboarders have their wax, so we started lubing up this log. My pedals, shoes, grips and gloves were covered in Vaseline. We went up there on the fourth day, and then, on the last day, in the last bit of light, I landed the trick. Then I ended up doing it four times in a row.

Jumping on a moving hay bale and rolling down a field was yet another “real good” idea I had—again, it was a four-day one. We got the local farmer to combine three hay bales into one big one so it would be heavy enough to keep rolling with me on top. It took about 400 goes.

Two of my friends would have to push the thousand-pound hay bale to get it rolling before I jumped on, then three friends— to whom I owe a lot—would have to try to catch it halfway down the hill. Every single time. It was madness, basically.

“I probably tried the grind on the log 150 times on the first day and didn’t come close.”

Kilimanjaro: Mountain of Greatness (2018) Hans Rey is one of my heroes in riding, almost a mentor—he’s been there and done it all. So when he asked me to join him in summiting Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro in one trip, I jumped at the chance. I’d had a lot of bike time that summer, having just filmed Wee Day Out, but I wouldn’t say I was particularly fit. That said, I was about to climb Kilimanjaro with a 51-yearold who has a passion for whisky and beer, so I thought I’d be fine fitness-wise. It ended up being a hell of a trip. We made a quick ascent on Mount Kenya, and I’d come straight from sea level and

never done anything at altitude before. I got altitude sickness and had to be helicoptered off.

The next day, we traveled through to Tanzania to the foot of Kilimanjaro and, the day after that, started making our way up. My body fared a lot better up there. That final climb with the bike on my back is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—nobody normally carries that weight at that altitude.

Type 2 fun—I think that’s what people call it. But the beauty of lugging your bikes up there is getting to descend 16,000 feet back down to base camp.

“This is me doing a 180 between some rails on ‘the Bridge to Nowhere.’ ”

Seaside Trials (2019)

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MARTIN BISSIG, ADIDAS OUTDOOR, DAVE MACKISON

This is a film I made for one of my new partners, Adidas. We had quite a short time frame, so I went to a place near Dunbar in Scotland that I’d scouted for Way Back Home. It’s known as “the Bridge to Nowhere” and it crosses a river, taking you to a beach [and at high tide the bridge is cut off on both sides]. I waded out in my bare feet and took my bike to get some cool shots. We filmed between Dunbar Harbour and Glen Coe so that we could have a contrast between mountain bike and trials. This is me doing a 180 between some rails. Very easy riding—although it was very windy—but it made for a cool and unusual shot.

My process hasn’t changed that much in the past 10 years.

Scouting is an important part of making the films—not wasting your time on things that won’t make it in. But I’m still as ambitious as ever, trying to come up with tricks that are really out there and that you’ve never seen anyone else do. Going through the process of trying to make them work in the way that you hoped is a lot of fun.

It’s been an amazing 10 years, and I’ve got enough ideas written down in my books to last another 50 years.

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guide Get it. Do it. See it.

VEGAS, BABY Whether you’re looking to party, eat, dance or just do some crazy #(*$, Las Vegas has new offerings that rock.

Words CARLY FISHER

GINA JOY CHONG

As revelers at Kaos nightclub at the Palms evince, Vegas is hardly suffering from an energy crisis.

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Do it Some things never change— you can still get married by an Elvis impersonator without a legally binding contract—but there’s fresh energy driving this legendary party city. The place that birthed artist residencies for Liberace, Sinatra, Elvis, Barry Manilow and Wayne Newton is now a part-time home to headliners like Cardi B, Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Gwen Stefani and Mariah Carey. The EDM party scene that lured people to Dubai, Ibiza and Berlin has returned to the Strip.

Countless outposts of the world’s hottest restaurants call Las Vegas Boulevard home, including eats from celebrity chefs like José Andrés of Bazaar Meat, David Chang of Momofuku Las Vegas and even Guy Fieri, if that’s your thing.

There’s plenty to do off the Strip, too. You can find unique indie shows, edgy burlesque and good eats in Paradise, Henderson and Spring Valley.

Or rent an ATV to bounce through the Mojave, or zip down a course in a race car or luxe sports car. Nearly every type of transportation is available to cross the Grand Canyon off your bucket list.

And if you have the desire (and available credit), Vegas is the place to make any hedonistic dream come true. In that vein, here are 10 ways to turn your next trip into a real trip.

Fear and loathing (without the drugs). You don’t need

psilocybin like Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in Knocked Up to have an extra-worldly night in Vegas. Spiegelworld, an immersive theater company, brings its experimental shows to the Strip. Opium, a psychedelic adults-only production at the Cosmopolitan, whisks its audience on a kitschy-sexy alien disco space ride.

Absinthe, Spiegelworld’s show at Caesar’s Palace, invites guests to visit 19th century Europe for a mystical circus filled with enough burlesque to make Moulin Rouge blush.

best LGBT pool party in town, stick around for Temptation Sundays at the Luxor.

Nightclubs are still cool.

The nightlife here is legendary, with long lines and last-minute headliners. Jewel Nightclub at the Aria Resort & Casino, 1Oak at the Mirage and Hakkasan Las Vegas Nightclub at the MGM Grand host a serious EDM crowd—queuing for Steve Aoki, Calvin Harris, Tiesto, Zedd, Xzibit and Desiigner. Squeeze in a set from Drake, Diplo or the Chainsmokers at XS at the Wynn, or see DJ Mustard spin at Marquee Nightclub at the Cosmopolitan. Bonus: Some dayclubs transform into outdoor nightclubs, so you can take a midnight swim at spots like Encore Beach Club.

See Gaga, Christina and Mariah in a weekend. Why

wait for pop icons to come to your local arena when you can see them in Vegas? Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey all have residencies here—it’s possible in theory to catch more than one at a time if you plan way ahead. Or extend your pilgrimage to see Gwen Stefani, Cher, Aerosmith or Rod Stewart.

Dayclubs are the new nightclubs. Vegas is made for

Channel your inner superhero—and hit up to 35 mph—at Fly Linq zipline.

Marriage, meet IG: The Joshua Vides chapel at the Palms.

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nighttime hijinx, but in the afternoon, if you’re not crushed by a hangover, you can sit poolside surrounded by state-of-the-art sound systems.

Kaos Dayclub, the latest addition to the remodeled Palms, stretches 73,000 square feet around two main pools, numerous side pools and 39 cabanas—all surrounding a behemoth 60-foot bronze Damien Hirst statue called “Demon with Bowl.” The huge Encore Beach Club at the Wynn hosts DJ residents like David Guetta, RL Grime and Flosstradamus. And for the

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PGPHOTO, COURTESY OF WALDORF ASTORIA, COURTESY OF SUNBUGGY

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as Vegas has lived many lives, but its reputation as hedonistic oasis in the desert remains unshakable. Impulsive choices are the perpetual allure of this Wild West outpost, whether it’s doubling down at the blackjack table or waking up with a hangover and a wedding ring. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” is no longer the official slogan, but that doesn’t mean reckless decadence has gone out of fashion here.

Las Vegas

Wander through a neon-lit graveyard. Ever wondered

where the relics of Vegas’s past go to die? Pay homage to the ghosts of the Stardust, Horseshoe and old steakhouses at the Neon Museum. There you can learn a lot about this noble gas and cultural symbol, and then admire more than 200 original signs that light up at sunset. Elsewhere, some of the vintage stalwarts immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s Casino are still alive and well on Fremont Street, where legends like the Golden Nugget, Binion’s Gambling Hall and the Fremont Hotel & Casino still thrive. Between the free concerts from ’90s headliners like Nelly, the Wallflowers, Vanilla Ice and Coolio and the nonstop screams of people whisking down the SlotZilla zipline and zoomline, this anachronistic antidote to the Strip is packed year round.

Have a surrealist dinner.

Are your eyes bigger than your stomach? Find out by booking a table at Blackout, a mystery dining experience where your seasonal, plant-based prix fixe meal is enjoyed in the dark.

Too weird? Cheer up: Vegas is full of incredible food options.

Chef Pierre Gagnaire’s U.S. debut, Twist.

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Rally for Sun Buggy’s Baja Chase.

DIY your own foodie crawl by hitting up Pizza Rock, an artisan pie shop from 12-time pizza world champion Tony Gemignani, experiencing the world-renowned 48-seat robata spot Aburiya Raku or visiting the countless celebritychef-backed restaurants, which include culinary legends like Charlie Palmer’s Aureole at Mandalay Bay, Roy Choi’s Best Friend at the Park MGM and French chef Pierre Gagnaire’s debut U.S. restaurant, Twist, at the Waldorf Astoria.

Elope like a proud tourist.

For better or worse, Vegas is a place where many still go to tie the knot—including a few who didn’t intend to. While traditionalists may prefer to hit up 24-hour-spot A Little White

Chapel as a special drive-up destination for 3 a.m. declarations of commitment, new schoolers might prefer how Guatemalan-American graphic designer and visual artist Joshua Vides reinterprets classic kitsch into an immersive contemporary installation titled “Till Death Do Us Part” inside the Pearl Concert Theater at the Palms Casino Resort. The black-and-white wedding chapel looks like a living graphic novel, which means even if your quickie union doesn’t last, at least you’ll still have a cool IG post.

Drive it like you stole it.

Did you secretly harbor a fantasy of starring in 2 Fast, 2 Furious? Make your own wishes come true by booking a race car driving experience at Dream Racing, Speedvegas or Exotics Racing—where you can burn rubber in an exotic Ferrari, Lamborghini or Porsche. Or get dirty off the tarmac by booking a 4WD, ATV or UTV tour of the Mojave Desert, Red Rock Canyon or Death Valley through outfits like Sun Buggy & ATV Fun Rentals, Las Vegas ATV Tours and DeTour Vegas.

Get high (in the sky). The Linq Promenade at Caesar’s Palace is home to Fly Linq, a 1,121-foot zipline that allows you to soar seated, superhero or backwards over 12 stories at speeds up to 35 miles per hour.

If drinks and a view are more your speed, hit up the Linq’s High Roller Ferris Wheel, which soars 550 feet above the Strip. There’s no shortage of chopper rides in Vegas, but if you don’t want to spend a few Benjamins or commit a full afternoon to soaring over the Grand Canyon, operators like Sundance Helicopters and Canyon Tours offer evening lifts for less than $100.

Go down a rabbit hole. Las

Vegas is a weird and wonderful place, where something strange is often hiding in plain sight. One lovely treasure is the Twilight Zone-themed mini golf at Bally’s. While this spot isn’t a seen-and-be-seen party hub, it’s undeniably cool.

After all, playing 18 holes of putt-putt on a glow-in-thedark course backed by kitschy cautionary tales from the 1960s is an experience you won’t find anywhere else—and incredibly Instagram-worthy.

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Do it TRAIN LIKE A PRO

“I DON’T KNOW ANY OTHER SPEED THAN BASKETBALL” WNBA star Breanna Stewart gives a behind-the-scenes look at how she prepares for game day with the Seattle Storm.

As her team’s forward, Stewart is constantly on the move. “In the game now, the ball’s going through the forward all the time,” she says. Stewart drives the ball down the court or sends a shot from the outside. Then without missing a beat, she posts up under the basket on defense. “It gets physical when you’re playing on the post, playing down low, banging with the bigger bodies,” she says. Stewart plainly has the skills. In 2018, she led her team to a WNBA title, and her wellrounded talent earned her the league’s MVP prize. A ruptured Achilles sent the 25-year-old to the sidelines in April, so she spent the 2019 season working toward her return to the sport she loves. “I just fell in love with the competitiveness of it—and just wanting to win.”

“Sometimes, people just think we show up and play, then go home and show up at the next game,” Stewart says. “But we put in a lot more work behind the scenes.”

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Fitness

C O N D ITI O N I N G

“The best way to get into game shape is to play basketball.“

“I like to have a schedule and keep things consistent.”

“I don’t really know any other speed than basketball. I’ve just been playing it forever. It’s a stopand-go game. You can be running up and down for a while, then stop, then you have to go again. We don’t do much conditioning work during the season, because we’re playing almost three games each week.

But during the preseason we do some sprints on the court, and riding the Airdyne bike, which really sucks—whether you’re in shape or not, you’re dying on that thing. And a lot of different cardio machines and kinds of cardio exercises. And just playing— nothing compares to it.”

“I need to make sure that my body is ready and that means getting in the weight room. I just work everything—upper and lower body.

I also do Pilates to make sure that my core is strong. When I’m on the court, I’m using everything, so I want to make sure that my whole body is ready to go. I usually spend an hour in the gym, then we spend about two hours on the court for practice. I do drills—like I’ll work on my post game. It helps to have someone to work with you to make sure you’re getting pushed. After practice, I do an hour of shooting drills. I like to have a schedule and keep things consistent.”

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JEN SEE

“I want to stay ahead of letting my body break down.”

GARTH MILAN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

WO R K ETH I C

“My muscles get really tight, so I’ll get them worked on before and after practice. I like going in the steam room and the hot tub; that makes my body feel good on the day after games. And doing yoga and really all the recovery things— the foam rolling, muscle flossing, the list goes on and on. I’ll go in the hot tub before practice and the cold tub after. The cold tub helps get the lactic acid and everything out of your legs. I try to make sure that I’m doing everything I can to keep my body feeling good. I want to stay ahead of letting my body break down, which allows injuries to happen.”

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“WE ALWAYS PRACTICE BEFORE WE TRAVEL.” “We’ll never travel and then practice—it’s just a nightmare. Nobody can move and it’s just a waste.

When I’m flying, I use a Firefly device on my legs, which stimulates blood flow and prevents swelling after being on the plane. I like to bring small packages of almond butter, trail mix and maybe beef jerky. When I get where I’m going, I’ll put my feet up on the wall.”

I NJ U RY C O M E BAC K

“I’m not going to lie—the beginning was super tough.”

“Rupturing your Achilles is the worst. It’s been about having confidence that when it’s time to be back, I’ll be back to where I was.

You have to listen to your body. You can only go as fast as your body wants you to go. Now I can see myself actually doing it and it’s a lot easier. I can see the end result and the end goal. I’m running on a treadmill and I can jump now.

At the beginning, when I couldn’t move at all, I was like, this is terrible. You’ll never understand how you got hurt. I did all the stuff— why? What happened? You’re never going to know the answer, so it’s better to look forward.”

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GUI D E

5 Do it

November / December December Art Basel Miami Beach At this glamorous and splashy art fair in Miami, more than 80,000 people gather to explore offerings from more than 4,000 artists from some of America’s top galleries—all while partying and rubbing elbows with celebrities. If you have a deep pocket, then great art is available to purchase for those who seek everything from established artists and rising stars to bona fide discoveries of new talent.

Thru December 8; artbasel.com

5

December

BIRDS OF PREY

The best ski racers from around the globe head to Beaver Creek, Colorado, for one of the most challenging stops on the men’s World Cup tour. The Birds of Prey racecourse has a starting altitude of 11,500 feet and a vertical drop of 2,470 feet—but you can safely watch the competitors (for free) while they rocket down the mountain at speeds up to 80 mph.

Plus, in between races, you can sip on craft beers, listen to some local music, ice skate or nab an autograph from one of your idols during scheduled athlete signings.

Thru December 8; bcworldcup.com

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In the last two weeks in November, more than 40 artists will gather in the Windy City for a series of innovative performances, but if you can only hit one event, don’t miss local rapper Saba and the remaining members of the Pivot Gang, as they pay tribute to John Walt, a member of the group who was killed in 2017.

Ticket proceeds will go to the John Walt Foundation, which offers scholarships to young local artists. redbull.com/chicago

7

December Battle at the Berrics Finals

For the past decade, this revered private indoor skatepark in L.A. has hosted a professional game of S.K.A.T.E. in a bracket-style tournament. This year marks the first-ever women’s competition, where pro skaters will go head to head with amateurs who’ve been hand-picked via a social media campaign. The finals of this groundbreaking event will air live on December 7 on Red Bull TV. redbull.tv

29

December Snow Globe Music Festival Even if it’s a little chilly in Lake Tahoe, it’s easy to warm up when you’re dancing in a tight crowd to the likes of headline DJs such as Skrillex, Fisher, Louis the Child, Griz, Gigantic Nghtmre and more. The threenight festival features dozens of artists spread over three stages, ending with a fireworks display to ring in the new year.

Thru December 31; snowglobemusicfestival.com

THE RED BULLETIN

STEVEN KONREICH, ART BASEL

29

November Red Bull Music Fest Chicago

See it

November / December Off the rails: Finnish freeskier Antti Ollila

A WORLD WITHOUT LIMITS

STEPHAN SUTTO, LUKAS PILZ/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, FUTURE7MEDIA/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Skiing as a state of mind; the wildest of mountain bike rides; all-areas access to the stars of enduro— you’ll find all this and more on Red Bull TV this month.

25

November FILM

THE COLLECTIVE

Shot on location across the world, this film transports the viewer from the peaks of the Bernese Alps to the deep snow of Hakuba, Japan, to the winding Powder Highway of British Columbia. Filmmakers and top freeskiers including Will Berman, Cody Cirillo, Caroline Claire, Mac Forehand, Mathilde Gremaud, Alex Hall and Sarah Höfflin join forces to explore the individual goals—but common purpose—of this diverse group. The message: Skiing is collective.

12

November ON

DEMAND

ROB WARNER’S WILD RIDES

WATCH RED BULL TV ANYWHERE

Red Bull TV is a global digital entertainment destination featuring programming that is beyond the ordinary and is available anytime, anywhere.

Go online at redbull.tv, download the app or connect via your Smart TV. To find out more, visit redbull.tv

THE RED BULLETIN

Former MTB World Cup winner and commentator Rob Warner joins the world’s best riders in search of virgin terrain where they can test their limits.

Be warned: Mountain biking is about to get wild.

4

December ON

DEMAND

WESS DIARIES: SEASON FINALE

This year’s World Enduro Super Series came to a close at the famous Getzenrodeo. Go behind the scenes in Drebach, Germany, and meet the elite riders who made the 2019 season so unmissable.

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PRESENT PERFECT

Inventive holiday gift ideas for people who love tech, adventure, travel or working out.

Words GRANT DAVIS

With a speaker and light show, the JBL Pulse 4 is a party waiting to happen.

GU I D E

T E C H

LIGHT SHOW

SOUND STRATEGY

PRIVATE CELL

FINE PRINT

SOUND MOVE

SMALL PRODUCTION

JBL’s new Pulse 4 Bluetooth speaker and FM radio is a modern-day lava lamp that uses a 360-degree LED light show to match colors to the music’s beat—you can customize a light show using the JBL Connect app. The waterand dirtproof sound system can run up to 12 hours on one charge and also syncs to other Pulse 4s simply by shaking one next to another.

And if you don’t want to blast tunes, you can just use it for an ambient light show. $250; jbl.com

Transforming your favorite Instagram snaps into real photographs just got a whole lot easier thanks to the Polaroid Lab printer. Simply place your smartphone face down on top of the Lab. A camera inside the compact unit snaps a picture of your phone’s screen—and just a split-second later, a color Polaroid print slides out of the bottom. You can also use the Lab to produce collages integrating up to nine frames. $130; us.polaroidoriginals.com THE RED BULLETIN

Multiplayer gaming relies on a killer comms device like the HyperX Cloud Revolver S gaming headset. Precise, Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound audio tuning ensures you can hear “where” sounds come from inside the game. Memory foam ear cups fit comfortably for hours of play. The Revolver S’s signature feature is the handheld USB remote with DSP Sound Card that lets you control your mic and sound without fiddling with the headphones. $150; hyperxgaming.com

Sonos, the nice folks who made streaming, whole-home speaker systems a thing, take their game outside with their portable Move speaker.

The weatherproof and drop-proof cylinder packs two Class-D amps, a downward-facing tweeter and a midrange woofer, is Bluetooth or Wi-Fi compatible, works with Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa and features a slick, wirelesscharging base stand that can charge the battery to 50 percent in an hour. $399; sonos.com

If you find yourself in remote places without cell reception, create your own with goTenna’s Mesh transmitters. Each lighter-sized unit connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth and sends and receives private texts over its own instant network. Range is roughly 4 miles. It’s a good workaround for global travel where you don’t need to access local cell to connect with your group or at festivals where the local cell network is overloaded. $179/pair; gotennamesh.com

The action cam just got an upgrade. The GoPro Max packs three lenses: a 1080p forward-facing camera and a front-and rear-facing dual lens for 360 video. For selfie-video, there’s a color LCD screen so you can really see what you’re shooting. As for sound, the tiny unit uses six mics for crisp 360-degree stereo recording.

And the Max is tough, too: waterproof to a depth of 16 feet as well as drop- and shockproof. $500; gopro.com 89

GUI D E

A DV E N T U R E

THE SCRAMBLERS

Five Ten invented the approach shoe with the original Guide Tennie, designed for miles of trekking, scrambling over rockfall and even technical climbing in the mountains. The sticky soles made from Five Ten’s proprietary Stealth S1 rubber grip onto rock like Velcro, and a handbeveled toe box allows for precise foot placement on precarious edges and ledges.

Sock-like uppers cinch around ankles to keep out dirt and pebbles. $120; adidas.com

CLEAN ENERGY

There’s little worse than coming off a trail or out of the water only to marinate in your own stink on the ride home. That’s why NEMO Equipment’s Helio LX Pressure Shower is a godsend. The insulated 5.8-gallon reservoir collects solar heat while you’re out on an adventure. When ready, the foot pump pressurizes the water tank and shoots it out of a 7-foot hose. At full pressure, the shower will hose you down for 7-plus minutes, leaving you clean and refreshed. $150; nemoequipment.com

HOT STUFF

On the coldest days this winter, Marmot’s West Rib down jacket has you covered. This new waterresistant coat uses a proprietary system of cubes filled with 800-fill down inside the jacket to maximize loft—aka insulation—and integrates lightweight Pertex nylon for windproof protection.

The insulation even extends to the hood, making this an ideal cocoon for subzero fun. Thoughtful touches include an internal gear organizer and zippered hand pockets. $600; marmot.com

These shoes offer the protection of a trail shoe and the fit of a sock.

PARTY CASE

Looking for a waterproof, crushproof storage case and Bluetooth speaker system for parties on the beach or at the lake? The DemerBox DB2 is a retrofitted Pelican Case that doubles as a subwoofer with two speakers attached. The internal battery can power a party and your smartphone for 40 hours. A software upgrade lets you pair your phone with up to six different DemerBoxes for a seamless, venue-wide, wireless sound system. $349; demerbox.com 90

GO-TO TOOL

Leatherman multitools are legendary for saving lives in emergencies as well as helping repair almost anything on the fly. Still, that didn’t stop the 36-year-old company from coming out with the ultimate multitasker, the Leatherman Free P4. With 21 different tools, including the company’s classic pliers, knife, saw and screwdrivers, the Free P4 ought to help get you out of almost any hairy situation. $140; leatherman.com

FITS LIKE A GLOVE

For an adventure in warmer, more tropical climes, slip on a pair of Merrell Trail Glove 5s. These minimalist trail shoes offer the protection of a trail shoe with the fit of a sock. Merrell’s Barefoot 2 construction marries super flexibility with the support underfoot and toe protection of a traditional trail shoe. A Vibram outsole promises superior traction on dry land and in the water.

Mesh uppers keep feet cool no matter what the humidity. $100; merrell.com THE RED BULLETIN

Even if conditions get arctic, the West Rib down jacket will keep you toasty.

The Garmin Venu is made for serious athletes with a sense of style.

You can download 500 songs off Spotify for phonefree listening.

GU I D E

F I T N E S S

SICK KICKS

BASELINE COMFORT

WATCH IT

FEELING IN KNEAD?

RUNNING COMFORT

SMALL LIFT

Puma’s LQDCELL Origin trainers take the best aspect of a running shoe—a hexagonal matrix of cells underneath the heal and midfoot for cushioning—and meld it to the solid foundation of a cross-training sneaker. The result is a stylish pair of super soft and comfy street kicks that can handle almost any workout you throw at ’em—running, court sports, strength training, you name it. $120; us.puma.com

Forget the ibuprofen—speed up your recovery with a Theragun Liv muscle massager. The vibrating, padded knob goes right to work on tight and sore muscles with all the aggressiveness of a Russian bath house masseuse, kneading out tightness and increasing blood flow to the afflicted area. You can also use the Theragun, which weighs only 2.5 pounds, to help stimulate and warm up your body before a training session or activity. $249; theragun.com THE RED BULLETIN

Base layers are a key to staying warm while doing any winter activity, and the people behind Brynje, the brand from Norway, know a thing or two about that. Their unique Wool Thermo long-sleeved base layer uses a mesh fabric for maximum airflow and loft—the design helps create a space to trap body heat between skin and your next layer while allowing for perspiration to escape your skin. In short, a go-to option for hard-charging winter athletes. $80; brynjeusa.com

Pull on the Voormi Road Runner Hoodie and stay warm and dry while running hard. The lightweight wool fabric retains heat naturally even when drenched in your sweat or rain, and it’s woven with proprietary high-visibility fibers that drivers will notice during your predawn/ after-sunset workouts. It has thumb loops and a hood that’s cut for a snug fit so it won’t billow out into a parachute even when you do speed work. $129; voormi.com

For serious multisport athletes, Garmin has a new svelte, stylish GPS watch, the waterproof Venu. It can clock the usual sports (running, biking) as well as some new ones (cross-country skiing, swimming, weight lifting, among others).

Its wrist-based heart rate monitor negates the need for a chest strap. For music, download a playlist of up to 500 songs off Spotify for phonefree music listening via your Bluetooth wireless headphones. $399; garmin.com

The brain trust behind the new Handy Gym was inspired by NASA and its method for making a compact cable gym for astronauts to use in zero gravity. The 2-pound gizmo attaches to anything firm and enables you to do one-handed cable pushes and pulls at any angle with a resistance up to 220 pounds.

Attach it to a deck or floor and a weight belt and you can even do weighted squats and lunges. $500; handygymfit.com 93

GUI D E

T R AV E L

MUG SHOT

Yeti is justifiably famous for its vacuum insulated coolers and tumblers that can keep drinks and ice cold for days. Its new 10-ounce Scrambler travel mugs can do the same, but they’re best used to keep your precious coffee hot all morning. Geared for the car-camping/ overlanding set, these smaller mugs can conveniently stack on top of each other, saving precious space inside your rig’s kitchen. $25 each; yeti.com

GAME ON

Sometimes even the best trips bring unexpected downtime—things like long flight delays, train trips or time stuck in your tent waiting out inclement weather. In all these situations, nothing beats a deck of cards for passing the time.

(They’re also pretty handy at happy hour.) With these uses and more in mind, Filson offers a retro set of Bicycle Frontier playing cards, decks adorned with wildlife illustrations from the 1800s. $22; filson.com

PERSONAL TRANSLATOR

Google escalates the earbuds arms race with its innovative new Pixel Buds, which can translate nearly 40 different foreign languages into English (and vice versa) in real time. Just pair the earpieces with an Android phone, then touch a button to enable Google Translate. Now hold the phone out so its mic can pick up the foreign tongue and translate it and voice the words in English to the buds. Who needs to learn another language anymore. $159; store.google.com

This palm-sized disc lets you buy Wi-Fi time by the day, month or GB.

WALK ON CLOUDS

Slip on a pair of lightweight HokaOneOne Hupana Flow Wool sneakers on your next whirlwind travel adventure. Their deep, cushioned sole will keep your legs feeling fresh through day after day of cultural attractions or around-town walking. The wool uppers naturally fend off stink, are comfortable whether it’s hot or cold out and look just classy enough to wear out to dinner and into the night. $120; hokaoneone.com 94

PRIVATE CONNECTION

Make sketchy Wi-Fi connections and a jumble of SIM cards things of the past with help from a Skyroam Solis X Global LTE Wi-Fi port. The palm-sized disc allows you to buy Wi-Fi time by the day, month or GB; supports up to 10 devices; and does it all on a secure, encrypted network that works in 130 countries worldwide— including the entire Western Hemisphere and most of Europe. $150, plus $10/24 hrs of Wi-Fi; skyroam.com

HOT POCKET

Bitter cold and blazing heat can hasten the death of smartphone batteries, hence the Phoozy Apollo Series smartphone case. The insulated pouch blocks 90 percent of radiant heat from cooking your phone and triples battery life in sub-freezing temps. All that waterproof insulation does triple-duty, protecting a phone from shattering due to drops up to 6 feet high and floating if you drop it into the water. $30; phoozy.com THE RED BULLETIN

Banish cold camp coffee with Yeti’s Scrambler travel mugs.

GLOBAL TEAM

THE RED BULLETIN WORLDWIDE

The Red Bulletin is published in six countries. This month’s Swiss edition features alpine ski racer Marco Odermatt, who won five gold medals at the 2018 Junior World Championships.

For more stories beyond the ordinary, go to redbulletin.com

Disclaimer If you subscribed to The Red Bulletin magazine in the USA either by mail, online or other method, we may send you offers through direct mail that we feel might be of interest to you and/or share your name and mailing address and certain other information, such as when you first subscribed, with reputable companies that provide marketing offers through direct mail. If you do not want us to send you any offers from third parties through direct mail or share your personal Information with other companies so that they can send you direct mail offers about their products and services, please write to us at the street address or subscription email address above. Please note that even if you opt out of receiving promotional direct mail offers, we may continue to send you service notifications by direct mail that are related to your The Red Bulletin account(s).

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Editor-in-Chief Alexander Macheck Deputy Editors-in-Chief Andreas Rottenschlager, Nina Treml Creative Director Erik Turek Art Directors Kasimir Reimann (deputy CD), Miles English Head of Photo Eva Kerschbaum Deputy Head of Photo Marion Batty Photo Director Rudi Übelhör Production Editor Marion Lukas-Wildmann Managing Editor Ulrich Corazza Copy Chief Andreas Wollinger Editors Jakob Hübner, Werner Jessner, Alex Lisetz, Stefan Wagner Design Marion Bernert-Thomann, Martina de CarvalhoHutter, Kevin Goll, Carita Najewitz Photo Editors Susie Forman, Ellen Haas, Tahira Mirza Head of Commercial & Publishing Management Stefan Ebner Publishing Management Sara Varming (manager), Ivona Glibusic, Bernhard Schmied, Melissa Stutz, Mia Wienerberger B2B-Marketing & Communication Katrin Sigl (manager), Agnes Hager, Teresa Kronreif Head of Creative Markus Kietreiber Co-Publishing Susanne Degn-Pfleger & Elisabeth Staber (manager), Mathias Blaha, Vanessa Elwitschger, Raffael Fritz, Marlene Hinterleitner, Valentina Pierer, Mariella Reithoffer, Verena Schörkhuber, Julia Zmek, Edith Zöchling-Marchart Commercial Design Peter Knehtl (manager), Sasha Bunch, Simone Fischer, Martina Maier, Florian Solly Advertising Placement Manuela Brandstätter, Monika Spitaler Head of Production Veronika Felder Production Walter O. Sádaba, Friedrich Indich, Sabine Wessig Repro Clemens Ragotzky (manager), Claudia Heis, Nenad Isailovi c,̀ Sandra Maiko Krutz, Josef Mühlbacher Operations Michael Thaler (MIT), Alexander Peham, Yvonne Tremmel (Office Management) Subscriptions and Distribution Peter Schiffer (manager), Klaus Pleninger (distribution), Nicole Glaser (distribution), Yoldaş Yarar (subscriptions) Global Editorial Office Heinrich-Collin-Straße 1, A-1140 Vienna Tel: +43 1 90221 28800, Fax: +43 1 90221 28809 redbulletin.com Red Bull Media House GmbH Oberst-Lepperdinger-Straße 11-15, A-5071 Wals bei Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700 General Manager and Publisher Andreas Kornhofer Directors Dietrich Mateschitz, Gerrit Meier, Dietmar Otti, Christopher Reindl

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Action highlight

Brazilian Felipe Gustavo originally wanted to follow in the footsteps of his country’s soccer-playing heroes—stars such as Pelé and Neymar. But then he swapped the ball for a board, and the rest was street skateboarding history. In the video All On Me, the 28-year-old journeys through New York, musing on his life in the U.S. and the decisions that took him to the top of his sport. Watch All On Me at redbull.com

The next issue of THE RED BULLETIN is out on December 17.

98

THE RED BULLETIN

JONATHAN MEHRING/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Flipping the script

ADI DAS. COM/FI V ET EN

RID ER: DJ BRANDT