HANNAH INTERVIEWS BRAGE VESTAVIK, FREERIDE’S WILDEST NORSEMAN.

WORDS AS TOLD TO HANNAH

PHOTOGRAPHY ALE DI LULLO

With his name conveniently morphing into B-Rage, a Viking-like appearance, a penchant for heavy metal, and a reputation for videos featuring some of the gnarliest riding going, it’s perhaps just as well Brage Vestavik is a Red Bullsponsored freerider from Norway. And not a librarian. Or a kitten breeder.

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a fan. I was especially disappointed when his Red Bull Rampage debut in 2021 was cut short when he crashed hard. His loose line seemed to be barely scratched into the ground and was a contrast to the relatively groomed lips and landers we tend to see there these days. In his videos, it always looks like he’s having a lot of fun. They’re high energy, and there’s a raw edge to them that reminds me of the early days of mountain biking videos. He does some dizzying things on log skinnies, but it’s his more natural line riding that I like best – when he carves his way through terrain where it seems barely plausible that there is a line.

It’s this type of raw, big mountain riding that features in his latest video release, ‘Planet Alaska’ – an image from which adorns the cover of this issue. Looking ant-like in the vastness, Brage steers his way down shifting scree and rocks, to a guitar soundtrack as heavy as the consequences of a crash.

I did my best to set my fandom aside. And my mum-instinct to worry about his welfare. Heavy metal might be a racket to some, but it takes a lot of control and skill to make music instead of noise. I suspect that being a freeride Viking is much the same, and I want to understand what goes into what we see, and who Brage is. I start at the very beginning.

A moment of calm

What was your first bike?

BV: My very first bike was a small three-wheeler with two wheels in the back and one in the front. When I was a kid, I had so much energy I was struggling to sleep and stuff. My mom and dad would put me on this threewheeler, and I would ride around in the house in the winter, constantly in circles, until I got tired.

Around the time I started riding on the threewheeler, our house burned down and we moved into my grandpa’s place. I started riding more there, on a bike with training wheels. [My grandpa] made me some small cardboard jumps and stuffoutside. I would have, like, a plank and he would put like a few cardboard sheets on it and that would be my first jump. I was three years old, getting into it.

Then when we moved back into the new house after the fire, the house was done, but not the garden. [At the same time] I got my first mountain bike DVDs… I was five, six, maybe. And I would watch the DVDs and go out in the yard where there was still a bunch of dirt piles and planks, and try to, like, replicate what they did in the movies… building came in kind of around the same time as riding.

Finding my own stuff to ride, that’s always been a part of my riding. It’s not really been a separate thing. To me, it’s always been natural to find my own things to ride and build, or just look for new things.

If you’re hoping to get your own kids to get on out there, the movies that inspired the young Brage were Roam by Anthill, New World Disorder 7 by Freeride Entertainment, and Make It Work by a Norwegian crew. But it’s not just TV that inspired him – his dad also had a big role to play.

BV: My dad was working with youth that was troubled in school, maybe couldn’t live at home, or had ADHD and stuff. He would take these kids out on the weekends for skiing, motocross and biking. So my dad was already heavily into all those things.

He was the one that brought me to the bike shops and got me the DVDs. He never pushed me, just always supported what I [said I] was going to do.