The Red Bulletin UK 07/23

GREAT LENGTHS

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE CONTRIBUTORS

Olympic swimmer Tom Dean (page 30) thinks of his sporting career as a story, an autobiography he’s writing in real time. And in announcing his audacious goal of becoming Britain’s most successful-ever athlete at a single Olympics – Paris 2024 – he’s ensured the book of his life will contain action, jeopardy and, he hopes, a heroic ending. We join the 23-year-old double Olympic gold medallist to understand the dedication and meticulous hard work needed to make sporting history.

Skate royalty Ryan Sheckler (page 62) is another athlete with his mind on his legacy. After more than two decades of fast living, the 33-year-old Californian is helping inspire the next generation of skateboarding talent in different ways thanks to a newfound inner peace.

Then we meet US four-piece The Aces (page 42), who have been on their own journey of self-discovery, freeing themselves from the restrictive religious community they grew up in, coming out as queer and facing inner demons, culminating in their most honest album yet.

Enjoy the issue.

THIS ISSUE

MARK BAILEY

The freelance writer, who specialises in sport, science and adventure, travelled to Portishead to talk to our cover star, Tom Dean. “Tom’s decision to chase a medal haul that no British Olympian has dared to contemplate nudges him out of the world of mainstream sport and into the realms of exploration, innovation and adventure,” says Bailey. “It’ll be fun watching him head into new territory.” Page 30

PIPER FERGUSON

The Los Angeles-based photographer has shot many top musicians and has clients including Capitol Records, iTunes, Levi’s and Interscope. “Working with The Aces was such a dream gig,” says Ferguson, who photographed the band in an atmospheric LA lounge bar. “The electric energy was flowing from the first set-up, and the band are so grounded, sweet and lovely to be around.” Page 42

8 Gallery: a pump-track paradise in Portugal, skating meets sculpture in South Africa, aviation addicts in Austria, and climbing contingency near the Canada-US border

15 Clear winners: Albert Hammond Jr’s glass-themed playlist gives us a window on his music tastes

16 Root awakening: the Tiny Forests project is breathing new life into woodless urban spaces

19 Art of the matter: Justyna Green conveys painful home truths through humorous illustrations

20 “ Hi, is Jonah there?”: the marine biologists eavesdropping the conversations of sperm whales

22 Going out out: remote clubbing with Detour Discotheque

24 Teresa Bonvalot

In surfing, the next wipeout is never far away, but this young Portuguese isn’t scared of setbacks

CONTENTS

July

26

Alfie Hewett

The men’s wheelchair tennis world number one has his eye on further net gains, starting with this year’s Wimbledon

28 Iqra Ismail

The story of one young player’s footballing odyssey and how it helped carve a space in the game for Muslim women just like herself

30 Tom Dean

Two golds in Tokyo aren’t enough for this British freestyle swimming phenom – now he’s gunning for a magnificent seven at Paris 2024

42 The Aces

The Red Bulletin meets up with the Utah indie-rock foursome who had to make a break with the past to live their truth

50 John Webster

A whitewater kayaking tour de force as captured by the Idaho-based adventure photographer

62 Ryan Sheckler

Faith, hope and clarity: how the skate icon regained balance after addiction flipped the script

73 Swiss fashion designer Yannik Zamboni tours Zurich on skates

78 Get pit crew fit, shed a tyre – both the F1 kind and the spare variety

80 Plain sailing: master the boat simulator game Virtual Regatta

82 In the zone: one Polish pilot, one truly audacious landing

84 Adventure kit that refuses to stay indoors, even when it’s raining

92 East mode: these six Hackney bars are a cut above the rest

94 Essential dates for your calendar

98 Outdoors wisdom from Semi-Rad

LISBON, PORTUGAL Pump it up

July 8, 1497: Vasco de Gama sets sail from Lisbon on his historic voyage to India. October 18, 2020: this venue in Parque das Nações hosts its first Red Bull UCI Pump Track World Championships qualifier. The link? None, though Vasco de Gama Bridge is very close by. In pump track, riders bomb around a circuit of rollers, banked turns and jumps using only their body weight and the track’s contours, not their pedals, to build and maintain momentum. Could the great explorer have reached Kerala without using his sails? No chance. redbullcontentpool.com

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Kick start

When Leticia Bufoni began skating at the age of nine, she was the only girl on a board in her São Paolo neighbourhood. During her tour of South Africa in March this year – ‘Leticia Pushes Mzansi’ – the six-time X-Games gold medallist passed on her knowledge to the next generation via clinics and workshops. In between, the Brazilian found time to ride at Cape Town’s stunning Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art, dubbed ‘Africa’s Tate Modern’. Would it be too corny to call this ‘skate of the art’? Yeah, thought so. redbullcontentpool.com

SALZBURG, AUSTRIA

Soar point

It’s easy to tell when The Flying Bulls are passing overhead – you’ll see aviation fanatics staring skyward with facial expressions combining awe and envy. Formed in 1999, this privileged group of pilots and technicians have access to the best historical aircraft, from iconic planes to classic helicopters. Here we see The Flying Bulls’ Cessna 337 Skymaster – a unique model with a ‘push-pull’ propeller set-up – in the skies near to their base in Salzburg. Look closely and you might spot a few green faces on the ground. flyingbulls.at; redbullcontentpool.com

NORTH IDAHO, USA Put

on hold

When the COVID lockdowns of early 2020 made self-isolation mandatory, many people were crawling up the walls – none so literally as those at photographer Ben Herndon’s home in north Idaho, which has a climbing set-up in the garage. On his Instagram, Herndon acknowledged the importance of avoiding risky outdoor activities that might burden the emergency services. “The good news is there are plenty of ways to get hurt from home!” he added. Too right, you should see the Olympic-size diving board in his en suite. benherndon.com; redbullillume.com

Glass act

The Strokes guitarist and solo artist reveals four tunes that give him a sense of clarity

In April this year, Albert Hammond Jr – guitarist and singer-songwriter with Grammy-winning New York City rockers The Strokes, and a solo artist since 2016 – played with the band in Minneapolis. After the show, they listened to one of his playlists. First there was a track by minimalist composer Philip Glass, followed by Nick Lowe’s 1978 hit I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, which prompted Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti to ask if there was an intentional theme. “I was like, ‘No, but I should keep this going – it seems fun,’” recalls Hammond Jr, now 43. To mark the release of his fifth solo album, Melodies on Hiatus, here he does exactly that. Melodies on Hiatus is out on June 23; redbullrecords.com

Nick Lowe I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass (1978)

“While renovating my house, I stayed in Villa Carlotta, this cool apartment building in LA where a lot of musicians and actors stay. I became friends with the musician Joy Downer, and she had this on her playlist. I was like, ‘Wow, what is this?’ I love Nick Lowe, but I wasn’t aware of [this song]. It’s so cool when you discover a song you didn’t know by someone you like.”

Blondie Heart of Glass (1978)

“In our early days, we got referenced to some bands I didn’t really listen to until other people said it – [bands] like Blondie. Blondie are great, and it’s so cool to see them still play. When you’re younger, you want to live fast, die young. Then you get older and you realise it’s so exciting to keep creating and changing, and what you lose with age you gain in wisdom and ability.”

Philip Glass

String Quartet No. 3 (1985)

“I do sauna and ice baths with friends every Sunday. One time in the sauna, this [track] came on and, even though I’m a huge Philip Glass fan, I didn’t know it. I fell in love with it instantly! It’s a song I usually put on every playlist, because it cleanses the palate of anything, and it’s fun to listen to when you’re driving at night. It’s inspirational for creating, too, if you’re in a lull period.”

Julian Casablancas Glass (2009)

“This is a song from [Strokes singer] Julian’s first solo record that I’ve always loved. He’s amazing at melody, Even if I don’t know what he’s saying sometimes, the word combination with the melody always brings melancholy. He’s really good at hitting you with little things that reflect your life. So regardless of what he’s saying, you’re having thoughts about your own life.”

TINY FORESTS

Planting hope

Using an ingenious method for accelerating growth, this project is creating small areas of flourishing woodland in unlikely urban spaces

In a space the size of a tennis court, nestled between the old BBC Broadcasting House and Queens Park Rangers’ football ground in west London, 600 trees have laid down roots. In time, this small patch of land in Hammersmith Park will be home to a thriving mini-forest, and it will happen sooner than you might think possible.

This is one of almost 200 fast-growing Tiny Forests that have been planted across the UK since the launch of the project by environmental charity Earthwatch in 2020. Its aim: to turn underused urban land into flourishing natural forests using an ingenious method to accelerate growth. As senior programme manager

dating back decades, Tiny Forests grow quickly.

“The planting methodology is based on a technique developed in the 1970s by a Japanese botanist named Dr Akira Miyawaki,” says Hartley. “Trees are planted closer together than they typically would be – around 30cm apart. This drives competition [between them] and faster forest development… We planted our first Tiny Forest in Witney in Oxfordshire in 2020, and most of the trees are now above adult height. After five years, you’ll be able to walk beneath the canopy of the forest. Between five and ten years, you’ll see it establish.”

Modelled on a widespread adoption of the Miyawaki method pioneered by Dutch nature organisation IVN, Tiny Forests have sprung up everywhere from Belfast and Bristol to inner-city Birmingham. It takes a team of 20 to 30 people just one day to lay the foundations of a forest that could last hundreds of years. Even better, while these forests require some initial TLC –weeding and watering by a network of more than 400 tree-keeping volunteers –they are soon self-sufficient.

Louise Hartley explains, even a small space can make a big impact. “The challenges our planet is facing with huge biodiversity loss and climate change can sometimes feel overwhelming,” she says. “With Tiny Forests, I can see the tangible effects of physically enhancing urban spaces and making our cities greener.”

Those effects include creating wildlife habitats, tackling climate change by increasing carbon capture and cooling urban spaces, and offering human inhabitants the chance to enjoy nature in even the most built-up of areas. But speed is crucial, and thanks to an innovative, nature-mimicking philosophy

But the biggest advantage of the small footprint is that these forests can prosper where space is at a premium, transforming areas with low biodiversity into super-rich resources for wildlife.

“Through planting trees and leaving the leaf litter on the ground, you’re improving the soil quality and that’s great for supporting ground-dwelling organisms,” says Hartley. “Flowering species are great for pollinators, and the forest is also providing shelter for small mammals and birds.”

With a goal of 500 forests planted in the UK by 2030, the impact of Tiny Forests, despite their size, is mighty. tinyforest.earthwatch.org

NUROAD C:62

THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE YOUR OWN PATH

Drawing from experience

This illustrator’s work helps others express painful universal feelings when words are hard to find

A series of brightly coloured illustrations show a woman going about her daily routine, taking meetings, going out for coffee, making dinner at home. But around her lower abdomen in all these images are a tangle of monstrous black-and-white tentacles. Sometimes they clench tightly, making the woman squirm in pain; other times they loosen and slither around the periphery, not demanding her full attention yet always present. Half of the world’s population, specifically those who have periods, will immediately feel the discomfort conveyed by these images – and that is the power of Justyna Green’s art.

The award-winning, Londonbased illustrator creates pieces that explore and communicate elements of people’s lives that usually remain hidden and taboo, too difficult to articulate. From painful periods to existential dread, struggles with anxiety to the fear of failure, Green confronts these issues with humour, colour and optimism.

It was her own experiences with endometriosis that inspired the 35-year-old to use art in this way. While in her early thirties, around the same time that she started pursuing a career in

illustration, Green began to suffer severe period pains every month. With no point of reference, she found it difficult to accurately describe the discomfort to doctors, and it took two years to receive a diagnosis. “At the hospital, I’d be asked how much pain I felt [on a scale of] one to 10, but I just couldn’t imagine putting the pain to numbers,” Green recalls. “It was this huge thing that would take over my whole body and my mental health.”

To explain her symptoms, last year Green created Raw, a zine that uses her trademark bold and ebullient creations to express the overwhelming experience of living with endometriosis. “I was alone with a lot of pain,” she says. “Drawing my symptoms made me realise how amazing illustration can be in bringing to life feelings that are hard to put into words. Lots of women got in touch, saying that it showed exactly how they felt, too, and that it helped them.” Green’s work has now explored various subjects surrounding physical and mental health, as well as significant topics such as loneliness and the decision to have children. “These are moments in life where we can feel so vulnerable, but they’re entirely human,” she explains. “I try to normalise the idea that pain and suffering are just a part of life, and to help us all be kinder to ourselves. Instead of skipping over the hard bits, my illustrations turn them into stories, allowing me to make friends with them, be more accepting of them, and take away some of their power.” justynagreen.com

Unlocking their language

communicate. Set up in 2020, this massive collaborative effort between marine biologists, roboticists, cryptographers, linguists and AI experts aims to capture all audible forms of whale communication using a combination of unobtrusive ‘swimming robots’, tiny computers attached by suction cup to the creatures themselves and hundreds of strategically placed underwater microphones, or hydrophones.

The information gathered will be added to the findings of a team from The Dominica Sperm Whale Project, who have studied a single population of whales since 2005. Then computer scientists, with the assistance of advanced machine-learning technology, will analyse all this available data to help identify patterns and meanings.

Thanks to this ambitious, hi-tech initiative, one day we may all be able to speak whale

The ability to communicate with other creatures in their language is something that’s usually reserved for the realms of fantasy and science fiction, from Doctor Dolittle to the Babel Fish, the mythical universal translator in Douglas Adams’ 1979 comedy novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But a groundbreaking project is utilising the latest in robotics and AI to bring us a step closer to making this a reality, starting with sperm whales.

The sperm whale has the largest brain of any species, and it shares many surprising traits with humans, including forward planning, feelings of love and intuition, as well as

speech. “They’re absolutely magical creatures that have permeated our imaginations for centuries,” says US marine biologist David Gruber. “There are just so many mysteries [around] them. Until the 1950s, we scientists didn’t even know sperm whales were making sounds. We’re just beginning to have the tools to get a portal into their lives.”

Gruber is heading up the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or Project CETI, a scientist-led, not-for-profit initiative based on the Caribbean island of Dominica, which is using cutting-edge tech to help deepen our understanding of how these complex marine mammals

“The easiest way to think about it is to think about how you learn language,” Gruber explains. “You watch and listen to your parents and you notice associations. What we’re doing here is trying to train the computers to essentially be a baby whale, to learn the language from the bottom up. We’re focusing a lot on mothercalf relationships.”

The scientists’ aim is to test their findings by attempting to communicate with whales in their own language, a huge step forward that Gruber hopes will help us safeguard the mammals’ communities better. “We need to know how we’re impacting them,” he says. “If we could understand [the whales’] communication, we could understand how human disruptions are affecting them and better protect them in the future.”

Project CETI’s findings could also provide a blueprint for understanding communication between other species, such as elephants, gorillas and birds. And maybe even Vogon poetry. projectceti.org

THE MOST CAPABLE RARELY GO IT ALONE.

THE MOST CAPABLE RARELY GO IT ALONE.

THE MOST CAPABLE RARELY GO IT ALONE.

Taking the foor

How one former editorial director swapped the work treadmill for a pop-up disco, bringing the party to places it’s never been before

In March this year, Jonny Ensall quit his job to run a disco. He was at the peak of his career as an editorial director for a travel media company; for years he’d worked hard for promotions, pay rises, influence even. But slowly, something began to shift within him.

“I think we’re taught there’s something meaningful in all that [stuff],” the 37-year-old from Huddersfield (pictured) says of his former ambitions.

“But I began to ask why. I found that, increasingly, there’s so much more value in finding something you genuinely believe in and just doing it.”

Ensall’s dream was Detour Discotheque, the world’s most

remote ‘pop-up’ disco. The concept is simple: gather people and DJs from far and wide – plus mirror balls –once a year for a weekend of parties in some of the most beautiful locations our planet has to offer.

The idea came to Ensall in 2019 when, while on a work trip to the fishing village of Þingeyri, Iceland, he found himself stranded by snow and ended up at the hjónaball, a traditional couples dance rooted in community and joy. “Everyone came together, and this kind of ‘pinged’ something in my head,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the music scenes of the late ’70s

when there was a real ethos of togetherness. And I thought, what if you put that in this beautiful setting?”

The more Ensall thought about it, the more magical the idea it seemed, and his debut event – back in Þingeyri last year, beneath the gaze of the Northern Lights – was just that. Of course, it wasn’t easy. One of the challenges, Ensall says, is that the event must operate at a community level, meaning tickets for visitors are limited. There were also licensing issues, and his intended centrepiece – the world’s largest mirror ball –proved too big to transport.

“It was stressful, but yeah, it was special,” says Ensall. “When we closed at 4am on the Saturday, there was this beautiful moment as the light dawned on the fjord. Everyone was coming to the end of this adventure, having made friends and spent their time dancing together.”

Now, Ensall is preparing for Detour Discotheque’s second event: “a truly cosmic disco under the Milky Way” on the Isle of Coll in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides this September. For one weekend, the island’s community of around 200 people will come together with an equal number from all over the world to take part in wild swimming, guided nature walks, a special disco-themed local market – and, of course, a party they’ll never forget.

So does Ensall, who now runs Detour Discotheque fulltime, ever regret quitting his job? “Ultimately, I felt I had nothing to lose,” he says. “Even if nobody turned up [to the event], it wouldn’t have felt like a failure, because I’d done it. I’m in a privileged position to have quit [my job] and this idea was, on paper, kind of stupid. But that’s also its strength. It’s not something that most people would do, but I believe in it.” detourdisco.com

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Riding out the storm

How do you train for that?

I work three-and-a-half days a week with a mental coach, Ana Ramires, and we focus on being more active in the water, not waiting for the wave but going after it. It creates a flow, a better rhythm, and helps me to be more consistent on each wave.

What’s your training pattern?

Teresa Bonvalot is one seriously talented surfer. The 23-year-old from Cascais, Portugal, is a fourtime national champion, a two-time WSL Europe Junior Women’s Series winner, and took the crown in the 2021-22 WSL European Qualifying Series. But in December last year she found herself crying on the podium on the North Shore of O‘ahu, Hawaii, for all the wrong reasons.

Bonvalot had been competing in the Challenger Series, hoping to make the cut for this year’s WSL Championship Tour (WCT), and at the last event, the Haleiwa Challenger, ended up with the same series score as another surfer. But as her rival had won more heats to get there, it was she who took the remaining slot; Bonvalot would miss out on joining the global elite of women’s surfing by a hair’s breadth.

On Instagram a few days later, she wrote: “It’s been the best year of my life in a competitive [sense]. I won a Challenger series event, I got third in Brazil, got two ninth places and went to the last event in Hawaii and still did a freaking final, finishing in third place. Still wasn’t enough…” Then came a lifeline: following some withdrawals, Bonvalot got through as a ‘lucky loser’. Now neither hell nor high water will stop her making the most of her second chance…

the red bulletin: How did you deal with that setback at the end of your best year?

teresa bonvalot: I wrote that post to show who I was and what I was

capable of, and a few hours later I had my motivation back. My strength rests on all the effort I’ve put in over the last few years. And it helped at that particularly hard time. We know that in high-level sport we lose more than we win, so we have to move on quickly and bounce back as quickly as we can.

What did the experience teach you about yourself?

That things don’t necessarily happen when you want them the most, but [instead] in their own time, so I must be more patient. And to accept what happens, even when it’s difficult to get your head around. The women’s tour is very strong and there aren’t many events where you can stand out, so you have to cling onto your good results from before and keep on improving to be able to grab your chance when the time comes…

Yann Martin, your team manager at Rip Curl, says you’re a fierce competitor. Would you agree? I always want to win, whatever the stakes, and not just in surfing. It’s a personality trait of mine. I’m going to fight to the end, give it my all. I keep pushing myself, over and over and over again. I always want more. There is no limit as far as I’m concerned.

How do you keep progressing?

By tapping into this perfectionism, and thanks to my ability to adapt. In the past, I tended to wait for the best wave in the heats, a wave that would potentially earn me the most points, when in reality there was little chance of it coming. Now I deal with what the ocean gives me.

In the morning, I focus on the moves, particularly the ones that are 100per-cent feasible in all conditions. In the afternoon, I apply what I did in the morning, solo, and then I take care of the physical side of things with mobility training that increases the range of motion and controls the muscles in each movement, which will help me avoid injuries.

When did you decide to become a professional surfer?

I started surfing and competing at the age of nine. I was hooked immediately, took part in every amateur competition I could, and knew that if I wanted to do things correctly I had to go pro. And when I got my first wild card at the age of 13, for a WCT competition in my hometown of Cascais, it all clicked. I was up against the best surfers in the world, and I knew this was what I wanted to do my whole life.

And now you’re up against them 10 years later on the Tour… It’s crazy! They were my idols, the world champions, the likes of Stephanie Gilmore and Carissa Moore. I admire Stephanie for her style and Carissa for her power. I would love to be a mix of the two! They’re just as good today as ever, which gives me hope for the future where my own progress is concerned.

Do you see yourself having a career as long as Kelly Slater’s?

Yes. In my first interview, I said I wanted to be the female Kelly Slater. He’s the boss, an incredible talent, and he has a permanent smile on his face. I was lucky enough to meet him a few years ago. He’s remained humble and passionate, even after turning 50.

Instagram: @teresabonvalot

The 23-year-old Portuguese surfer dreams of being the female Kelly Slater. Here, she explains how she navigates the ups and downs of a life on the waves

“I’m going to fight to the end, give it my all… I always want more”

Serving with purpose

He’s the world number one in men’s wheelchair tennis, but so far the Wimbledon singles title and Paralympic gold have eluded him. Now he’s ready to cross them off the list…

At 25, Alfie Hewett is the best in the world in both singles and doubles tennis. In 2021, Hewett and his doubles partner Gordon Reid became the first pairing to win all four Grand Slam titles in one year; in singles tennis, he has conquered the French, Australian and US Opens and won silver at the Rio 2016 Paralympics. The only goals he has yet to realise: winning a Wimbledon final and bringing home Paralympic gold.

This is a position Hewett never expected to be in. He was six when it transpired that the “growing pains” in his legs were symptoms of the hip disorder Perthes disease. As the pain got worse and walking more difficult, a wheelchair became necessary. Hewett felt, he says, like his life was over.

He’d been an active kid, so his mum sent him to a weekend camp at Stoke Mandeville Stadium, a centre for disability sports. Among the sports he tried was wheelchair tennis. “I was useless,” Hewett admits, “but I found the challenge rewarding.” On returning home to Norwich, he joined a weekly local club and became hooked. A visit to the London 2012 Paralympics proved pivotal: “That was a groundbreaking year. From then on, I wanted to work my way up.” After topping the junior rankings, he began competing against adults and won his first senior singles title aged just 14.

Incredible success followed, though not without further bumps in the road. In 2019, the International Tennis Federation announced it was changing its classifications for wheelchair tennis, and Hewett was

ruled ineligible to play on beyond the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. Two long and stressful years later, the decision was reversed, allowing the participation of any athlete who is unable to play on their feet. Since then, Hewett tells The Red Bulletin, he has doubled down on training and come back stronger, with a fresh appreciation for every opportunity to make his mark.

the red bulletin: What does tennis mean to you?

alfie hewett: [Playing tennis at a young age] was, for me, about being around other young disabled people, having a laugh, something to look forward to every week. It gave me such a purpose. That’s so powerful. Sport has always been an escape from my problems. People think, “He’s living the best life,” but there’s been a lot of upset and heartache. I was that kid who hated being in a wheelchair, who thought his life was over and he’d never get to achieve anything. If I can use my platform to make a difference [for others], that’s just as much a win as any trophy.

How did the period of uncertainty about your eligibility affect you? It’s not until it could be taken away that you realise how much you love what you do. It taught me a lot of lessons: to be present, to be mentally resilient. It’s made me a stronger person and given me a kick up the backside to have a plan B.

Have those changes stuck with you? Big time. I used to be known as an emotional player. You wouldn’t have to guess how I was feeling on the court; it’d be obvious. Now, I’m so

much more relaxed and constructive in my thoughts. The key point was just to control the controllables.

How did it feel winning the Australian Open in January?

This was the first time in my career when my emotions were completely expressed as I felt them. I burst into tears, almost uncontrollably. It was the hardest I’d ever worked. Mentally, it took me to a place I’d never been. Getting up at six, cold showers, up to six training sessions in a day, missing my birthday and my mum’s, not even letting my hair down at Christmas… it was exhausting. But the motivation and commitment were sky-high. And everything paid off. It was worth it.

What will it mean to you to play at Wimbledon this summer?

If you’re a British tennis player, it’s almost like the two weeks in the year when you’re given a real voice that people will listen to. Last year, I got to play in front of 10,000 spectators on Court One. That’s an opportunity for 10,000 people to spread the word about wheelchair tennis.

What impact can that have?

I met a seven-year-old girl in Norwich who had leg cancer and didn’t want to play wheelchair tennis – even though she’d played [the sport] on her feet – because she didn’t want to be seen in a wheelchair. I gave her mum two tickets to watch a game at Wimbledon last year, and [the girl] loved it. The following week, she went to one of the camps in Norwich. She’s now part of a weekly programme. That’s the power of visibility.

How hungry are you for gold at the Paris 2024 Paralympics?

I look at where I’m at in my career and I’ve got a Wimbledon singles title and a gold medal to tick off the bucket list. Those are the two I dreamt of as a kid. I’m very grateful to have three silver medals already [two as a doubles player, one for singles] but I think it’s time to upgrade them.

Wimbledon runs from July 3 to 16; wimbledon.com

“I’m grateful for my three silver medals, but it’s time to upgrade them”

Fighting a pitch battle

At the age of eight, the British-born Somali found a space for girls like her in football. Now 22 and established as a player, coach and club director, she’s changing the women’s game

There are many ways that Iqra Ismail might describe her career so far. She might tell you she captained the Somalia women’s football team at just 19, or that she has just been named one of Forbes’ ‘30 under 30’. She could say that she was – again, at 19 – the youngest-ever recipient of the Football Black List award, which celebrates excellence in the sport in the UK, and that she’s not just a footballer but a force for change. Oh, and she’s a model, too.

Ismail herself, now 22, describes it in simpler terms: “Actually, I just took a series of left turns and kept going.” It’s three years since she started her club, Hilltop WFC, to encourage more Muslim women to feel confident about playing football, and since then her life has “spiralled into a bunch of things I didn’t really expect it to,” she says. “I didn’t know what would happen; I just knew I had to keep going.”

Now, ahead of the Women’s World Cup this summer, Ismail is continuing her campaign to make safer, more accessible – and more fun – environments for Muslim women to find and build on their passion for the beautiful game.

the red bulletin: How did Hilltop WFC come about?

iqra ismail: It’s really daunting sometimes to go out and find a club to play for. Especially because that age-old story of girls dropping out of the sport they love aged 15 or 16 is true. I’d noticed this happening, so when I was 19 and studying at university in Portsmouth I decided

to run a charity football tournament and see what happened. Five teams signed up, then loads of their friends came along to support, too. And basically they all looked like me, which was a huge change. It got me thinking how many of them wanted to play but didn’t have a club. So I started NUR – Never Underestimate Resilience – WFC, and people began to sign up. As we grew, Hilltop FC [a men’s club for the Somali diaspora in northwest London] invited us to merge with them.

Is there a particular moment that set you on this path?

One of my earliest football memories is watching the 2006 World Cup final. That’s my first memory of how [the sport] can captivate a person, and how it can bring us together. I started playing at the age of eight and it was just an overwhelming sense of fun – genuine enjoyment. It really felt like an even playing field back then, too. When it came to football, it wasn’t about how good you were, just about having a good time. As I’ve grown up, I guess I’ve been trying to chase that feeling.

How difficult has that become as you’ve grown older?

I’ve always had my back against the wall, fighting through things, but until I progressed further into the game I didn’t know how rare it was for someone like me to be playing football. The intersectionality of my identity made it like three or four fights at the same time. I’m fighting to be a young girl who wants to play football. Then, on top of that, I think there’s a misconception that young Muslim girls – young Black Muslim

girls – don’t want to play, or that they don’t have the community’s backing. In retrospect, it was more of a lack of understanding. I’d walk around with a football under my arm and people [in my community] would ask, “Why are you doing that?” It wasn’t malicious; they just couldn’t comprehend that I wanted to play. Now, my community is one of my biggest supporters. Playing for Somalia is one of my all-time proudest moments – I don’t know how I’ll top that.

Has the Lionesses’ success on the world stage had a big impact?

Yes and no. For women as a whole in football, the Euros win last year was amazing, a massive moment. But a lot of the development has only happened in the elite game. If you’re in grassroots football, or even the middle tiers of the women’s game, you’ll see a lot of players who look like me. So not being able to have a poster on my wall of a player who I feel fully represents my identity is a shame. It’s been beautiful to see as a woman, but [I haven’t felt] as triumphant as I’d like to as a Black Muslim woman.

Why do you think there are such barriers to the elite game?

The pathway of women’s football is a tumultuous space. It’s so difficult to get to the top levels. The men’s game has the bridge of semi-professional football, but for women there’s a gap: it’s grassroots, then elite. When you’re younger, getting into an academy brings barriers of its own. Imagine if I did get to play for Chelsea when I was, say, 11, and we had to go to the club’s training grounds out in Surrey two to three times per week. My mum is a single parent, so how could we manage that? We need to make football more accessible.

What would you tell others wanting to make a change in their world?

I’d say just get started. It doesn’t need to be an exact science, or perfect. You’ll figure things out along the way. I didn’t know what I was doing at 19. But you learn through experience. It’s OK to get things wrong. Just start anyway. Take the left turn. hilltopfc.co.uk; Instagram: @coachiqra

“Playing for Somalia is one of my proudest moments”

BOLD AMBITION

Winning two Olympic gold medals is something few athletes will achieve in their lifetime. But, having already ticked that box, TOM DEAN is pushing his body and mind to their absolute limits in pursuit of a daring new target: to become Britain’s most successful-ever athlete at a single Games

Swimmer Tom Dean has set himself the epic goal of winning more medals at a single Games than any other British Olympian. It’s a mission that’s as outrageous as it is courageous: in stretching his body to execute this ambitious haul in Paris next year, Dean could jeopardise his defence of the two golds won at Tokyo 2020 – 200m freestyle and 4x200m freestyle relay. But with refreshing boldness, he’s willing to risk it all for the chance to achieve something truly spectacular. His decision may be creating headlines and raising eyebrows, but Dean is smart enough to

Tom Dean

analyse the probabilities, equations and fractions upon which sporting dreams are made. Long before he hunted Olympic records, Dean excelled in ‘Maths Olympiads’ for his school team. Skilled with numbers and processes, he later began a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Bath, before deferring to focus on Tokyo 2020. And today, as he bids to smash the British record of four medals won at a single Olympics, it’s with numbers that Dean dissects his superhuman mission.

“We work for four years for one minute and 45 seconds of racing at the Olympics, and that’s just for the 200m free[style] – the ratio is nuts,” laughs Dean, who won the event at Tokyo 2020 by just four hundredths of a second. “It’s insane and daunting. But it means every detail has to add up. Already, for me, it’s been 15 years of work, of saying no to things, of waking up at 5am, clocking on at 7am on Monday morning and doing a 7,000m aerobic session, then a VO2 max session in the evening, with my heart rate above 180bpm, for two hours. I just did an Australia training camp – 10 swims a week for four weeks – and we touched a quarter of a million metres.”

At the British Swimming Performance Centre in Bath, Dean inhabits a complex matrix of information, driven by video monitoring, blood tests, power data and biomechanical analysis. Eat 6,000 calories a day (2.4 times the recommended norm for a man). Smash 60,000m in a week (the equivalent of swimming from Croydon, on the outskirts of London, to the northern edges of Brighton). Consume 25mg of iron (triple the guidance for men) to build the oxygen-carrying capacity of your blood cells. Deadlift 165kg (close to the average weight of an adult male lion). If all the numbers add up, Dean might – just – achieve his lofty aim of winning as many as seven medals in a single Olympics.

This is why his maths skills are now such a signifcant sporting weapon; they’re part of a toolkit that’s been proven to unlock success by making the most of all his talents, quirks and interests. Watching boxing bouts teaches Dean about tactics and confdence; listening to politics podcasts sharpens his analytical brain; and getting his geek on by crunching his training data turns his mind-bending ambition from a fantasy into a targetable, achievable reality.

“My background in maths and engineering really helps,” he says. “I track my heart-rate variability, blood oxygen percentage, respiratory rate…. If my Omega-3 dips, that impacts my recovery. Lower creatine levels affect my gym scores. And as I understand the data, I can push myself harder, because I can see the results refected in the numbers. Paris is a 700-piece jigsaw, and every piece is a step closer to my goal.”

Thinking bigger

The Red Bulletin’s photoshoot with Dean takes place at Portishead Open Air Pool, a retro-kitsch world of pastelpainted walls, not far from his home in Bath. It’s strange seeing an Olympian – all six-pack and sculpted biceps – at such an ordinary venue. When Dean, lithe and powerful, torpedoes through the water, a lifeguard is duty-bound to come outside to make sure the double Olympic champion doesn’t drown. Up close, his aquatic movements blend elegance and brutality: his agile kicks evoke the fuid, fowing form of a dolphin, and his arms display methodical, almost mechanised power. The cold, chlorinated water soon turns his skin red – proof that Dean is made of the same blood vessels, muscle and sinew as the rest of us.

After changing, Dean sits on a sofa in the café as kids and pensioners begin the public swim session. He’s come a long way since Tokyo, where his second gold – in the relay with James Guy, Duncan Scott and Matt Richards – made him the frst male British swimmer in 113 years to win two at the same Games. Scott later raised that to four – the current overall British record. But Dean doesn’t distance himself from ordinary swim culture. After Tokyo, he did swim clinics at his old club, Maidenhead Marlins, and even turned out for a club relay race. “I sometimes join in a public session when I’m home [in Berkshire] for the Christmas holidays, too,” says Dean. “And I’ll always have someone pull me aside and say, ‘Young man, you should think about joining a local swimming club. You’re quite good!’ And I say, ‘Well, thank you. That’s very kind.’”

The story says a lot about Dean and how he blends heroic sporting achievements with humility and humour. Standing 1.93m (6ft 4in) tall, Dean is an imposing but affable presence, quick to laugh. He talks of his interest in badminton and politics, then stops. “People will think you’re interviewing a 66-year-old!” he jokes, before sharing that he enjoys listening to Skepta, Kano and Loyle Carner. And he’s enjoying the ride. “The Olympics can change your life,” he says. “I got to go to Wimbledon, I did A Question of Sport, and I watched a Liverpool match from the director’s box and met Kenny Dalglish. It was so, so cool.”

But Dean is wiser than his years. He gives talks to business leaders about success and habits. In January last year, he was awarded an MBE. He hosts his own swimming podcast, The Weekly Freestyle, with impressive poise. And he’s still determined to fnish his degree. But that will have to wait because, after Tokyo, Dean wants more. A lot more. And that’s why he conjured up this colossal medal target. Where’s his absolute limit? He’s striving to fnd out.

“It’s about re-evaluating after a success,” he says. “After Tokyo, I wanted to know how far I can push my body. I thought, ‘Let’s really push this, put everything on the line, maybe even the gold medals… but for the pursuit of a greater goal, to see how many medals I can

“Paris is a 700-piece jigsaw, and every piece [of training] is a step closer to my goal”

“We’ve got a chance to make history. I believe it will happen”

win.’ For me, it’s 100 per cent or nothing. I don’t see the point of doing 95 per cent.” He knows it won’t be easy, but he frames his mission as a “story”: to achieve today, you frst need to think about the future. “I want to know that my story is what I wanted it to be,” he explains. “It’s like writing your biography. This ambition is an insane journey. But I hope that one day I’ll write the fnal chapter by becoming the most decorated GB athlete ever.’’

For Dean, this might actually be possible. At the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games last summer, he completed a stunning haul of seven medals, with gold in the 4x100m medley and silvers in the 100m freestyle, 200m freestyle, 200m medley, 4x100m freestyle, 4x200m freestyle, and 4x100m mixed freestyle – a new English record. The World Aquatic Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, this July will be another stepping stone to Paris.

But doesn’t he worry that he’s taking on too much? At the Olympics, Dean will be competing against athletes who, with fewer events, are fresher and more rested. “It can be daunting trying to break new ground,” he admits. “I believe it will happen. It might not, but I believe in myself. That’s why I’m confdent to say, ‘This is what I want to do!’ There’s no arrogance. It’s just confdence in what I’m capable of, and the work I do.” But why risk defending those Olympic titles? “That’s sport,” he shrugs. “We’ve got a chance to make history here. I do have that voice [of doubt] – I think everyone does. But I never like to shy away from things. I want to give myself the best possible chance of achieving what I want to achieve.”

As he speaks, Dean glances at the other swimmers. His goal is deeply personal, but it’s also about those he wants to inspire and entertain. “We’re in the sports industry, and it’s the nature of sport for there to be a ‘will he or won’t he?’ That’s why people follow the storylines. And that’s why I don’t wear headphones when I’m walking to the pool: I don’t like to pretend the crowd isn’t there. It is there! And in Paris I’ll walk out and show them what I’m capable of.”

Diving in

Dean can thank his mum Jacquie for his passion for the sport: she took all her kids swimming as babies, then ferried them to training as they progressed. Dean is the second eldest of fve, and his siblings Connie, Nancy, Alfe and Will are talented swimmers and athletes, too. “We moved to Maidenhead [from London] when I was eight, and we’d swim then go to my granny’s for a Sunday roast,” he says. “It was just fun. But it builds up and builds up.”

Dean played football and rugby at Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School in Marlow, but preferred swimming’s brutal fairness: “It’s so black and white. The harder you work, the more gains you get. It’s inputs and outputs.”

Paul Lloyd, Dean’s infuential coach at Maidenhead Marlins, says the young swimmer was an unpolished diamond: “Tom was always a talented athlete with a

natural feel for the water. But at frst he wasn’t massively self-motivated.” This might seem surprising given where he is today, but it proves you can ingrain new qualities.

Dean gained his work ethic from his sister Connie, a successful national swimmer who secured a scholarship in the US at Duke University in North Carolina. “I was ready to call it a day when I was 13,” recalls Dean. “You’re a teenager, your mates are going to parties, and nobody from my school swam. But Connie was an inspiration. I said to Paul, ‘I want what Connie has!’ And he said, ‘You’ve got to work like her, then! Do one session, get the most out of it, and move on.’ It fipped a switch in my head.”

“There’s no better feeling than walking home from a session absolutely spent, starving”

Maidenhead wasn’t an obvious breeding ground for Olympic glory. “Imagine leaving school early to go to a leisure centre on your own and being coached in the centre lane alongside toddler groups and aqua aerobics classes for the 50-plus,” says Lloyd. “Tom showed with talent and drive you can succeed in a less-than-perfect environment.”

Dean’s hero was US swimmer Michael Phelps, who won eight gold medals at Beiing 2008. “I’ve gained even greater respect for [Phelps] as I’m now doing multi-event myself,” he says. “He’s amazing for what he did, but also for taking sport to that new level.” Dean’s own frst big moment came when, aged 17, he won the 200m medley at the European Junior Swimming Championships in 2017. “I realised, ‘Wow, I can give this a real crack!’ The question then becomes: why not me?”

Aged 18, he was invited to Bath and thrived, taking gold in the 4x200m freestyle relay at the 2018 European Aquatics Championships in Glasgow; three years later, at the rescheduled 2020 event in Budapest, he won three golds, two silvers and a bronze. But Dean knows success is fragile. Two bouts of COVID in a short space of time, just months before Tokyo, left him bed-ridden for weeks. He had to learn to convert hard times into motivational fuel. “I fipped the COVID experience and made it positive. At frst, it was, ‘Why have I been dealt these cards?’ But I realised that now every session had to be 100 per cent, not one per cent less. When I give business talks today, I say, ‘You need to have the ability to hit that higher level.’”

After the edgy build-up, Dean’s frst Olympic gold shocked him. “At the medal ceremony, the lady who was chaperoning me said, ‘Tom Dean, please stand on the spot that says Olympic Gold Medallist.’ That’s when it hit me like a tonne of bricks. I stood on the podium and it was just a wave of ecstasy, joy and emotion.”

Killer instinct

Though Dean enjoyed the post-Olympic parties, his success drained his motivation. “I was like, ‘Where do I go from here?’” he says. “I didn’t want to swim.” He was still out of the pool 12 weeks later. Then one day he saw some race results and his competitive edge returned. “I thought, ‘I could beat that!’ I knew I wanted that feeling back.”

Dean feeds off goals, and after his incredible success in Tokyo he needed a bigger one. “I started looking at how far I could go. I’d be 24 in Paris – prime age. So we added up the events: 200 free, 200 IM [individual medley], maybe 100 free, and let’s add the 4x100 free, 4x200m

free, 4x100m medley… And we thought, ‘That’s six! Maybe the mixed [4x100m freestyle] relay, too?’ It took me back to that moment at the European Juniors: why not me?”

When asked what personal qualities make such a goal possible, Dean is quick to respond. “My capacity for work,” he says. “I do a hard session, then back it up with another. And another. One thing I take pride in is that I’m never off pace.” He credits this to his work with Lloyd, who devised killer sets like 30x100m swims with ever-shifting rests and speeds. Dean knows pushing your limits is the only way to reach full potential. “I’m a passionate believer in progression, not instant success,” says Lloyd. “You need to do 100 per cent of what you’re capable of, year on year. When Tom kept pushing his limit, that’s when he got really excited.”

Dean’s regime for Paris 2024 is brutal. To prep for multiple events, he does 10 swim sessions and four gym sessions a week, plus core work and physio. “About 99 per cent of what we do isn’t glamorous, it’s just hard work and high-level habits,” he says. His hardest sessions are lactate efforts, which often leave swimmers vomiting. “You produce lactic acid in your muscles from a hard set, then sit poolside and let the acid build, then do another repetition, so you’re essentially training pain,” says Dean. “But there’s no better feeling than walking home from a session absolutely spent, on your ass, starving, feeling like you’ve been hit by a train. It hurts so much. But I always think, ‘I’ll beneft from that.’”

What about those high-level habits? Through dedication in the gym, Dean has added 4kg of muscle to improve his power and durability, and he does shoulder capacity work to enhance the angles and effciency of his arm movements in the water. “There are no slip-ups. I’m having the right snack when I’m walking from the pool to the gym. And if my hips are too tight, it causes lower back problems that limit the range of my fy kicks, so I do a hip health routine. It’s easy to skip one rep in the gym when the Olympics are so far away, but it’s about having that connection – between today and your future goals – that links the two together.”

Dean is supported by a huge team at British Swimming and the UK Sports Institute, including coach Dave McNulty, biomechanist and performance analysis expert Victoria Jones, senior physiologist and technical lead Clare Lobb, strength coach Andy Elkins, nutritionist Rich Chessor and psychologist Tom Bates. It’s a science-driven world: Lobb analyses Dean’s lactate levels with blood tests; Jones uses underwater cameras to analyse his technique.

Described by staff as “engaged”, “inquisitive” and “sharp”, Dean loves connecting the data and fnding

“In an Olympic final you’re so dialled in, the first part of the swim is almost meditative”

THE MAKING OF A MULTIMEDAL MACHINE

HEART RATE

Physiologist Clare Lobb helps Dean to optimise his training by tracking his heart-rate data. “We use the Polar Verity sensor, which Tom wears inside his hat,” she says. “It gives us an instant reading.” With this data, Lobb can track Dean’s sets and heart-rate zones to maximise each workout.

BODY SHAPE

Dean has long arms, big feet and a tall body, but thanks to his swim sessions and clean diet he has between seven and nine-per-cent body fat –

less than half the male average. Swimmers must be powerful but slim. “Body composition is critical because of the forces of drag versus propulsive forces [in the water]” says nutritionist Rich Chessor.

MUSCLE MASS

Heavy gym lifts – including deadlifts, pull-ups and medball slams – and a high protein intake (2.2g per kg of body mass) help Dean maintain his muscular 92kg body. He does 110kg bench presses, 160kg deadlifts, 35kg pull-ups and 60kg press-ups.

BLOOD

Blood lactate tests show the speed of Dean’s recovery –key to his multi-medal task. Extra samples taken with a Radiometer monitor levels of electrolytes, hydration, haemoglobin, and red blood cell count. Altitude camps in Flagstaff, Arizona (elevation: 2,100m) help aid Dean’s red blood cell production.

IMMUNITY

Training for multiple events could make Dean ill, so he’s given an immunity checklist: get enough carbs, watch hydration levels, and target

key micronutrients. “And we look at high-risk issues like long-haul travel or high training loads,” says Chessor. A constant energy intake is also key: “We don’t want large windows for infection left open throughout the day.”

SLEEP

Dean wears an Oura Ring to monitor his sleep quality and heart-rate variability. “If he’s on the edge, whether it’s due to training or lack of sleep or stress or he’s about to get ill, we’ll see that variability drop,” Lobb says. This way, any issues can be pre-empted.

TACTICS

Using complex race data on the world’s best swimmers, biomechanist Victoria Jones analyses trends and career trajectories, rivals’ tactics and splits, and can predict race-winning times, which plummet each year.

ENERGY

Dean needs a huge calorie load to fuel his mission (see p41). “Swimming is energycostly,” says Chessor. “We’re using our full body against the resistance of water, which is incredibly dense. The faster you move, the harder it gets.”

BIOMECHANICS

Underwater and above-water cameras, velocity meters and race analysis software record Dean’s key metrics. “Whether it’s something on the block, a different trajectory in the air or maybe his underwater speed, it all adds up,” says biomechanist Jones.

SUPPLEMENTS

Hard exercise generates hydrogen ions in the muscle, creating acid and limiting contraction. Supplements of sodium bicarbonate remove these ions, helping his muscles work harder for longer.

RECOVERY

Dean uses different recovery strategies for different races. “He might want to see the physio and have a massage after one race,” says Lobb. “After another, he’ll use compression garments. Or we might encourage him to go for a walk and chat to somebody, so it is more of a psychological recovery.”

BRAIN

Dean works on positive selftalk and pre-swim routines with psychologist Tom Bates to switch blood flow from the amygdala (the emotional part

of the brain) to the prefrontal cortex (the rational part).

“My job is to help athletes stay centred in the present,” Bates says. “That’s the flow state: effortless, natural.”

VISUALISATION

Dean is visualising every detail of his races in Paris, from his warm-up to the noise of the crowd, so he’s unfazed.

“Two thirds of the brain’s activity is the same when you visualise as when you perform an activity physically,” says Bates. “So you can train the neurological pathways as you would [everything else].”

“For me, it’s 100 per cent or nothing. I don’t see the point of doing 95 per cent”

patterns. “My biomechanist tracks my power through my stroke and might say, ‘Because your gym scores have gone up here, which correlates with your increased protein intake, your power at this point of the stroke is now more effcient.’ And if I do underwater camera work, they might notice a faw in a specifc part of my arm movement, so that goes to my strength coach and we work on it in the gym.”

Dean specialises in freestyle (front crawl) because it suits his physique: he has an arm span of 2m (6ft 8in, greater than the height of Michael Jordan) and 30cmlong, size-13 feet. But for his multi-medal mission he has to excel in the other strokes of the medley (butterfy, backstroke, breaststroke) too. “I’ve been working on my backstroke and my breaststroke turns,” he says. But every technical tweak must become instinctive. “That becomes even more important when he has a lot of different events to think about,” says biomechanics expert Jones.

Dean must fuel his training with a 6,000-calorie daily diet (see below), plus key nutrient targets such as a high Omega-3 intake of 4-6g per day to aid recovery. “Swimming is intensely repetitive,” says nutritionist Chessor, “and the wear and tear across joint and muscle tissue means we need to repair that infammation.”

His race schedule will be brutal, too. At Tokyo 2020, Dean swam fve times (heat, semi-fnal and fnal of the 200m; heat and fnal of the 4x200m). At the Commonwealth Games last year – a tester for Paris – he raced 13 times. In Paris, pursuing seven medals, that could be 17: a 240-per-cent increase on Tokyo. “You’re getting up for it emotionally and physically going for it, so you’re taking caffeine for focus,” says Dean. “But then

EAT LIKE AN OLYMPIAN

To fuel his multi-medal ambitions, Dean must eat 6,000 calories per day – 45-per-cent energyboosting carbs, 20-percent muscle-building protein and 35-per-cent healthy fats. This is a typical meal plan he’ll dive into on a training day…

FIRST BREAKFAST

“In the morning, I’ll have coffee and a large bowl of porridge with berries, frozen fruit, honey, peanut butter, a banana and a scoop of creatine. I tracked my diet and I didn’t realise that my breakfast is 1,200 calories – that’s what some have in half a day!”

SECOND BREAKFAST

“After my first session, I’ll go to the training centre café and have what’s essentially a fry-up: sausage, eggs,

beans, hash browns. It’s the hard part of the job! Then I’ll do my gym session and have a protein bar.”

LUNCH

“Back at home, lunch is normally chilli con carne with rice, or spaghetti Bolognese, then some fruit, like an apple or an orange.”

AFTERNOON SNACK

“I’ll have a cereal bar or a protein bar when I’m walking from core training to the pool, then eat a banana after the session.”

DINNER

“At home I’ll have a peanutbutter bagel before dinner, which might be a stir-fry or any big hearty dish with meat, veg and carbs. Then I’ll have fruit for dessert.”

PRE-BEDTIME SNACK

“At 9pm I’ll have a bowl of yoghurt, granola, peanut butter, fruit and honey, and my supplements, like multivitamins or Omega-3. I’m in bed by 9.30-10pm.”

you need to recover and sleep. So you have to work out every detail.” For example, he could swim in a fnal one evening, then a heat the next morning, so that’s simulated in training.

In September, Chessor will get the Olympic cafeteria menu and work out a meal plan: “The dining hall has everything, whether that’s temptation, indulgence, or frustration because you can’t get what you want,” the nutritionist says.

Taking on multiple events brings unique psychological challenges, too. Dean is working to “strip back emotions” between events so if one race goes badly he can refocus. “We teach athletes to redirect emotional energy and attention to the next task,” says psychologist Bates. Dean adds, “I use a lot of routines, too, so everything’s regimented and there’s no room for emotion.”

Away from training, he likes to decompress with his siblings: Connie is studying medicine at Oxford, Alfe is a rower at Durham, Nancy is a personal trainer, and swimmad Will might soon come to Bath, too. But the truth is that Dean doesn’t want to avoid pressure but to confront it. “People say, ‘You’ve got a target on your back now you’ve won the Olympics.’ Good! It means I must have done something to deserve that. Let’s hope I get a bigger target on my back in the future.”

Be your best

Despite the scale of Dean’s new ambitions, his frst coach is confdent. “We discussed it when we went for a coffee,” says Lloyd. “I said, ‘People will get concerned, but you have to be in control of your own destiny. You’ll be driven to win as many as possible. And even if you don’t, no one will know in ten years’ time whether they’re gold, silver and bronze. Whatever your limit is, just make sure you achieve it.’”

Many athletes prefer to announce low-key goals, insisting they just want to do their best. Dean is much bolder. But psychologist Bates has taught him the difference between distress (a debilitating, negative stress) and eustress (a positive, challenging stress that inspires success). When Dean feels a tingle in his body before a race, this is eustress. “I’m ready to tap into that higher level,” he says.

There remain many obstacles. Will his rivals outsmart him? Will his coaches select him for so many events? And the athletes he must beat to win individual medals are also teammates he’s dependent upon for those relay medals. “It is strange,” he admits. “James Guy and Duncan Scott are close pals, but at some point you have to switch it off. For fve minutes, in the fnals, they are just another competitor. But then we are teammates again.”

Next summer Dean will dive into the pool in Paris again and again, in pursuit of sporting immortality. He’s unsure what will happen. But he does know that if you work hard at something, the feeling of reaching your full potential is irresistible. “In an Olympic fnal you’re so dialled in, the frst part of the swim is almost meditative, like you’re foating through the water,” he refects. “As you feel every sinew, you know exactly where every muscle and joint is located, and you have this connectivity. That’s the ‘fow state’. You sit back like a passenger in your own body. Then the pain kicks in and you’re gunning for the home straight in agony. But you think, ‘This was four years in the making. I don’t have a single chink in my armour.’”

Instagram: @tomdean00

THE BIG TIME

When the pandemic quashed their tour plans, Utah’s THE ACES changed tack and went back into the studio. The result is an indie-rock gem that’s their most personal album to date

ucked behind a loading dock and beyond a hidden door in Los Angeles, there’s a time warp in progress. Four women, all in their mid-twenties, are mugging for a camera phone while a friend records a TikTok video. Though this wouldn’t have been technologically possible before 2016, the result on the screen looks deceptively analogue. The women are dressed in the same oversized, 1990s-style blazers. (Or is it the 1960s, when The Beatles wore matching suits on The Ed Sullivan Show?) The location doesn’t line up, either. The foursome are palling around inside a dark bar in Koreatown, illuminated by the glow of old TVs playing vintage MTV videos and snippets of ’80s pop-culture sensation Max Headroom. But these women are not only travellers across time and space, they’re channelling their younger selves. And despite all these divergent timelines, they’re in sync like never before. The year is 2023, and these chrononauts are in a band named The Aces.

Since they were tweens living in suburban Utah, the group have been making infectious pop-rock about the trials and tribulations of young romance, a winning formula that got them signed to Red Bull Records in 2016 when only recently out of high school. Together, sisters Cristal (lead vocals/guitar) and Alisa Ramirez (drums), Katie Henderson

(lead guitar/vocals) and McKenna Petty (bass/vocals) have now released three albums and amassed more than 260 million streams. That number should be even higher, but the pandemic botched plans to take their second album, Under My Influence, on tour in 2020.

The inability to perform in public led them back into the studio, where they began writing music to reflect on the grief, panic and trauma they felt in those moments of uncertainty. Ultimately, the material from those sessions became the basis for their just-released third album, I’ve Loved You for So Long. It’s their most mature effort yet, with a raw honesty that permeates every track, and a sound that evokes the playful experimentation and hard-hitting riffs they composed back when they were kids jamming in a basement in Utah.

“I don’t think The Aces would be where they are today, and I don’t think this album could exist, if it wasn’t for that forced time alone and that forced time not working,” says Alisa. “The pandemic afforded us the time and space to write this record, because there was so much processing and reflecting happening.”

Growing up Mormon in Utah, each woman has faced the decision to leave their religion behind at different times, but as a group they’ve leaned on each other

“This beautiful synchronicity happened between us where we were all on the same page”

Excellent adventure: the band time-travel back to a classic moment from the Bill & Ted movies

to unpack the reasons why. Cristal, Alisa and Katie identify as queer, something condemned by the Mormon Church –also known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) – and though McKenna is married and identifies as straight, she struggled with a doctrine that excluded her closest friends. “For the first time in our lives and in our career, we’re all on the same page about religious trauma,” says Cristal. The songs on I’ve Loved You for So Long can be divided into two parts: the struggles of the past and the struggles of the now, but the two are intertwined. “It’s like you’re timetravelling back and forth to the younger self and the present self,” Alisa says.

It’s 2013. Cristal Ramirez is about to turn 18, and she’s sitting in her car as she waits to pick up younger sister Alisa from school. Cristal is starting to sweat, steeling herself to tell her closest

confidante two words: “I’m gay.” Cristal has had crushes on girls since she was kindergarten, but for years she’s kept those feelings secret because her religion told her they were unacceptable. She tried bargaining with God, asking him to lessen her attraction to girls. She tried dating guys in high school, but she can’t live in denial any longer. As she starts to accept her queerness, she knows she must tell someone. And so, Cristal picks up Alisa from school, they go on a drive and then park the car. “I need to tell you something,” Cristal says with tears in her eyes. “I haven’t told anyone this, but I’m gay.” “Oh, same,” Alisa replies. “I thought that we knew that.”

Back in the present day, Cristal and Alisa effortlessly seesaw in conversation. By their own description, they are yin and yang. Cristal is more emotive, Alisa more pragmatic. They balance each other. “She’s a lot more assured and I’m

“This felt like the frst version of a chosen family. Whenever we came together, we were our truest selves”

the more anxious one who overthinks,” Cristal says now of that pivotal moment. “I needed that reaction to help fuel me through the rest of my coming-out process: that’s just who we are, that’s who we’ve always been.”

But the years leading up to that confession were a torturous time for Cristal. “I was deeply depressed about being queer as a teenager,” she says. Those struggles are laid bare in Suburban Blues, one of the songs on I’ve Loved You for So Long that dissects the past. Backed by hard-hitting guitars, the chorus wails: “Nobody knows that I’m dying inside, nobody knows that I’m hating my life.”

Before Cristal and Alisa came out to each other, they both had a sixth sense that they were different. “We’re like freaky twins that way,” says Alisa. “I just knew that she was gay. And I knew I was gay. But I was having less anxiety about it. I was more dissociating away from it.”

Alisa remembers having a crush on a friend in preschool. When she told some of her older peers about it, they recoiled in disgust. “I didn’t know what being gay was – I was five,” she says. “I felt so shamed by them. That was the first time I realised, ‘Oh, I think I’m doing something wrong.’” Alisa kept her queerness to herself for years. But once the sisters were out, their safe space was the band. “This felt like the first version of a chosen family,” Alisa says. “Whenever we came together, we were our truest selves.”

Plenty of prominent bands in rock history formed when the members were teenagers – The Beatles, U2, Radiohead and Green Day come to mind – but tweens? When Cristal and Alisa began playing together, they were 10 and eight respectively. Within a couple of years, they recruited McKenna and Katie,

and The Aces began playing together in middle school. By their early teens they were headlining venues in Provo, Utah, and after winning a local competition they had the money to record their first single in a studio. They continued to scrape money together, doing everything they could to propel the band forward. As high-school graduation loomed, they decided as a group to pursue the band full-time.

“We wrote down our goals,” Cristal says. “We’d, like, hold hands and manifest.” Eventually, they gathered enough funds to release an EP, and at the release party the studio owner suggested they reach out to a lawyer he knew in New York who was well connected in the music industry. That lawyer ultimately connected them to their first manager, who began introducing the band to record labels. In 2016, they signed with Red Bull Records, and two years later

they released their debut album, When My Heart Felt Volcanic.

On that album, there’s a curious lack of pronouns in the lyrics. Although Cristal and Alisa were out to their friends and family, it wasn’t something they discussed with reporters, nor was religion on the table. At the time, Katie and McKenna were still affiliated with the Mormon Church, and only the band knew Katie was gay, too. “I was really scared of the religion we grew up in, and that was all I knew,” Katie says. Her family was religious, and she wasn’t ready to uproot her life and go down a different path – not yet anyway. “Everybody just needs time.”

It’s March 2020. The Aces have just released the first single off their forthcoming second album, Under My Influence. It’s a sunshine-filled bop titled Daydream. After spending time in the

desert recording a music video for the song, the band have a meeting with their manager in Los Angeles. Then phones start lighting up. The World Health Organisation declares a global pandemic. The next day, Katie and McKenna fly home to Utah while Cristal and Alisa stay in LA. Their tour isn’t scheduled until July, so the band figure they’ll ride out this lockdown for two months and then get back on the road.

Of course, that’s not what happened. The band didn’t get to tour the album, and that loss weighed heavily. “We’d put so much work into this album,” Alisa says. “There was a lot of pressure for it to do well, and it felt like everything was ripped straight out of our hands. We [felt] so beat down.”

“For me, it was pure apathy,” Cristal says. “I didn’t want to do anything. In my deepest scared place in my head, I thought, ‘What if I don’t like doing

this any more? What if I don’t want to be here?’ I was deeply depressed.”

Almost every night, the two sisters spent hours awake. Around 3am, Cristal, in the middle of a panic attack, would knock on Alisa’s door. Alisa would try to calm her down, make her oatmeal, and sleep in her bed if necessary.

After a few months, Cristal and Alisa reached a stage of acceptance: the tour wouldn’t happen. All they could do was make more music, so they called their rep and asked if the two of them could get back into the studio. “It gave me a reason to put clothes on,” Cristal says. “There was no real expectation.”

Eventually, Cristal and Alisa reached out to Keith Varon, who had produced Daydream, their biggest hit to date, and asked him to join a session. “Keith has this really positive, motivated mentality,” Alisa says. “He put wind in my sails again as an artist.”

Back in Utah, Katie and McKenna were wrestling with their own situation. As the band did their best to promote their second album through Zoom interviews and virtual concerts, Katie had to face the reality of being gay. On Under My Influence, the lyrics include pronouns – she, her – and Cristal and Alisa were now openly talking to reporters about being queer. “I hated this weird deceit I was living,” Katie says. “I recall thinking, ‘Am I not going to talk about myself being gay?’ How could I sit in an interview with questions about being queer and act like I’m not?” By June 2020, Katie was out publicly and had separated from the church. “It was time for me to come into my own,” she says.

For McKenna, who always supported her band members, it was a personal reckoning. A year before the pandemic, she got married in the LDS Temple, and she was still in the process of finishing her degree at Provo’s Brigham Young University, which is sponsored by the Mormon Church. If she didn’t follow certain rules, she was at risk of not getting her diploma. “I was living the blueprint, because I fit into it, being straight,” McKenna says. “But I was struggling. I was using touring and travelling in a way to escape all these feelings by not having to deal with [the question of] what I believed.”

The pandemic forced her to start asking that question. McKenna began going to therapy, and she started to realise that all her trauma was connected to her religion. “I was never having the spiritual experiences that I was supposed to have in the church as a Mormon,” she says. “But I always felt it with the band.” McKenna says the past few years have seen some dark periods with her family. After getting her degree in 2021, she left the church, and it transformed her relationship with her parents. “It was really hard,” McKenna says, though she adds that now she’s on the other side of it, things are getting better.

By 2021, when travel felt safer, Katie and McKenna started coming to LA to write music with Cristal and Alisa. Up to that point, their songs had been fuelled by real-life experience – love, sex, heartbreak – but with their lives on hold, they all faced the question of what they wanted to talk about as artists. “It felt cheap to talk about the pandemic,” Cristal says. But every band member was going through something in that

moment, so they encouraged Cristal to start writing about the panic attacks she’d suffered, though she resisted at first. “As an artist, I pride myself on being very vulnerable, but when they were like, ‘We should talk about your anxiety,’ I was like, ‘No, that’s going to be corny. What authority do I have to speak on that?’ And I realised there’s all this shame around it for me.”

Cristal continues, “If you’re an artist, you have to talk about the shame. That’s your job, to talk about the things that people don’t want to talk about. So I was like, ‘If I can’t fucking talk about my panic attacks, then I don’t deserve the fucking mic.’”

On the new album, songs such as Always Get This Way and Stop Feeling probe at Cristal’s panic attacks and depression, but they’re delivered in a package so catchy it makes listeners want to dance. “That’s very on-brand for us,” Alisa says. “We love to write songs that make you feel good but are about something really hard. It’s this good catharsis, where it’s like, ‘I feel like I’m going to get through it.’”

The band just started playing together, making music like they did when they were kids. “We started writing in different ways than we had ever before,” McKenna says. Now that every band member had left the church, they could finally talk openly about their experience for the very first time. Cristal explains, “This beautiful synchronicity happened between us where, for the first time in our lives and our career, we were all on the same page about religious trauma, about our past. Katie was out; Kenna had just left the faith. We were all out living our truth, and we were in this space where we were making music from the same place.”

With I’ve Loved You for So Long, the band are sharing that truth with the world. And this summer they’re finally able to go on tour again, see their fans and reach more people than ever before. “We’re in the business of making real music that our fans can feel,” Cristal says. But this album is really for these four women who’ve had each other’s backs since they were young girls jamming together in a Utah basement. The album’s title track is ultimately a love letter to the band. It’s now 2023 and the Aces are exactly where they’re supposed to be.

theacesofficial.com/tour

“It’s like you’re time-travelling back and forth to the younger self and the present self”

Reaching out: The Aces are excited about going back on the road to promote their new album and see their fans again

CREATIVE SURGE

For whitewater photographer John Webster, summer means getting in the kayak and heading south through raging water. Here, he takes us downstream in North and South America

Wish you were here Curacautín, Chile

The 15m-high Tomatita waterfall is a popular postcard spot. So Webster went for a lesserseen perspective, clambering his way up to a barely accessible vantage point to capture his friend Jan L Domènech’s vertical drop.

Rapid response

Payette River, Idaho

French slalom canoeist Nouría Newman performs an S-turn on the North Fork of the Payette River: 14km of consistently big, fast waves requiring plenty of ‘boofing’ – lifting the boat out of the water with a power stroke.

Webster en route to Idaho’s Bruneau River, a journey that takes him, his crew and their truck through seemingly endless barren plateaus.

“The journey to the water is long and dusty”

John Webster

Bananarama

Tlapacoyan, Mexico

Thick with banana trees, the quiet hills surrounding the Rio Alseseca provide a stark contrast to the river’s wild waters. Here, Californian paddler Evan Moore goes for a walk with his boat and experiences a whole new panorama.

Calm before the storm Salmon River, Idaho

Using a drone, Webster captures rafting guides Metta and Kyra as they sit back and take a deep breath before their guests come aboard to begin the trip downstream.

John Webster

“This sport is about more than just speed. It’s nature in its purest and most intense form”

Webster on the kayaking experience, as documented here on the Futaleufú River in northern Patagonia, Chile.

Expedition logs

Boise, Idaho

All kayakers know that the journey down usually starts with a steep uphill climb. Here, Webster records the travails of a friend clambering his way up to the perfect entry point on a waterfall.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be the right way up again when he lands”

Webster

Meet the photographer

Wild water is tough to tame. This is exactly what has fascinated Idaho native John Webster from an early age. Having started out taking photographs for large companies and agencies, at the age of 19 Webster decided the path his life was taking was too calm, too leisurely. So he set out on his frst photo expeditions around his home town of Boise and to the Payette River, an hour’s drive away. “I started making friends with well-known kayakers, photographing their adventures and stunts,” says Webster, now 32. After some initial awe, he fnally dared to paddle the streams of the US himself and has since travelled the world with his kayak. “I love capturing those big little moments between man and nature,” says Webster. “What’s coming next? What will the light conditions be like this time? The quest never fails to fascinate.”

webstermediahouse.com

Over the rainbow Columbia River, Oregon

FREE AND CLEAR

At 33, US skate royalty RYAN SHECKLER has found himself. And when he’s on his board, it shows

Words PETER FLAX Photography ATIBA JEFFERSON

Blazing a rail: “The level he’s at now – honestly, it’s insane,” says Ira Ingram, Sheckler’s longtime filmer

It’s tricky to decide where to begin the story of Ryan Sheckler’s hard-fought journey to find peace. Maybe it starts with the skater writhing and screaming at the bottom of a concrete staircase in Pomona, California, as he reels from yet another awful bone-and-tendon-snapping impact. No doubt, his narrative has often been propelled by how he has willed himself back to his feet after getting pummelled.

Or perhaps it opens with his second trip to rehab. Sheckler had been sober for a few years and thought maybe he could drink with moderation. He was wrong about that. But this time he felt something click inside – a deep yearning to alter the trajectory of his life – and now a very public figure who spent a solid chunk of two decades feeling pretty lost has found a better foothold.

Or maybe the story begins as Sheckler opens the front door to his home with a 19-day-old baby cradled in his right arm. His eyes look a little heavy – after all, the skater and his wife are trapped in a sleep-deprivation experiment – but there’s an ease to his gaze. Like he’s about to launch a huge gap and he just knows he’s going to land it. Somehow, he’s in his element. The guy who friends and fans sometimes called ‘Sheck Daddy’ has undeniably manifested that title.

But while the structure of this story’s prologue remains up in the air, the broader contours of his journey and even his destination are in sharp focus. Ryan Sheckler is in a good place. “Until recently, my identity – my whole life – has been

“I’m curious still, and I’m also addicted to that adrenaline rush of healthy fear”

tied to skateboarding,” he says as his daughter Olive snoozes in a rocker nearby. “I never addressed who Ryan was as a person. And by doing that, all these doors have opened and all these situations that used to baffle me and take me for a loop have become completely manageable.”

Sheckler, who long ago gained fame for skating the gnarliest shit and acting like a rock star, has turned his gaze inward, finding things he didn’t realise he needed. Sobriety. Faith. Marriage. Fatherhood. Balance. And perhaps above all, peace. And, fans will be stoked to hear, you can see it when he skates.

Though it’s long been true that Sheckler has nothing to prove, he’s liberated to express himself in ways that feel new. The physical and metaphysical housecleaning has reinvigorated him as a skater. The 33-year-old veteran – who has been performing at the highest level for two decades, and who, helped by orthopaedic surgeons, put his kids through college and juggled as much love and hate from skate culture as any pro ever – is seeing a new clarity and drive in his skating life. “Inner peace builds confidence,” says fellow skate pro David Reyes, one of his closest friends. “It allows you to be present in the moment. Ryan has always been a Nitro Circus baby, someone born to jump off things and take risks, but now he’s skating with more confidence than I’ve ever seen.”

As this issue goes to press, the finishing touches are being applied to an ambitious skate part and a documentary unpacking Sheckler’s tumultuous journey, aptly titled Rolling Away. Both projects, which are expected to drop in July, have been three years in the making, delayed and informed by the pandemic, an injury that could have been career-ending, rehab, and the roller-coaster known as life. True to his perfectionist nature, Sheckler’s trying to nail a couple final tricks, including one that would instantly join his greatest hits, before setting that content free. Rest assured that domestic and existential bliss have not quieted his hunger to explore the boundaries of physics and courage; it’s more like he’s free to go for it.

In some ways, despite his legitimate world-class talents, Sheckler is like a progenitor of the modern reality star, famous for being famous. For better or worse, key moments in his adolescence played out on MTV. (If you’re too young

to replay this reference in your brain, feel free to Google Life of Ryan. Or, better yet, don’t.) “He’s been vulnerable his entire life and everyone has been able to watch,” says Reyes. Sheckler ripped a kickflip at the age of six. A year later, he had legit sponsors. He won the first of seven XGames medals when he was 13. Then came reality shows and TV commercials, A-list fame and millions of dollars. He was winning contests and releasing sick clips, flying private jets and collecting supercars, partying hard and polarising skate culture. He was a teen superstar on a wild adventure with no mentors or a road map, living large with a major IDGAF attitude. (In a 2011 interview with ESPN The Magazine, he leaned into the friction with core skate fans: “I want to give them more reasons not to like me.”)

But through it all, even when folks were dissing him like he was the Justin Bieber of skating, even the biggest haters couldn’t deny his clips were off the charts. People still talk about his 2008 kickflip at the so-called Costco Gap in Laguna Niguel, California, clearing a fence and a 5m drop with shocking nonchalance. Along the way, there were so many huge tricks and huge impacts. “He’s got a crazy work ethic,” says Ira Ingram, his long-time filmer. “He’ll brutalise himself to make something happen. He’ll skate something until he has baby-deer legs.”

Sheckler grimaces when asked to explain his relationship with pavement. “That relationship is super-rad when you are rolling away,” he says, referring to the euphoric moment a trick is nailed. “But everything else is just a brutal divorce, you know? It’s gnarly. I was counting the other day – it’s [more than] 12 broken bones, more torn ligaments than I can remember, and six major surgeries, concussions. It’s all pain.” Sheckler has been through the cycle of injury, surgery and recovery enough times to know how much it can impact his mental health: “I’ve probably spent five years in total of my life recovering. That’s where my mind

starts going a little bit crazy and the questions start coming up. ‘Am I made for this? Do I even want this? What am I doing?’ And those questions are supergnarly, especially when you’re already down and you can’t do anything.”

In Rolling Away, a few legendary pros try to describe the abusive relationship committed skaters have with pavement. “Skateboarding is terrible for your body,” says British skate pioneer Geoff Rowley. “It chips away like a hammer and chisel.” Meanwhile, fellow US icon Tony Hawk, who was a surprise guest at Sheckler’s sixth birthday party, reflects on the commitment that the hammer and chisel demand. “When you first start to skate,

“For a long time, I led a life that was very fast, and now I’ve learned to slow down”

there’s sort of a moment of recognition and the threshold, where the first time you get hurt seriously,” says Hawk, who, like Sheckler, has seen a surgeon or two. “That’s the moment where it’s like, do you really love this enough to keep doing it?”

As Rolling Away documents, Sheckler faced two serious injuries in the past five years that challenged his resolve. The first came in 2018 in Pomona, where an attempt to grind the cement railing of an 18-step staircase ended with him crumpled on the ground. He pulverised the bones and tendons in his left ankle and broke the L1 vertebra in his lower back. “I don’t really talk about this slam because it was so traumatic,” says

Sheckler, who soon would be back in a surgical suite. “But that fall was the catalyst for me to take a deep dive into myself.” In his mind, the journey that would lead him to sobriety, the Bible, his wife, a baby and to skating with new clarity began right there in Pomona as he recoiled in agony. Sheckler knew

what would come next. Pain. Grinding physical therapy. Creeping self-doubt. He knew that all he could do was obsessively recover and train to be ready when the next opportunity came.

That opportunity came sooner than he or anyone would have guessed. Later in 2018, Sheckler was invited to join fellow Red Bull pros Zion Wright and Jamie Foy on a trip to Taiwan. Even though he wasn’t 100-per-cent healed, he found himself in a great headspace and wound up nailing all sorts of clips. The highlight of that trip came when he pulled off a high-consequence taildrop off a Taipei bridge into a quarterpipe that was flanked on both sides by highway

“My 2018 fall was the catalyst for me to take a deep dive into myself”

traffic. “That taildrop was as scary as anything he’s ever done,” says Ingram, who filmed the trick. “My hands were literally shaking, so I needed to lean against something as I shot it.” Even top pros were blown away. “One word comes to mind seeing that taildrop: psycho,” says pro Paul Rodriguez, aka P-Rod, Sheckler’s longtime former teammate with sponsors Plan B. “That was insane.”

Sheckler was back. And over time he realised he was mentally and physically ready to film a major part. In March 2020, he visited Red Bull HQ in Santa Monica to finalise plans for this project and the adjacent short film. He was fired up. But as it turned out, that was the day before the office – and basically the world – shut down as the pandemic changed life as we knew it. Nothing went to plan after that.

The central space in Sheckler’s home has an open floor plan and visual cues of how his life has radically changed are all around. His wife Abigail sits in the living room, with Olive sleeping nearby. There’s an open Bible on the dining-room table and a more ceremonial Bible on display in the living room, below a framed rendering of Jesus. (There’s also a large framed

black-and-white photograph of Sheckler skating on a crowded freeway that has a considerably more secular vibe.) When talking about his baby, his devotion to his faith and his experiences with sobriety, there’s an ease to the way he discusses these potentially thorny topics. Sheckler isn’t afraid to be honest and vulnerable about his struggles and revelations, but he also has no interest to preach or

overdramatise. “I’m trying to live by attraction rather than promotion,” he says. “I don’t want to tell people they need to go to church. I’m not trying to force things down people’s throat – I just want to be a man of my word, a man of action.”

The flatscreen in the living room is set to a channel playing Christian rock. He feels there’s no contradiction between listening to Christian ballads and skating like a punk rocker, no inconsistency in studying the New Testament and then bungeeing himself across a concrete abyss in the afternoon. Who’s to say he’s wrong about that? Certainly not his buddy Reyes, who says skate culture is more open to pros like Sheckler being their true selves: “I’ve told this to Ryan and other OG pros: fans just want to see you be you. With Ryan, they want to see the kickflip and the kickflip indy. Beyond that, there’s less judgment now.”

Sheckler feels no awkwardness or shame discussing his struggle with alcohol abuse. There has always been a hard-partying side to skate culture, and a sense there’s something uncool about talking openly about sobriety. “I led a life that was very fast, and now I’ve learned to slow down,” he says. “For a long time I was gripped by partying. Injuries led me to feeling down about myself, and I thought the solution was alcohol. But alcohol is a depressant, so it only drove me deeper into a hole. I was making the people I love worried about me, [which] wasn’t fair to them or to me. So I was ready to make a change, to admit I wasn’t in control of my life or my drinking.”

Sheckler is insistent that the best part of his own self-improvement is in the meaning and peace he’s gained in his personal life. But he knows it has impacted his skating, too. He’s now healthier and living in the moment, more fulfilled and more clear-headed about what skating means to him. And the people who watch him skate on a daily basis say the impact is strikingly obvious. “Ryan has always walked his own path, and his skating speaks for itself,” says Ingram, who has witnessed more of Sheckler’s part than anyone. “But the level he’s at now – honestly, it’s insane.”

As the upcoming skate part and the film Rolling Away will demonstrate, Sheckler still has something to prove –not to fans or posterity but to himself. It’s been more than three years since these projects were born, and seeing them through has taken more perseverance

“Until recently, my identity – my whole life – has been tied to skateboarding”

than he could have imagined. The earliest weeks of filming, which coincided with the start of the pandemic, required significant improvisation as Sheckler and Ingram sought out some truly isolated spots to nail down clips. Nonetheless, these were intensely productive months, yielding one quality clip after another.

But that early momentum came to a painful and screeching halt three months later in National City, California. Sheckler had his eye on a high-risk ender, a dramatic clip that would appear near the end of his part to showcase his best work, but he suffered a hard landing before he could even give it a shot. Warming up with an easier trick, he launched over a staircase with metal railings on both sides and landed awkwardly on a sloped concrete embankment, with the brunt of the impact loaded on his left knee.

True to form, Sheckler, who says it felt like a “super-gnarly dead leg”, kept skating that session, even nailing a couple more tricks. He can admit now that he was in a state of denial; he didn’t get an MRI of that joint for a month and a half after skating those six weeks in a knee brace. That’s when Sheckler learnt he had completely severed his ACL. So it was back to the surgeon and the couch

and the PT and the creeping self-doubt. “Ryan isn’t old by any means,” Ingram says. “But still, a torn ACL in your thirties can be a career ender for a pro skater.”

Sheckler attacked his rehabilitation to get well as fast as possible. He amped up his weight training to add muscle mass as body armour. He did everything he could to stay busy, because it took 14 long months before he could really start doing heavy tricks again. That whole period was tough. He lost his grandmother during that grinding recovery. “She was my best friend,” Sheckler says. He had plenty of reasons to start drinking again. But he didn’t.

By the time he got back at it, so much about his life was reoriented in a different and better way. He was sober, engaged, going to church, and doing a lot of little things more mindfully. And he went out with an intense eye to execute tricks that

pushed his own envelope. Ingram says Sheckler has been playing with bungees that allow him to launch up features that in the past he would have launched himself down. “We’re using a bungee that is off the market now because it’s so dangerous,” Ingram says. “It can get Ryan up to 25 or 30 miles per hour [40-50kph]. We’re talking about intense physics – it’s like he’s getting fired out of a cannon.”

The part and the film are almost done – but not quite. In particular, Sheckler is intensely focused on one trick: a massive gap in northern San Diego County. Maybe he’ll have nailed it by the time you read this, maybe not. “I hope to get this last trick, and I believe I will,” he says. “I’m scared of it, you know? But it’s a healthy fear. I cannot let this thing go. And I think that’s what’s made me a skateboarder, and it’s why I’m still a skateboarder today.”

Sheckler freely admits this quest presses many of the same buttons as any other addiction – not just with the narcotic rush of rolling away from an impossibly hard trick, but all the heartache and tense moments that precede it. “I think I’m just curious still, and I’m also addicted to that adrenaline rush of healthy fear,” he says. “I’m addicted to the whole process. It’s the drive. It’s what music I’m going to listen to on the way down. Sometimes I don’t listen to music; sometimes it’s one song on repeat. It’s all very different, and it’s very hard to calculate what the right day is to do it, so everything’s a guess.”

A long day with Sheckler is drawing to a close. His wife is holding their baby. His mother, who helps run his various business enterprises, sits at the head of the dining room table, firing off emails. He rubs his eyes. Sheckler is tired because he spent part of the night half asleep on the floor of the nursery. But he’s feeling alive and well because so many things have fallen into place for him. He’s grateful for that horrible slam in Pomona and how it nudged his trajectory in a better direction.

“It feels like I could’ve missed all of this,” Sheckler says, waving his arms at the family around him and at things that can be felt and not seen. “It feels like I could’ve missed it all. But by changing one thing, which meant I had to change everything, I have a full life again.” He pauses, then corrects himself. “Actually, for the first time, I have a full life.”

ryansheckler.com

“By changing one thing, which meant I had to change everything, I have a full life again”

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The next issue is out on Tuesday 11 July with London Evening Standard. Also available across the UK at airports, universities, and selected supermarkets and retail stores. Read more at theredbulletin.com

VENTURE

Enhance, equip, and experience your best life

ZURICH AS MUSE

Finding inspiration with designer Yannik Zamboni

It’s a sunny day in early spring, and Swiss fashion designer Yannik Zamboni, dressed in signature white, is sitting in Frau Gerolds Garten, a secluded modular city garden in Zurich’s industrial district. Here, beer and food are served from repurposed shipping containers.

“I love coming here – you see a side of Zurich that isn’t well-known,” says Zamboni. This is the first stop on the designer’s tour of the many places that inspire him in Switzerland’s largest city. “I fell in love with Zurich when I was 16 years old,” he explains, “and nothing has changed.”

A lot else has changed in Zamboni’s life. Since winning Making the Cut – the US reality TV show created and presented by supermodel Heidi Klum and fashion consultant Tom Gunn – last year, along with the big money prize of one million dollars, his career has been on a steep upward trajectory. But Zamboni hasn’t been tempted to leave the city he first discovered as a teen.

“I was always in Zurich, right from when I was young,” he says. Zamboni

VENTURE Travel

grew up in a village with a population of just around 700 people, but he felt the pull of the more cosmopolitan Zurich (population: just under 500,000) early on in his life.

“In the Upper Basel area, where I come from, I missed queer representation,” he recalls, “and for me, as a queer kid, there was only anything interesting [happening] in Zurich. I often felt different and lost, but in Zurich I found the tolerance and diversity I was looking for.”

For Zamboni, Zurich’s industrial district feels like home. The area that was once known for factories and ship building is now a hive of creative activity – in the worlds of fashion, art, culture and cuisine. Zamboni namechecks the nearby Rote Fabrik, a vast, red-brick

“As a queer kid, I often felt different and lost, but in Zurich there was the tolerance and diversity”

Yannik Zamboni, Swiss fashion designer

VENTURE Travel

former silk-weaving mill just a short walk away, which hosted concerts by music greats including Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the ’80s and ’90s and is an important cultural centre. Smaller design shops can be found here at Zurich’s Viadukt, a shopping street built into a railway viaduct – a centre of innovation and diversity.

It all helps to feed Zamboni’s creativity. “[I get my inspiration] from socio-political themes,” the designer says. “Everything that I find unfair in our society drives me on.” He designs for people who feel different. “I don’t believe in a binary gender system,” he explains, which is why he has done away with gender classification and clothing sizes at his label Maison Blanche.

But thanks to his success in the fashion world, Zamboni must travel to a different part of the city to show off his own creations: Bahnhofstrasse, internationally renowned as one of the world’s most expensive and exclusive shopping streets. Still on his skates, Zamboni makes the journey to his pop-up store, which sits inside BIG POP, a brand aiming to bring some non-conformity to an area characterised by established big-name boutiques, jewellery and watch shops, and luxury hotels. “My store doesn’t fit in [this area of the city],” says Zamboni. “But I’m happy about it, because that’s how I get discovered by people who wouldn’t otherwise come across me.”

Now in the heart of Zurich, Zamboni wheels across the Münsterbrücke

(Minster Bridge) which crosses the river Limmat and offers striking views of the city and Lake Zurich. Then he continues on to the impressive sandstone exterior of the Kunsthaus Zurich museum on Heimplatz, situated amid narrow cobbled streets in the heart of the historic and picturesque Old Town.

Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland’s biggest art museum, houses one of the largest international collections by Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch, alongside works dating from the Middle Ages right up to present day, and in 2020 it received a new light-filled extension designed by British architect David Chipperfield. Zamboni says that he visits as much for the architecture as for the art. “It’s such an impressive, beautiful place,” he says of the new building. “That space, those high walls!”

Having completed his tour of the city, Zamboni is keen to take off his skates. “Let’s go down to the lake!” he shouts, already on his way to the northernmost shores of Lake Zurich, on which the city sits. Water is a big part of Zurich’s allure for the designer. “The water is so incredibly clean, you can see right to the bottom,” he says once he’s come to a stop. “We don’t

VENTURE Travel

just have the Limmat, the river that runs through the middle of the Old Town, but Lake Zurich, too.”

Zamboni wants to put his now wheel-free feet to work in a pedalo –a more attractive option than jumping into one of Zurich’s many badis, or smaller swimming pools, until there’s a rise in temperature.

And with that, the designer is off on the water, his white hat and shirt catching the sun as he goes. For more information on visiting Zurich, go to: zuerich.com

Must-see places to visit

1 BIG POP

A large store housing a selection of pop-up outlets for brands including Yannik Zamboni’s Maison Blanche. Bahnhofstrasse 73

2 Markthalle im Viadukt

Secondhand and high fashion outside the mainstream. Viaduktstrasse

3 Frau Gerolds Garten

An urban garden located in the centre of the city. Geroldstrasse 23

4 Kunsthaus Zurich

One of the most important art collections in Switzerland. Heimplatz 1/5

5 Boat Hire Enge

Whether in a classic pedalo or a sauna boat, if you’re in Zurich you have to get out on the water.

Mythenquai 25

How to get there

Situated in the heart of Europe, Zürich is easy to reach by train and then discover on foot or by bike. For more information : zuerich.com

Yannik Zamboni is working on a limited Zurich line in collaboration with the label Collectif mon Amour and Zürich Tourism. T-shirts and bags are in the pipeline and will soon be available at BIG POP

The greatoutdoors

Your outdoor destination on Lake Maggiore!

Nature and Adventure destination: 1’400 km of hiking tours, trail running, climbing, bouldering, biking and plenty of water fun! ...not to mention the over 2’300 hours of sunshine a year!

www.ascona-locarno.com

Two seconds. In the time it took you to read that sentence, there were more than 120,000 Google searches, a bee flapped its wings at least 460 times, and Oracle Red Bull Racing’s F1 drivers Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez would have completed a pit stop.

In a sport where recent World Championships have been decided on the final lap of the final race of the season, marginal gains are everything; the time it takes to change a set of tyres can be the difference between finishing first and being the first loser.

The Oracle Red Bull Racing pit crew is the ace up the racing-suit sleeves of its drivers. It has won every DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award since 2018, breaking and re-breaking world records in the process – 1.82 for Max Verstappen at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix remains the time to beat.

This isn’t a dedicated specialist team, however; in fact, ‘pit crew member’ isn’t even the main job of those involved. The 20-strong group work as mechanics, technicians and even trackside IT engineers by day, their pit crew credentials only coming to the fore during races.

Matt Caller knows what it takes first-hand. Number one mechanic for Sergio Perez’s car, the 33-year-old is one of the Oracle Red Bull Racing pit crew’s four wheel gunners –the person who bookends a wheel change by removing and attaching the nut using an aerospace-grade wheel gun.

“You don’t have to be insanely fit or strong [to do pit crew duties],” says Caller. “It’s more about injury prevention. I’m crouched down a lot and leaning in and out, so I try to keep my core and back in relatively good condition and strengthen it with exercises and compound lifts to deal with the stresses and strains.”

To be the best, though, requires a body and mind

Top gunner

Oracle Red Bull Racing’s Matt Caller on what it takes to be a cog in the well-oiled machine that is the world’s best Formula 1 pit crew

that’s ready to get to work at a moment’s notice, 23 race weekends a year.

Track time

While the off-season is for personal fitness targets such as “putting on a bit of size or getting back into cardiovascular goals”, Caller says flexibility is key for the season’s March-to-November duration: ”Sometimes you’ll go to a hotel and it’ll have the world’s best gym; other times, you’ll be in a tiny room and there won’t be a gym whatsoever.” If it’s the latter, pit crews are able to get creative with their cardio; once covers are on the cars, they have an hour to use the

track for running or cycling. Some even use it as an opportunity to secure their own pit-lane bragging rights: “There’s a competition every weekend between all the really serious runners to see who gets the fastest time on the circuit.”

Muscle memory

Caller estimates that the crew practise 2,000 pit stops every season – 100 a week during pre-season, and between 60 to 100 on a race weekend. A session lasts around 15 to 20 minutes, with everything reset between each drill: “We all go back into the garage to be roughly where we’d be sitting or standing.” The aim is consistency rather than speed at all costs. “We’re doing exactly what we’d do in the race, every single time, so it’s like muscle memory.”

Chain reaction

Although the pit crew will warm up with stretches and use massage guns to overcome any pre-race niggles, there’s no way of knowing when they’ll be sprung into action for the first pit stop. “You can get into the right mindset, but it can happen with 15 seconds’ notice,” says Caller, “so you don’t really have time to warm up – you’ve just got to hit the ground running and react straight away.” To help compose himself, he performs breathing exercises – “deep breaths, holding and exhaling really slowly to bring my heart rate down and get everything under control” – and visualises the perfect stop while making the 10-15m journey from the garage to the pit lane. “Before you even get out there, you’ve done two stops in your head, so that first stop isn’t the first, it’s the third.”

Take aim

A wheel gunner requires amazing accuracy to ensure that the gun locks onto the nut first time. While he believes the practice pit stops help him stay sharp, Caller also completes a drill where he throws a tennis ball against a wall and catches it with the other hand, before repeating. “[Doing the drill] under time pressure and trying to get as fast as you can keeps your hand-eye coordination up,” he says. redbullracing.com

“You don’t have time to warm up”

Matt Caller, Formula 1 wheel-gunslinger

AIM

zuerich.com/recreation

The city trip for active people: Matteo went biking, played ping-pong, learned salsa and dared the legendary beam challenge. Special city experiences and sports activities in the nearby recreation areas make for a great break in Zurich.

Give it a try!

Active relaxation, Zürich, Switzerland.

VENTURE Gaming

Know your mode

Virtual Regatta has two modes: Inshore and Offshore. In the former, up to 20 players race a course while rounding marks (buoys) and navigating changing weather conditions. A championship comprises upwards of 10 back-to-back races, each of which uses a different class of boat, so players must tweak their approach depending on the vessel’s handling. Offshore is a real-time simulation of events like The Ocean Race, a round-the-world epic where stages can last weeks. “[An Inshore championship] lasts a maximum of two hours. Offshore is much harder – it takes many days and nights.”

PLAY

Gold standard

Esports are being given the Olympic treatment, and IRL-sailor-turned-gamer Francisco Melo is ready to win his medal

On October 19, 1972, Stanford University hosted the first-ever video game competition. The game (Spacewar!) and console (the PDP-1) may have been consigned to history, but it was the inclusion of a prize – a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine – that got the esports ball rolling.

Over the intervening halfcentury, esports have grown to become as popular as the ‘standard’ kind. Millions watch tournaments such as the League of Legends World Championship on the live streaming platform Twitch, and a 2021 poll by YouGov America found that six per cent of US males aged 13-17 dreamt of becoming an ‘esports star’ – one per cent higher than ‘doctor/nurse’. Even the International Olympic Committee (IOC) appreciates their worth, noting that “the players involved prepare and train with an intensity which may be comparable to athletes in traditional sports”.

In 2021, the IOC hosted its first esports tournament, the Olympic Virtual Series, where titles in five games including Gran Turismo (motorsport) and Zwift (cycling) were up for grabs. And this June, in Singapore, it’s taking things a step further. The inaugural Olympic Esports Series (OES) live finals will see qualifiers across nine different games compete to become the first OES winner in their field.

But we’re not about to witness the Olympic debut of Fortnite or CS:GO; games depicting armed battles are out. Instead, the IOC favours simulations of real sports –the likes of WBSC eBaseball: Power Pros, Tennis Clash and Virtual Taekwondo.

This is how Francisco Melo, one of the world’s best at the sailing simulator Virtual Regatta, finds himself in with a shot at an Olympic title. Here, the Portuguese 30-yearold reveals what’s required to tack your way to the top…

Chance encounter

Melo has been hooked on real-life sailing since the age of 11; in adulthood, he even tried to qualify for the 470 class at the Rio 2016 Olympics. When COVID curbed waterbased racing in 2020, a friend told him about an online game championship with a big Portuguese contingent. Melo installed Virtual Regatta on his iPad and won the event: “I haven’t stopped playing since.”

Tack it slow

“To be fast, you must learn how to extract the maximum potential of each boat,” says Melo. He researches the speed with which each model changes direction by turning its front (‘tacking’) or back (‘gybing’) through the wind. He also looks at the wind direction across the whole course to find where it’s strongest and therefore fastest. “Each tack slows the boat down. Learn which side of the course is better and you don’t need a lot of tacks.”

Lone ranger

Melo uses open-water racing strategies on the simulated seas. He isn’t alone in tapping into IRL experience; reigning 49er World Champion Bart Lambriex is one of Virtual Regatta’s best players. Melo’s top tactic? “When getting into fights and protecting your place, you slow down your boat a lot with tacks.” Instead, Melo prefers to sail away from the scrapping pack, even if this means a longer route: “If you’re fast enough, you’ll likely still get top three.” The Olympic Esports Series runs from June 22 to 25. Virtual Regatta is on the App Store and Google Play; virtualregatta.com

“Offshore mode takes many days and nights”

Francisco Melo, esports sailor

VENTURE How To

Centre stage

Łukasz Czepiela tore up the rule books when he landed a plane on a 212m-high helipad. Here’s how the Polish pilot hit the bullseye

Babysitting isn’t an obvious entry-level job for a pilot who, this March, landed a plane on the tight confines of the Burj Al Arab helipad in Dubai. But Łukasz Czepiela’s career path has been far from conventional.

Born in Rzeszów, Poland, he was hooked after watching an aerobatic display at the age of six. “I totally fell in love with flying,” says Czepiela, now 40. Any waking moment was spent obsessing over aeronautics, until at 15 he was granted his glider pilot’s licence.

A recruitment freeze prevented Czepiela joining the Polish air force on graduation from high school, and a degree in aeronautics at university was also out of the question –it would require a private pilot’s licence costing 10 times his parents’ joint annual earnings. Instead, he decided to travel to the UK to fund it while learning English. But this wasn’t easy in 2003: “Poland wasn’t in the EU, so nobody would issue [a work visa] to a 19-year-old.”

Enter babysitting. Through an au pair programme, he got a job with a family in Biggin Hill, on the outskirts of London. Nearby was a small airport, and Czepiela asked about jobs. A plane maintenance and repair company offered him an apprenticeship, and the owner agreed that for every eight hours of work, he could have one hour of flying. That led to his private pilot’s licence.

The same formula was used to train as an aerobatic pilot –Czepiela gave up his spare time to support civilian aerobatic group the Honda Dream Team in exchange for tuition. A job in an aviation shop helped pay for his commercial pilot’s licence.

Now living back in Poland, Czepiela has flown at various Red Bull acrobatic training camps and competitions, winning the 2018 Red Bull Air Race World Championship Challenger Class. But his Bullseye Landing project saw him push aviation’s boundaries beyond his wildest dreams.

Blue-sky thinking

Czepiela is accustomed to landing a plane in tight spaces – he touched down on Poland’s Sopot Pier in 2019. “I thought, ‘How do we top that?’ The Carbon Cub [plane] I used has a quarter of the flying costs of a helicopter and is capable of really short landings. So I thought, ‘Let’s put it on the world’s most famous helipad.’”

Hidden depths

Using spray paint, he marked out the helipad’s diameter on the runway at his local airport.

Czepiela officially logged 650 practice landings, but says he did “way more than that”. Two months in, he was nailing it every time. There was one thing he couldn’t prepare for, though. “[Landing at an] airport, you have a great visual picture of your height. Approaching the helipad, you’re at 200m, then zero. No depth perception.” He had to trust in the process: “Close your eyes and go.”

Prepared mind

Czepiela also captains planes for Wizz Air, so if you hear his voice over the intercom, you’re in safe hands. “If my Airbus ended up in some unusual attitude created by turbulence, I have a good set of skills to recover the aircraft.” It’s not just down to experience, either: “I’ve studied sports psychology – meditation, how to get calm before competition, how to be in a state of flow,” he says.

Air-fixed model

Aircraft modifications were needed for the project’s unique challenges. “The conventional set-up feels like a shopping trolley in reverse. If you break hard, the tail starts to rise.” Fuel tanks from the wings were moved to its back for stability, and the undercarriage was beefed up. More challenging was the turbulence created by the supporting structure of the helipad, which caused sinking downdrafts stronger than the engine: “We put nitrous oxide in it, [providing] an extra 50 horsepower to pull the aircraft up in case I hit a downdraft.”

Safe space

A commercial airport runway can reach lengths of 3.9km, offering 900m of landing space. The Burj Al Arab helipad is 27m long, with a landing window of just 4m. Approaching at 15mps, he had “literally split seconds” to decide whether to commit to the landing. “If I was short by a metre, I’d crash,” he says. “If I was over by a metre, I wouldn’t stop the aircraft [in time].”

redbull.com/bullseye-landing

“If my landing was short by a metre, I would crash”

Łukasz Czepiela, aerobatic pilot

BIG TORQUE

Canyon’s new Torque:ON CF is the perfect all-day bike-park companion

When you break it down, the actual time spent going downhill during a day at the bike park is firmly in the minority. Travelling to and from the trails and getting you and your bike set up and ready accounts for a large slice of a session. And that’s before you factor in the cumulative minutes and hours spent waiting for and taking an uplift.

Electric MTBs were supposed to solve this final problem, but the limited capacity of the industrystandard 504Wh batteries have meant at best nursing your charge for a full day or, at worst, being left with no juice, an extremely heavy bike, and still requiring the services of an uplift.

Canyon understands this pain. The German bike manufacturer knows how frustrating it is to balance battery anxiety or wait in a queue when you should be immersing yourself in shredding a new line. But like its general outlook, rather than settling for what has gone before, Canyon’s all-new Torque:ON CF disrupts the eMTB norm.

Fitted with a Shimano EP8 motor and packing either a 720Wh or 900Wh battery, the Torque:ON CF allows you to say sayonara to the shuttle and pedal back up to the top of the trailhead with 85Nm of torque between your legs, run after run. The result is more time spent doing the adrenaline-fuelled part you love, and less time spent kicking your heels at the foot of a hill.

All that battery power would count for nothing if its housing wasn’t up to

scratch, though. Fortunately, the Torque:ON CF is a fantastic freeride rig in its own right and can handle anything you throw at it – from the sunbaked Alpine descents of Morzine to the allweather options at BikePark Wales.

Centred around a full carbon-fibre frame, it shaves 1.5kg off its previous iteration, weighing in at a whippable 23.7kg. Its new motocross-inspired geometry helps to keep the centre of gravity low for improved control on all gradients, too, while its confidenceinspiring stiffness will have you railing berms at full gas. Teamed with 180mm travel up front and 175mm at the rear, it’s a bike built for going big.

Add in an innovative toptubeintegrated water bottle, a SUNringlé mullet wheelset, Canyon cockpit and a 200mm Iridium dropper post, and there’s never been a better way of getting in more downhill action on your next trip to the bike park. Find out more at canyon.com/en-gb/

VENTURE Equipment

VENTURE Equipment #2 FORAGE

VENTURE Equipment

SIX OF THE BEST Hackney

This patch of east London has so many drinking venues, your head will be spinning before you’ve taken a sip. Fear not, we’ve done the legwork…

VENTURE Bars

Barge East

Converted from a 122-year-old Dutch barge, this award-winning floating bar and restaurant offers a unique experience. Sitting alongside is a spacious canalside garden, and the venue also hosts art workshops. Come for: seasonal British cuisine; frozen cocktails; the location. Sweetwater Mooring, 98 White Post Lane, E9; bargeeast.com

Night Tales

“East London’s largest terrace, event space and nightclub” lives up to its billing. The main terrace in particular is huge (560sq-m), with cocktail bars, bookable VIP booths and in-house pizza among its numerous delights. Come for: the terrace and brunch parties; DJ nights at the Arch 14 club. 14BohemiaPlace,E8;nighttales.co.uk

Number 90

The eclectic style of this canalside bar and restaurant is obvious from its striking muralled exterior. Inside, you’re treated to a long list of craft beers and cocktails, with a menu that favours locally sourced produce. Come for: the terrace by the canal; giant mirror ball; in-house art gallery. 90 Main Yard, Wallis Road, E9; number90bar.co.uk

NT’s Loft

With an outdoor heated terrace and large indoor bar, this 180sq-m venue provides panoramic views. There are DJ sets at weekends, but if club tunes aren’t your thing, go midweek when Jazz Wednesday lowers the tempo. Come for: loft-style drinking; great music; some amazing sunsets.

207, 1 Westgate St, E8; ntloft.co.uk

Dalston Roofpark

Who needs the Manhattan skyline? This venue gives rooftop drinking an east London spin. Back for summer 2023 are its Love Pub + Grub events, offering DJ sets, great food and free bar games. Come for: Love Pub + Grub; bottomless brunch; sunrise yoga sessions; impressive views across Dalston and beyond. 18-22 Ashwin St, E8; dalstonroofpark.com

All My Friends

As its name suggests, this laid-back haunt is all about good times with good friends. A custom-built sound system, Japanese-inspired food and an extensive drinks list ensure this. Come for: great music; local craft beers; the in-store record shop. Unit 1, 96 White Post Lane, E9; allmyfriends.uk

June

CREPE CITY

“A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it,” says Matt Damon in recent box-office hit Air, in which he plays Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike executive who signed Michael Jordan to his first sneaker deal in 1984. Sage words that resonate even more strongly today. Sneaker culture is booming, largely due to brand collaborations with pop stars such as Bad Bunny and Travis Scott. Europe’s biggest travelling sneaker festival gathers the UK’s finest pump purveyors to showcase their newest kicks, alongside rare collectible classics that cost more than a used car. Box Hub Warehouse, Glasgow; crepe-city.com

13

July onwards BREAKING BEYOND

Breaking may have begun on the streets of New York, but today it’s a truly global phenomenon, as this six-part series illustrates. Each episode tells the story of a single B-boy or B-girl (such as Canada’s Phil Wizard, pictured) in their own home city, showcasing the local hip-hop scene and their part in it, but ultimately celebrating the singular passion they all share, before taking them to a destination city to exchange culture and ideas with breakers from other nations. Watch all the episodes on Red Bull TV. redbull.com

to 19 June SHEFFIELD DOCFEST

The documentary is a medium that can move us, educate us, and even provoke real-world change. You’ll find plenty with that power at the UK’s leading documentary festival, many here in the hope of finding a distributor. Discover otherwise untold personal stories about sport, communities, global issues and the environment, even pop groups such as TLC and Wham!, plus Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, described by Variety as “bleak, but essential viewing”. Alongside the 48 projects from 34 countries is Alternate Realities, an exhibition that utilises AI and VR to make the documentary experience even more immersive. Various venues, Sheffield; sheffdocfest.com

VENTURE Calendar

15 to 16 June

RED BULL HARDLINE

The toughest and most progressive downhill mountain-biking race returns to the Dyfi Valley in Wales as the world’s bravest riders tackle the fiendish course carved through treelines and rocky hills, and embellished with insane drops, ramps and a two-storey road gap, all born from the mind and spade of MTB mastermind Dan Atherton. It’s a spectacle to behold in person, but if you fancy enjoying it from a comfier vantage point, Adrenaline Alley (adrenalinealley.co.uk) –Europe’s largest action sports venue – in Corby, will be livestreaming all the weekend’s drama. Dyfi Valley, Wales; redbull.com

June onwards

WOOLF WOMEN

This is the true account of a 10,000km trip by German downhill skateboarder Jenny ‘Jungle’ Schauerte and four friends to an monastery in Turkey’s Pontic Mountains. Woolf Women is a thrilling skate film as the five hurtle down roads at obscene speeds, but it’s far more than that. Born out of an idea that Schauerte and first-time director Marchella De Angelis had while at crossroads in both their lives, the story takes a shocking turn early on that brings a deeper narrative to the journey. The film has also experienced its own pilgrimage, receiving acclaim at Raindance Festival in 2020 before taking three years to be released. It’s worth the wait. Showing nationwide; woolfwomen.com

30 June GUNS N’ ROSES LIVE

There hasn’t been a new GN’R album in 15 years. And while guitarist Slash announced that the US legends may release “a couple of epic songs” soon, that won’t be why more than 60,000 fans attend their headline gig at the BST Hyde Park festival. Rather, it’s the promise of more than two hours of hard-rock classics, from November Rain to Paradise City (usually their last encore). HydePark, London;bst-hydepark.com

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The Red Bulletin is published in six countries. This is the cover of our Swiss issue for July, featuring Olympic boulderer and former world champion Petra Klingler.

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

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Marin Heitzler

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Yoann Aubry, yoann.aubry@redbull.com

THE RED BULLETIN

Germany, ISSN 2079-4258

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David Mayer

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Hans Fleißner (manager), Petra Hannert, Monika Hasleder, Billy Kirnbauer-Walek

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Natascha Djodat

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Thomas Hutterer (manager), Michael Baidinger, Franz Fellner, Ines Gruber, Moritz Philipp Haaf, Wolfgang Kröll, Gabriele MatijevicBeisteiner, Yvonne Mensik, Alfred Minassian, Nicole Okasek-Lang, Britta Pucher, Nicole Umsait, Johannes Wahrmann-Schär, Ellen Wittmann-Sochor, Ute Wolker, Christian Wörndle, Sabine Zölß

THE RED BULLETIN

Switzerland, ISSN 2308-5886

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Saskia Jungnikl-Gossy

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Hans Fleißner (manager), Petra Hannert, Monika Hasleder, Billy Kirnbauer-Walek

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Meike Koch

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Goldbach Publishing

Marco Nicoli, marco.nicoli@goldbach.com

THE RED BULLETIN

USA, ISSN 2308-586X

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Peter Flax (manager), Melissa Gordon, Nora O’Donnell

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David Caplan

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Branden Peters

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Marissa Bobkowski, marissa.bobkowski@redbull.com

Tanya Foster, tanya.foster@redbull.com

Todd Peters, todd.peters@redbull.com

Dave Szych, dave.szych@redbull.com

$4 MILLION IN LIFETIME DONATIONS

Semi-Rad

Adventure philosophy from BRENDAN LEONARD

“Running is so simple, people always say, alluding to the fact that the only equipment you need is a pair of shoes (and some people would argue you don’t even need that). But it can get complicated if you, like me, overthink it every time. How far should I go? How fast? Trail or road? What route should I take? What should I wear? How much water and/or food should I take with me? Are there toilets and/or enough foliage along the route in case the need should arise? And then there are other people to dodge/ evade, sometimes in cars, sometimes on bicycles, sometimes with pushchairs, sometimes with leashed or unleashed dogs. And the worst: what if I have to pass someone who’s running at almost exactly the same pace as I am?”

The next issue of THE RED BULLETIN is out on July 11