All round mountain bike legend Hans Rey is touring the UK in November to talk about 30 years as a pro rider. Pete sat down with him for a chat to find out more.
Hans Rey starts an 11-date UK talk tour called Riding Life, following his 30 years as a professional mountain biker, including World Championship titles and being inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.
Was it your idea to make the film?
Well it’s really a Talk Tour, so what I’m going to do is in November I have an 11 city talk tour which is basically an evening with Hans Rey film. I’m going to be talking for about two hours at each venue, showing slides, showing short video clips and some film clips. Really it’s about telling anecdotes and stories about my past, about the path of the sport, about my adventure trips, about my charity Wheels4Life. I’m talking about what I believe is the future of the sport, I’m talking about, you know, all kinds of things, you know I’ve been around for 31 years as a pro rider…
That’s more than I’ve been on this earth…
I never thought that I would do this for 30 years but I have been lucky to experience a whole lot of things and this is basically going to be a great opportunity to see a lot of really cool pictures and videos, really cool destinations, hear some of the stories.
There’s a Q and A after each session. There will be autograph signings and book signings and in some of the places I might even do a ride or so with some of the locals.
You’ve gotta ride in Dunkeld. And if you’re in Glasgow I can show you some good riding.
Yeah I would love to go out and hit some trails, you know so, that’s the idea. And it’s all gonna go down in November – the promoter is speakers from The Edge, they do a lot of ‘talk tours’ usually with mountaineering guides and stuff but a lot of the info is on their website or on my website – there’s all the tour dates and how to pre-book the tickets and all that and I believe it’s going to be a really fun evening.
Photo by Martin Bissig
Why now? Why not 25 years? Why did you decide to do a tour? Why the UK? Is there a plan to do more maybe elsewhere in Europe?
Yeah I want to do it generally. I have been doing talks for the last 10 years and I do also sometimes do motivational talks for industry, for companies, where I kind of draw parallels to my career, like I did a big one in Las Vegas recently at a software company and I did a one hour keynote speech talking to all these software people.
Literally right after me the CFO of Microsoft came on stage and did his thing, and I was talking about calculated risk and pushing the limits and trendsetting and all those things that I’ve done in our sport or experienced and so I really want to do more talks of this kind.
My wife is from England and I have a second home in England so I spend more and more time there. I have quite a fanbase in England, you know England, Germany and America are markets that I’ve done a lot throughout my career in the media and on tv so I hope to do similar things in the US and Germany too, you know. I want to get more and more into these talking kind of things and there’s not many mountain bikers who do it and there’s not many mountain bikers who have such a story to tell you know.
So I’m looking forward to doing it and I hope people will embrace it and will enjoy it and I hope I can inspire people to ride, to travel, to live their dreams whatever they may be.
Cool. And you famously did Kilimanjaro with Danny MacAskill?
Yeah…
I remember seeing that and him struggling with the altitude, was it as hard as it looked?
Yeah it was really hard, it was harder than we expected. Personally, 12 years ago I did Mt. Kenya. I was the first person ever to do it together with Ritchie back then. And that was one of the hardest trips I’ve ever done, it took us 6 days. And this time we decided to do Mt Kenya as a warm up and we only had 4 days. And I don’t know what made me think it would be any easier 12 years later at 50! And we kind of rushed it there, we went a little bit too quickly, too high and Danny paid the price for it.
I mean Danny wasn’t experienced in high altitude at all and luckily he recovered to come back for Kili, you know? But it shows that sometimes the youngest or the best is not necessarily, you know, when it comes to the mountain it takes experience, it takes having the right equipment and I personally thought Kilimanjaro, you know you hear about so many people hiking up it, you know, so maybe it’s not that hard, but I was wrong and I was told that by all the guides and experts.
They said the fact that we are carrying a 30 litre backpack and a 30 pound bike, they said it makes it four times harder than when you just walk up it.
So we were pushing the limits there, I was glad when we did it and we pulled it off.
Awesome. Would you say that’s the hardest thing you’ve done?
I would say, yes. I mean in terms of actually doing those two mountains back to back. In my opinion Kilimanjaro is the Everest for bikers. Because yes you can go higher, and people have gone higher, but they usually carry their bikes in the snow up and down those additional whatever, over 6000 metres, and it’s a bit pointless, you know?
Yeah – you’re just going for a walk with a bike.
I mean of course we walked up to and you take you time, but we literally rode everything on the way down. There was one short section where we had to get off a couple of times too but yeah. So yeah I think it was the hardest thing.
Cool, so UK first because you’ve got a fanbase there. Is there anything you’ve not ridden in the UK that you want to ride while you’re on the tour?
There’s nothing right now that stands out particularly, but there’s a lot of places I haven’t been, I’ve never been to the Lake District for example, so it’s on my list when I go up there to either stop by there or get a ride in or so. Other than that there’s a lot of places that I haven’t ridden but there’s not one that sticks out right now. I love it up there in Scotland.
So even after a 30 year professional career there’s still places you haven’t ridden?
Ah there’s a lot. There’s a lot more places that I haven’t ridden than I have ridden even though I’ve been to 70 countries and ridden a lot of places.
I really enjoy the backcountry and the adventures but I also enjoy in recent years the flow purpose built trails and the bike parks. I have a really big respect for Bobby Davis who started it all you know. He’s the guy who really was ahead of his time and a vision and not only in building purpose built trails and building them beginner friendly and all that but also in measuring the impact and that really got the politicians behind it when you have some numbers to show. And that’s something that a lot of people can learn from and have learned from in the world, but I think a lot of people forget that he was the first to do all that.
Cool. The last question, if there’s one thing you always take in your riding pack when you’re going on an adventure what the one thing you never leave at home?
Uh gosh, on an adventure? A little bottle of whisky. (laughs)
Bottle of whisky! Good answer! Do you have a favourite whisky?
No, I love Scotch whisky, all the different ones.
A good single malt?
Yeah, a good single malt. Laphraoig can be nice, a bit peaty.
So not fussy, but a good single malt?
Yeah, yeah. I had a good one – Haig – that I had recently. Very nice.
