Duotone Diversity Magazine No.02 2020

Tom, you’ve been a motorbike racer since early childhood. You started with Pocket Bikes and rode your first race at the age of 9! You finished the 2019 season on rank three of the Moto 2 World Championships. What was your motivation to start kiteboarding? It came by accident. My manager Daniel introduced me to the sport for the first time in Tenerife / Canary Islands. From there everything came pretty quickly, I didn’t have any problems learning the basics. This is probably because due to racing I’m used to fast and coordinated motion sequences. How fast did you learn and what are your current goals in kitesurfing? I progressed to a good level pretty quickly for a hobby rider. I don’t have huge goals in Kitesurfing – I probably won’t be a professional kiter anymore. But of course I’m constantly searching for my personal challenges in new tricks, trying to improve my ability with better gear, with the help of kite teachers, Youtube Stunt man, Wingsuit flyer, skydiver – you seem to need a lot of adrenalin in your life? I do not consider myself an adrenaline junkie at all. My biggest drive is the challenge of pursuing and accomp- lishing something that I am not capable to do “yet”. It always needs to be something I have never done before. Even better if no one else has ever done it before. The sensation of overcoming my actual limits and rising up to a new level of learning, experience and knowledge. In 2000, together with your teammates, you were the first parachutist to proximity fly the Swiss Alps, creating a new skydiving discipline known as speedflying – what feeling does speedflying evoke in you? At the time mostly fear. I think I was doing it only to keep up with my three team mates. We were the first ones to ever be jumping from helicopters at high altitudes and extreme cold temperatures (25C below zero) to proximity fly down on the north face of Eiger Mountain. But the weather didn’t allow us to jump and fly. So we started to snowboard down, “kiting” our high performance parachutes down on the slopes until we would get some lift. Due to tutorials and the Academy App. But in general I want to have fun. In the end, with a professional career as a Moto GP rider, the goal will always also be to not take too many risks and to not get injured. What role have injuries played in your career so far? Unfortunately, so far injuries have played a bigger role in my career than I would have liked them to. An injury, which in racing can be very fast and very critical, is a lot of times a huge setback. Therefore I constantly have the possible risks in the back of my head, it doesn’t matter if I’m kiting, doing motocross, skiing or anything else. What does kitesurfing mean to you? What does the sport give to you? Kiting to me is the ultimate recreation. It means holidays, switching off, and not thinking about my job. You have to completely focus on the coordination and movement, which doesn’t allow you to think about anything else. the extreme small sizes of the parachutes as well as the steep trim angle of attack it was difficult to take off, we had to generate too much speed. We tried about 20 times before successfully taking off only once. It was extremely tough and exhausting. And it was really dangerous. We took way too many falls and were very lucky not to get seriously injured. We were young… You are also a kiter. Is the feeling kiteboarding gives you comparable to what you feel when speedflying? I wouldn’t say I’m a kiter yet – I am still learning. So right now I don’t feel any relation between kitesurfing and any form of parachuting. Maybe once I start learning high jumps and getting some air time under the kite I will be able to relate both but for now they are completely different in the way you pilot the chute and the feeling you get. You are holding certain world records – in 2005 you scored the world’s fastest free fall speed at 343mph / 552kmh (stream line body position). In 2007 you did a Wing-suit “proximity” fly-by within 5 meters of the Statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro and in 2010 you were the first human to fly a wing-suit in close Do you see similarities in kitesurfing and racing? Of course, both sports need a lot of coordination skills, which made it easy for me to learn how to kitesurf. Also, both are pure action. Exactly what I like. Do you see enormous differences between these sports? Apart from both needing coordination, they are completely different sports. The speed, the surface, the gear, nothing is quite comparable. So the sports themselves are more or less the opposite. If you weren’t a professional motorbike racer, what would you like to be? Professional kiteboarder? Probably not, I love racing motorbikes too much. I still have huge aims in racing and don’t like spending time with speculations. For me, everything is just perfect like it is. LUIGI CANI WI NGSU I T ATHL E TE formation with a jet fighter aircraft. Kiteboarding seems almost relaxing in comparison? Why do you do it? I do it because it is beautiful, it gives me the opportunity to be in connection with stunning nature. And it challenges me to learn something new every time. Do you see parallels between kiting and the other sports you do? Mostly with wake boarding. I think knowing how to wakeboard helped me a lot to pick up kite surfing quickly. What does kiteboarding mean to you? Quality time with myself. Photo LIQUI MOLY Intact GP Team Portrait Thomas Buchwalder Photo James Boole P E O P L E 25 24 P E O P L E S P O R T S M O TO RB I K E R A CE R