Red Bull Sessions event offers chance to surf with the pros at Edinburgh's Lost Shore
Big wave surfer Ben Larg is holding ‘community focused’ surfing sessions at Lost Shore, thanks to his corporate sponsor
Within the extreme sports universe, there has always been a certain squeamishness about sponsorship – a sense that the purity of noble, man vs the elements-type pursuits is somehow tarnished when grubby old commerce gets added to the mix. In reality, though, for every athlete looking to achieve something remarkable, there’s usually somebody in the corporate world picking up at least part of the tab.
Even the Everest Expedition of 1953, which seems to belong to a prelapsarian past in which mountaineers were all still enthusiastic amateurs with day jobs to go back to, was partly bankrolled by the Times newspaper. For £5,000 (about £180,000 in today’s money), they bought the rights to publish exclusive dispatches direct from the mountain, filed by the late, great Jan Morris, and in return Hillary, Tenzing and Co got a critical cash-injection to cover the costs of their climb.
For the vast majority of today’s extreme sportspeople, a professional career is only possible with the support of sponsors. Conventional, lines-on-the-ground sports like football have long been able to draw large crowds, and so, while sponsorship certainly has a role to play, cash from ticket receipts will always provide a core source of income from which to pay the athletes’ wages. For mountaineers though, or extreme skiers or BASE jumpers or anyone else whose exploits are likely to take place far from easy-to-reach population centres, that funding model doesn’t work. Instead, as with the ’53 Everest expedition, content is currency: photographs, stories, video footage and social media posts. Vicarious thrills are then duly packaged and sold to the masses, the athletes get paid and the sponsors hopefully get a bit of stardust-by-association.
If there’s one company that’s made this equation work for it better than any other, it’s Red Bull. In 1982, the Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz was visiting Thailand when he discovered that a locally manufactured caffeinated energy drink called Krating Daeng, pioneered by Thai businessman Chaleo Yoovidhya, helped cure his jetlag. Two years later, the pair went into business together and started selling re-branded Red Bull as a premium product at Austrian ski resorts. It’s now the third most valuable soft drinks brand in the world after Coca-Cola and Pepsi, with 13.9 billion cans sold worldwide last year.
That didn’t happen by accident – it happened because Red Bull made their drink synonymous with an adventurous, thrill-seeking lifestyle. They didn’t just achieve this via conventional advertising, either: instead, they started sponsoring extreme athletes and sports events, then went about producing their own films about them. For many years now (ever since I first interviewed Red Bull-sponsored Scottish trials bike legend Danny MacAskill back in the Noughties, in fact) I’ve been receiving Red Bull’s weekly “Content Pool” newsletter, and the range of activities they are now involved in is staggering. To give a flavour, this week’s selection ranges from photos of the Red Bull 400 in Liberec in Czechia – a bonkers-looking 400m sprint up a ski jump – to videos of Red Bull Skydive Team member Marco Waltenspiel donning a wingsuit, jumping out of a plane and then weaving between a slalom course made up of hot air balloons in the skies above Cappadocia in Türkiye.
All of which brings us to Scottish big wave surfer Ben Larg. A Red Bull athlete since 2022, the Tiree native has subsequently done his sponsors proud, taking a historic third-place finish in the World Surf League’s Nazare Big Wave Challenge in Portugal last year. The Red Bull gig doesn’t just involve surfing monster waves, however – on 22 August at the Lost Shore surf resort just outside Edinburgh, Larg will be hosting a “community-focused” Red Bull Sessions event from 5pm to 9pm. For a £10 registration fee, participants can take part in one of six 30-minute surf sessions with Larg and other pros in the water, and there will also be breathwork, mindfulness and mobility workshops running alongside the action, before an expression session, a barbecue and an afterparty to close out the night.
When I catch up with Larg, he’s just spent a full day with fellow big wave charger Nic von Rupp, surfing a remote left-hander called Greenbush in the Mentawai Islands off the western coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. “We got great waves today,” he says, “but I didn’t put any sunblock on so I’m really badly burned. We were in from half-eight this morning till about six this evening. We had no tops, no suntan lotion and it was scorching all day. In the end I grabbed a T-shirt off the boat and jumped back in the water but to be honest I think by then the worst was already done because that was probably about four o’clock.”
READ MORE: Beyond the Island: New film to chart Scottish surfer Ben Larg's first steps into big wave arena
The Red Bull Sessions event, he says, is very much open to all-comers. “If you’re a local kid and you want to come down to the pool we’re going to do a few sessions where anyone can go in. There are just 200 spaces available though, so people need to get in there and register soon.”
Say what you like about big corporations not being in tune with the spirit of surfing, but any way you slice it, ten quid for a meal and some guaranteed waves with Scotland’s most famous surfer sounds like a pretty good deal.
The Red Bull Sessions event is at Lost Shore Surf Resort near Edinburgh on 22 August. For more information, see www.redbull.com/gb-en/events/red-bull-sessions/lost-shore-info
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