The world and everything in it

I hate to say it, but I am every marketeer’s wet dream. Nothing I’m particularly proud of – it’s just the way it is. Not only do I tick most boxes of virtually every high-end consumer brand’s communication target, I’m also a complete sucker for blatantly obvious marketing ploys. I’ll demonstrate this with a small example. Last weekend I was in London where across the street from my hotel the cunning folks at Nike had put up a pop-up store. In it, they sold the Nike+ FuelBand. For those of you living on the moon for the past months, the Nike+ FuelBand is Nike’s latest must-have activity monitoring gadget. It registers the number of steps you take, uses that information to dubiously calculate the number of calories you burn and then translates those figures into so-called Fuel points. A universal points system reminiscent of Swatch’ failed attempt to introduce a new time standard back in 1998. Is it accurate? Hardly. Do I need such a device? Not at all. Does it come with shiny LED lights and is it therefore imperative I have one? Absolutely.

Even if the FuelBand hadn’t looked like something Spock would use to communicate with Kirk, the Nike store clerk did a very effective job in ‘selling’ me this £ 150 plastic bracelet. That’s because he uttered the following magic words: ‘the FuelBand is sold out in New York and we’re the only store in the world that is allowed to sell a limited number each day’. Sold out. Only store. In the world. He couldn’t have been more persuasive had he told me it came with a complementary Candice Swanepoel clone. And so I bought one without hesitation and have been walking around like the cat that got the cream eversince.

Nevertheless, the FuelBand has some serious limitations. Because it’s on your wrist, it doesn’t register cycling. Living in Amsterdam, where you spend half your waking life cycling into blustery headwinds burning off truckloads of calories, this is a little disappointing. Also, it isn’t waterproof. On the Nike+ website, Nike tries to gloss over this fact by saying it’s okay to dance in the rain with it, but you shouldn’t go swimming with your FuelBand. I windsurf, which burns off more calories than speed climbing Everest, but exactly how much more I will never know. But I could tell you how much energy it takes to do the Lambada in drizzle. Should I ever be inclined to find out.

Luckily for Nike, the world is filled with people like me and therefore the FuelBand will probably be a massive hit when it becomes more widely available. Just remember who got tricked into buying it first.

Anyone who’s ever been skiing in St. Anton, Austria should at some point have come across an establishment called the Mooserwirt. For those who haven’t had the pleasure or simply can’t remember, the Mooserwirt is best described as an alpine booze bastion filled to the rim with plastered winter sport enthusiasts singing along to German Schlager songs. Most of these tracks are so horrendously bad, they make David Hasselhoff’s Du sound like instant Grammy material. The gathered après-ski crowd doesn’t seem to mind though. But then again, very few things really bother you when you’ve consumed your own body volume in alcohol. I’ve seen people dancing around half naked in minus twenty degree temperatures with a pint of beer in each hand, crashing head-first off of icy bars, only to get up again to the laughter of their friends and keep on dancing. So if breaking your skull on a slab of ice doesn’t trouble you, a song like Hörst du die Regenwürmer husten probably won’t either. To keep mass casualties to a minimum, the mother of all après-ski bars closes its doors no later than 8 p.m. But as it’s located a couple of hundred meters before the end of the slopes, you still have to descend the remaining meters to the village below. In the dark. As you can imagine, this is quite a challenge even when sober. Legend has it more accidents occur on these final five hundred meters than on the other 260 kilometers of slopes of the entire Arlberg ski domain. And having boarded down there once myself with more alcohol than blood in my veins, I think this is one legend that might actually be true.

Apart from that one near-fatal day though, I never drink on the mountain or when (wind)surfing. Call me a health freak, but I simply value life too much to send myself into avalanche-prone backcountry terrain or big waves with the reflexes of a sloth. Even more so when it comes to drugs. While I’ve had my share in more, say, traditional circumstances, I’ve never felt the need to start seeing pink elephants frolicking around in the water below me when I’m trying to spot my landing in a twenty-foot backloop. And yet in action sports such as surfing and snowboarding it’s still pretty common and even accepted for people to go out under the influence.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to read that the Association of Surfing Professionals will start screening surfers for drugs in 2012. While back in the sixties surfing was considered to be something for pot-smoking hippies rebelling against society, nowadays it’s a full-on professional sport in which proper athletes compete for hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money provided by major consumer brands. Most of these brands aren’t particularly eager to connect their name to questionable behaviour. If Tiger Woods gets dropped by his sponsors for sleeping with supermodels, how do you think brands would respond to being associated with drug abuse? Therefore, straightening out the sport’s image only seems like the logical thing to do – especially at the top level. Because as long as companies are willing to invest in relative niche sports such as surfing, windsurfing and snowboarding, these awesome sports get the exposure they deserve, enabling them to survive and grow. Anyone advocating the commercialization of board sports will ultimately destroy its soul, might want to reconsider that standpoint when in the near future board prices will double because no one is backing their sport any more.

Money aside, I’ve never been a big fan of going out intoxicated in general. When conditions are big, you simply can’t afford to not be at your sharpest. Not in today’s level of competition, nor in recreational settings. Yes, you’re all cool and mellow paddling out in massive surf, riding dangerous mountains, or doing sky-high jumps stoned out of your mind, but exactly how mellow will you look rolling down the hospital ramp in a wheelchair later in the day? I’m not saying we should all get a one-way ticket on the next train to Lhasa and take a vow of eternal abstinence, but I do believe there really is a time and a place for everything. Although this is something the clientele of the Mooserwirt unfortunately will probably never understand.

When I tell people I windsurf, nine out of ten times the response I get these days is ‘Ah, you kitesurf’. I find this difficult to understand. If you tell me you’re into soccer, I don’t ask you whether your favourite player is Federer or Nadal either, do I? They’re two different sports, their only parallels being that they’re both wind-powered and take place on water, but that’s where the similarities end. So please world, try to understand: surfers surf, windsurfers windsurf and kitesurfers wear swim shorts over their wetsuits. It’s that simple.

It’s not hard to see where the confusion is coming from though. Kitesurfing is the latest in-sport that every man and his dog wants to get into, because they either think it will make them cool, they’re tired of dragging 100 kgs of windsurfing stuff around the world or because they’re twelve years old and didn’t grow up with legends like Bjorn Dunkerbeck, Mark Angulo and Robby Naish. Although they probably do know Naish – isn’t he that really old kitesurfer? Also, as kitesurfing can be practiced in less wind than windsurfing, it’s a lot more visible to the public. Especially here in northwestern Europe, where wind is dependant on low-pressure systems, it’s pretty common to have sunny beach days with just enough wind to dazzle the beach-going crowd with your kite and shorts. But when the real wind kicks in and the windsurfers come out, the sunbathers have long been chased off by rain and grizzly temperatures, leaving the windsurfers strutting their stuff unseen to the world. And so to most people, anything with the word ‘surf’ in it must be kitesurfing – it’s all the poor bastards know. And windsurfers are still regarded as those old-school guys with the colourful triangular sails brightening up the shores of Lake Whatever.

To all those people I say: go and watch Minds Wide Open. Not only will it set the record straight once and for all that windsurfing is the most spectacular water sport of them all, I’ll also guarantee you the action and scenic imagery will have you glued to your screen as if it were the final episode of 24, season 8. Minds Wide Open takes you to Maui, Cabo Verde, Indonesia, Denmark and Egypt, and features some of the best windsurfers the world has ever seen. Beautifully shot, skillfully edited and tastefully scored, it gives you a great insight into the essence of the sport, the spirit of the sailors and the amazing places and cultures it can take you. So go and get it here. Next time I tell you I’m a windsurfer, it would be nice if you could share your point of view on Kauli Seadi’s epic waveriding session at Coral Joul about halfway through the movie.

When Bono wrote Pride – U2’s genius tribute to the late Dr. Martin Luther King – back in 1984, I doubt his intention was for it to be mutilated into an elevator version so warped and distorted from the original, you have trouble distinguishing it from Sade’s Smooth Operator. Not only am I talking about the brutal rape of a track that needs no changing – let alone raping – whatsoever, but also, why on earth would I want to listen to a song about the assassination of one of the world’s great visionaries while sipping on a glass of wine by a hotel bar fireplace. None of these considerations seem to have come into play when putting together the lounge music compilation for Hotel Dos Mares in Tarifa, which is where I’m currently staying. It includes monstrous covers of Prince’s Purple Rain, Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the silence and – I kid you not – Snap’s Rhythm is a dancer. And they’re playing it round the clock, and I’m guessing year round as well. But other than its woeful attempt at creating a Hotel Costes-like musical ambiance, this is the most laid-back place I’ve stayed at in ages.

Hotel Dos Mares is situated about 3 kilometers north of Tarifa, directly on the sandy white beaches of Los Lances. The complex consists of 34 bungalows. 8 rooms and 4 suites, most of them to some extent overlooking the Atlantic. It’s all pretty basic stuff, but the clientele Dos Mares caters to – windsurfers and kitesurfers -, isn’t typically looking for anything fancy anyway. When you can fall asleep with the sound of breaking waves and the occasional Andalusian horse neighing in the hotel stables, what else do you really need? A tennis court maybe, or a gym and swimming pool? Dos Mares has got you covered there as well. Even the staff is friendly enough, which in Spain is about as hard to find as a local woman that doesn’t vaguely remind you of your uncle.

The scenery at Dos Mares is simply stunning. I’m writing this on the hotel terrace, blinded by the setting sun and hypnotized by the sound of picture perfect breaking waves. For a novice surfer like me, this place is great. The hotel break serves up solid waves right on its doorstep, even on a small-sized swell. The seaweed that’s washed right up to the hotel grounds is a silent indication of how big it can get here when the swell’s really pumping. If the wind actually came through, I have no doubt it would make for a great windsurfing beach as well, especially in combination with a decent swell. And I’m sure it’s great for kitesurfing too, but as this post isn’t about latent homosexuality, I won’t elaborate on that any further.

Before coming here, the biggest catch I read in the reviews was the hotel restaurant. Apparently it was dreadful. But while it’s certainly no haute cuisine, it’s perfectly fine for what it is – a Spanish beachside hotel restaurant where you grab a bite to eat when you’re too tired to go anywhere else. They even serve decent coffee. It’s from a machine, but still very drinkable. So if its only drawback is the music selection that makes you want to go Van Gogh on yourself, Hotel Dos Mares, Tarifa is a destination I can only highly recommend.

Earlier this year, I went on a windsurfing/surfing trip to the Canaries. I’d been there lots of times before, but always for windsurfing only. This time around though, I’d also thrown a surfboard in my quiver bag – just in case. I have to admit I didn’t really care much for surfing and only regarded it as a second-best alternative for windless days. It turned out to be a classic case of not knowing what I’d been missing all these years. I’ve been windsurfing all my life on the best breaks all over the world and though I still think it’s the greatest sport ever, ever since I’ve been paddling out and catching glassy waves on nothing more than a surfboard, I can only say surfing is absofuckinglutely amazing. Which is why since that trip, I’ve been keeping an eye on surfing through a different lens. Actually, I’ve been keeping an eye on it – full stop.

Today is special in the surfing scene for two reasons. November 2^nd 2011 marks the one-year anniversary of Andy Irons’ untimely death. For those who aren’t familiar with Irons, he was and still is one of the biggest names in surfing. He died of a heart attack at the age of 32 in a Dallas hotel room, while waiting for a connecting flight home. I’m not going to pretend I was a huge fan, because when Irons died, I hardly knew who he was myself. But I am going to post this amazing slide show in memory of a great athlete.

At the same time, today is about to go down in history as the day Kelly Slater grabs his 11^th world title at the Rip Curl Pro Search in San Francisco. Most people think Slater is an actor who starred in Baywatch and whose biggest achievement in life is making it with Pam Anderson. While this accomplishment should indeed not be overlooked, he’s actually one of the world’s best – if not the best – surfers that ever lived. An eleventh title would make him the most successful surfer the world has ever seen. And mind you, Slater is 39 going on 40. Watch him change that 10 into an 11 live here, or check him out featured in this very slick edit of the Quiksilver Pro France held in the Landes last month. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in a next life, I want to come back as a Red Camera.

The people at Chaudfontaine have done it again. In the latest installment of their series ‘backward commercials featuring poorly animated wildlife’, a pair of Jumanji beavers steals a bottle of mineral water from an unsuspecting family, by cunningly sabotaging a vending machine so that it leads each ordered bottle straight into their paws. I’m not kidding, it’s right here. When dad pushes the buttons on the vending machine, the bottle doesn’t come out the front as he might have expected. Because the beavers have somehow clawed their way through the machine’s metal casing and then built a massive slide to channel the bottle to their nest, it ends up in the hands of the furry rascals while dad keeps searching the machine for his Chaudfontaine – oblivious to the rodents’ diabolical scheme. I won’t even get into the sequence in which one beaver launches the other from a make-shift slingshot device to intercept the bottle in mid-air, because words would simply fail me.

None of this has got anything to do with the Red Bull Illume photo contest – except maybe that it’s at the complete opposite end of the cool spectrum. Red Bull Illume is a global action sports photography competition that has produced some of the most amazing images I’ve seen in a while. Each and every one of them makes me want to become either a professional extreme sports athlete or an extreme sports photographer – or both at the same time. If you’re even remotely into action sports and/or photography, check out redbullillume.com. The exhibition tour has just come to an end, but you can still check out the winning images and the stories behind them online. But if you really want to do this right, go and order the sublime limited print run coffee table book here. It will take you heli-boarding in the Rockies, tow-in surfing in French Polynesia, cliff-diving in downtown Hamburg, base-jumping in Norway and skateboarding on abandoned oil rigs, and many other astonishing places.

But Illume isn’t just about hardcore action shots. It also features beautiful portraits, scenic photography and background stories that will give you an insight in the world of these extraordinary athletes. The only flaw about Illume to me personally is that there aren’t any windsurfing shots in it. But at least that leaves something to improve in next year’s edition of this otherwise spectacular project.