Extreme ways
April 2003, etc magazine
Some of it is glamorous, adrenaline-soaked action sequences lifted from dumb Hollywood movies, and some of it is just hard, hard work - but you really can make a living from extreme sports. andrew losowsky finds out how
Get a grip
Leo Houlding has more lives than a catskin coat. "I often think about the risks I take," he says. "I love life and accept risk as part of it. Fear makes life more precious."
Leo, 21, doesn't just laugh in the face of fear, he snogs it full on. Climbing since the age of ten, when he was 15 he completed Britain's hardest route, Dinas Cromlech in North Wales, at 2am with a broken headlamp. A year earlier, he had already become the British indoor climbing champion. One afternoon in 1998, he was on the way to a family wedding when he made an impromptu stop to scale the Angel in the North (the police let him off with a caution).
Later that year, he and a friend were watching in awe as two men became the first to conquer the fearsome North America Wall in Yosemite National Park without ropes. The following day, with no planning whatsoever, they decided to 'have a go' and became the second.
Last year, his luck ran out (or held firmer than ever?) when he crushed his right foot in a fall in Patagonia. "I lost my grip," he says. "The next thing I knew, I was watching the fixed rope I had managed to grab burn into my hands without altering my velocity. The rope snapped tight and I was overwhelmed by the pain in my foot. I was optimistically screaming 'I've sprained my ankle'. My hands were badly burnt and covered in blood and I had to crawl down the mountain for three days. I had six months on crutches; six months ago I started climbing again. Another six and I should be crankin'."
When Leo gets crankin', rocks get scared. No longer doing competitions, and refusing to use artificial handholds, he remains one of Britain's few climbing superstars, earning money from sponsors, photography, writing and occasional public speaking.
"The worst thing," he says, "is the insecurity of professional sport and people trying to exploit the passion. But I'm living a dream - I have great friends all over the world who I spend quality adventure time with."
Following a bagful of As and A*s at GCSE, Leo decided to take two years out and try to become a professional climber. If it didn't work out, he would go back to school.
"I'd recommend reaching for your highest ambitions but don't bank on them," he says. "It's especially hard to be a full-time climber because there's very little money out there."
Although Leo is on etc's list of ideal drinking companions, he would rather be with someone he remembers fondly.
"If there was one man I'd like to share a drink with it would be a great friend and mentor Jose Peryra, a Venezuelan climber. He was killed by a rockfall while climbing on January 6th this year in Mexico. He lived his life to the full and I shared some incredible adventures with him. I miss him. We'd drink vodka, cranberry and orange, somewhere beautiful."
Rip girl
When the worst thing about your job is "running out of Marmite", you know you're onto a winner.
Such is one of the very few complaints of Robyn Davies. When she started out, she was probably the only 13-year-old in Cornwall not to have tried surfing.
"Me and my brother were on the beach and it looked fun," she says. "I hired a board and stood up first time. I thought, 'oh, I'm a natural.' In fact it was beginner's luck and it was weeks before I did it again. But I knew I was hooked." Now Britain's top female surfer, she spends her days doing yoga before fighting tides all around the world.
Things started slowly for Robyn, with modest victories in amateur competitions. But as time went on, things picked up; aged 19, she won the UK championships, joined the UK surfing team and, last year, was the only woman invited to try and tackle Britain's first ever Big Wave contest.
Making a living from it, however, wasn't so easy. Until the sponsors took notice, she'd been a waitress, sorted daffodil bulbs, worked in a car park... anything to fund her passion for the sport. Now aged 26 and the face of O'Neill, the Extreme Sports Channel and G-Sport, her concerns are somewhat different. And often based around the whereabouts of Marmite.
"It's not easy to become a full-time surfer," she says. "But if you're totally committed and your heart is in it, I believe you can achieve anything. Now I'm competing for a spot in the World Championship tour [only open to the top 20 or so surfers in the world]. After that I want to be World Champ. Life is there to be lived, after all."
Even if living it means sticking your head under the water now and then...
"I've taken a few bad wipeouts," she admits. "The nearest I came to drowning was in Hawaii. I pulled into the wave and it was pinching at the end. As it closed over me I took a breath a bit too late and breathed in water. I was held under for ages and came up with burning lungs, not able to take a breath or call for help. Just as I thought my time was up, I threw up, took a breath and then went out to catch a few more waves."
It could all have been quite different for the girl who was two years into an Animation degree before the seas claimed her. Now, despite eight nose breaks, there's only one thing besides Marmite on her mind.
"If there's a surf anywhere, even a tiny dribble of a wave, I'll be there," she says. "But don't call me a surf-babe. Nowadays I'm a professional athlete."
Saddlesore Superstar
When Zach Shaw left school, he ran away to join the circus. A tad clichéd perhaps, but the kid from Harlow who kept riding his BMX when everyone else had got proper jobs was indeed in a UK circus for a year, followed by three years in an Italian one. But the days of mucking out the elephants are long gone: Zach is now one of the top BMXers in the world.
"Everyone told me I couldn't make a career out of it," he says. "I'd left school as soon as I could and spent a few years doing shitty jobs. One day I was driving past a circus and thought 'why not?'."
Zach made a name for himself back in 1993, as the first person to do a 360 degree spin mid-somersault - a move now called the Zakflip and one that very few riders can perform.
Now Zach is one of the biggest names in the business and spends his days touring the world with the sport, as well as running a team of young riders, organising events, acting as advisor on the physics of BMX computer games (many of which he stars in) and acting as spokesman - pun intended - for any of his many sponsors.
"It's massively varied," he says. "I'm constantly travelling around the world, which is great. The only thing is that nowadays I hardly have any time to practise. But as my body starts to give, I'll ride less and get more into the business side of it all."
His body's given an awful lot already. Two kneecaps, countless ligaments, fractures, strains...
"If you haven't had an injury in BMX, you haven't ridden hard enough," he says. "When I was 17, I was in a full leg cast for eight weeks and told I'd never ride again."
Last year, Zach won a fistful of podium positions in the world's top extreme sports events and is hopeful for a similar record this year. Further into the future, deeper involvement in the sport beckons.
"My ambition," he says, "is to make sure that the sport isn't watered down by the media and to keep it going in the right direction. I've always been a very focussed person. If I'd not made it as a BMXer, I reckon I'd have spent a lot of time at Her Majesty's Pleasure. I was a pretty wayward kid but luckily I knew the direction I wanted my life to go in and ignored everyone when they told me it wasn't possible. You just grit your teeth and keep going."
Wake up bomb
"Mach 10 with your hair on fire."
That's how Julz Heaney describes the job he and his brother do. Two of the best wakeboarders in the world (and by far the best in Europe), the Geordie pair live together in Orlando and practise for four hours a day down at the nearby lake.
"When it's the season," says Julz, "our lives get busier. We spend our time travelling, meeting lots of people and performing in front of big crowds all over the world."
But it wasn't always thus. "When we started out, I was on the dole for six years," says Nick. "We worked in a rug factory, we cleaned toilets, we did anything so we could keep going out on the water. At the time we were waterskiers, but we were two weeks away from having our money totally run out when I got sponsorship for my first event. I won that and it all kicked off from there."
A few years on the waterskiing circuit proved too frustrating ("big bowls of pasta, going to be early, lots of regulations - it just wasn't us...") but when wakeboarding came along - a high-speed mix of snowboarding and waterskiing - it may as well have been called Heaneyboarding. Only once in the past two years as one of them not finished in the top ten of an event.
They make a pretty good living out of it too and they pool any money they earn to split it equally. Not bad for two boys who, when they were kids, fought so much that they had to be put in separate schools.
"As long as one of us is up there, the other one doesn't mind too much," says Julz. "Usually it's Nick who's on top, but sometimes he pushes too hard and drops down the list. But we've found something we both love doing and we're lucky enough to earn good money doing it."
"Back at the start, we had no idea if it was going to happen," adds Nick. "But if you know where your dreams are, you should follow them. If you don't go for it, you'll never know."
When they're not boarding, Nick and Julz act as models for adverts, have their own DJ set and there's even a CD in the pipeline for the Orlando's own Geordie pair. It all seems too perfect. Surely there's something missing?
"Actually, there is," admits Nick, lounging in his Florida home. "A pint, a curry and the Geordie girls."
Hardly seems worth it, really.
(ends)