It’s 11am on a Tuesday morning and Jay Monds, aka Bulletproof, is sipping champagne and eating cake at the offices of EMI on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. It’s not how he usually spends his mornings, but the superstar DJ has got a couple of good excuses. It’s his 35th birthday and his new album Dub Me Crazy has gone straight to No1 in the iTunes electronic chart and number four in the album chart. “Best birthday EVER,” he declares on his Facebook page.
Suzie Moncrieff was a struggling sculptor when she organised the first World of WearableArt (WOW) show. It was 1987 and a couple of hundred people turned up to support what was intended to be a one-off fundraiser for a rural art gallery in Nelson. Moncrieff however, was quick to spot the potential. “I knew I had something very special,” she says. “There was,
and still is, nothing like it anywhere else in the world. There have been copycat events that accept any old fancy-dress costume, but we’ve always set high standards.”
A photo shoot in a bikini in the freezing cold kick-started Annabel Anderson’s stand-up paddleboarding (SUP) career. The shoot at Wanaka was Jeremy Stephenson’s idea – he’s the New Zealand representative for Starboard, the world’s leading SUP board manufacturer – and they used Anderson’s photo in adverts, catalogues and on billboards. That was 2009 and Anderson was “just paddling for fun at the time”, but Starboard and
Stephenson recognised her potential.
"The car rolled once and ended up on its side," says Paddon. "We (Paddon and his then co-driver Nicole France) managed to climb out but there were trees on one side and a bank on the other so we couldn’t tip it back over and we couldn’t open the bonnet to get at the fire extinguisher. Some oil leaked onto the exhaust, there was a spark, then a flame and that was it. I stood on the side of the road and watched a $40,000 car go up in smoke. It was gut wrenching. There was nothing left but the roll cage - it melted the gear box, the dashboard, the seats – everything."
With no insurance – most rally cars in New Zealand aren't insured because of the high premiums - no car and no money, Paddon's fledgling rally career looked to have suffered a serious setback before it really got going.
Before the last Rugby World Cup in 2007, a three-month reconditioning window for 22 of Graham Henry's squad was designed to create a new breed of rugby player: the super-sized All Black. The New Zealand Herald reported Henry would have "the biggest, fastest, fittest All Black team ever assembled," at his disposal in France, "bulked-up, fuel-injected All Blacks waiting to be released on unsuspecting adversaries. The athletic base is in place for the All Blacks to make a quantum leap in terms of the pace and physicality with which they play the game."The 'bulked-up, fuel-injected' All Blacks were bundled out of the tournament by France in the quarter-finals. Four years on the build up to the World Cup is more low-key, less gung-ho. Nick Gill, the current strength and conditioning coach with the All Blacks, isn't predicting any 'quantum leaps'. He is confident however that the modern All Black is not only in better physical shape than players of the past but is also more skilful.
A sheep and cattle farm in Southland is the unlikely location for a celebration of two-wheel trickery.
Farm Jam shouldn’t work. It takes place miles from anywhere in the middle of nowhere; it’s a two-hour drive from Queenstown and then 17km off the main road that ends in Invercargill. Then there’s the fact that the event brings together mountain biking, BMXThe outstanding efforts of the All Whites at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa last
June have put football firmly in the spotlight. But what impact, if any, has this had on
the grassroots of the game, and what does the future hold for football?
Tom Wegener is a longboard legend from Los Angeles who fell in love with Australia. The man behind the revival of the Alaia, a surfboard used by the ancient Hawaiians, is hoping the Tuna -- a mass-produced board modeled on the Alaia -- will reinvigorate surfing.
Wegener is giving me the tour of the two-and-a-half-acre plot he calls his "Creation Plantation." The property, a mile or so outside Cooroy in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in Queensland, Australia, backs onto the Bruce Highway, but towering gum trees and thick trunks of bamboo provide ample shelter from passing traffic and prying eyes.
In the front yard is a homemade halfpipe. Out back is a three-story shack, a wonderful old wooden building with a set of rickety stairs up the side, leading to the loft where Wegener shapes his wooden surfboards. Since he bought the property in 2001, Wegener has planted orange trees, fig trees, passion fruit, tropical apples, dragon fruit, guava, pawpaw, persimmon, and peach trees. Lettuce, spinach, corn, tomatoes, and fresh herbs vie for space in the vegetable patch, and half a dozen egg cartons recycled as biodegradable seed trays are ready for planting. Sawdust from the ramshackle shed is used to mulch the trees. Wegener knows more about composting than any garden-center guru.
"We want to be hippies so bad," he laughs. "We want to create a green parallel-universe so if everything else collapses, we'll at least be able to feed ourselves."
Check out the rest of the story here at the new Redbull magazine.
Brook Macdonald announced his arrival in the mountain biking elite in 2009, winning the World Junior downhill title. Now in his second year in the senior ranks, the 20-year-old from Napier is eyeing a podium finish in the World Cup series.
Red Bulletin: Is it true that, in your case, mountain biking’s gain is the All Blacks’ loss?Dean Barker knows few may care about a Team New Zealand challenge for the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco in 2013. Since 2007, the last time NZ had
a crack at the Cup, the billionaire playboys behind teams Alinghi and Oracle have spent longer in court than on the water, arguing over the size and shape of their vessels.
“It’s going to take time for the public to re-engage with the America’s Cup after the damage they’ve done,” says Barker. “But it will recover.”
