Were there any videos yet?
There were very few of a Spanish rider doing bike trial shows for the moto trial brand Montesa. When we German trialists took part in a European Cup for the first time, two completely contrasting styles clashed: we Germans in rubber boots, with three-speed gears and drum brakes, the Spaniards in sneakers and with only one gear ratio. We tried to ride over the obstacles, the Spaniards were already hopping.

A little detail in passing: you're not German, you're Swiss.
That's right, I grew up in Germany, but I have a Swiss passport because of my Swiss father. I even completed recruit school. I've also had US citizenship for over ten years, where I've lived for a long time.

At the age of 20, you conquered the USA as a biker and became a global mountain bike star. How did that come about?
I had actually already stopped competing in order to study. I was in the European top ten for a few years and was a multiple German and Swiss champion. Then an American trials biker told me I should come to the USA, that there was a new sport there called mountain biking.

You went to the United States to become a mountain biker?
I thought of it as the end of my trial time, had a semester off granted and thought I'd be back at university six months later. But through a few coincidences, I immediately got to know various riders and sponsors and rode shows. Two weeks after my arrival, I was part of a film production with all the BMX greats in the USA. GT and Swatch signed me up. I kept postponing my return trip. I've now lived in Laguna Beach, California, for 33 years.

When did you switch from trials to mountain biking?
Even back then there were mountain bike stage races in the USA: downhill, cross country and trials, all on the same 26-inch mountain bike. At the end of the 1980s, many bike manufacturers thought that 20-inch trials would be the next big thing after BMX. But then the mountain bike caught on.

Was it an economic decision to switch to mountain bikes?
I earned ok in my first few years. But in the early nineties I almost switched to aggressive inline skating (that's what street skating was called on inline skates, ed.), I already had a contract with Rollerblade. Then the boss from GT came and said: Let's produce a video in which you show people what you do on a mountain bike! That was one of the first bike videos that didn't document a race. My goal was to demonstrate that I could do my trial moves not only on a custom bike but also on a normal mountain bike. That was the game changer.

This was then brought to the people on VHS tapes?
Exactly. VHS was to me in the nineties what YouTube is to Danny MacAskill today. Only back then I had the stage to myself. I made a name for myself all over the world with videos on VHS.

What did you do there?
I rode a trial bike over four balance beams arranged in a square. 41 million people watched live. You don't get ratings like that anymore.

After that performance, didn't you think about earning a living with trial shows?
We rode a lot of shows. But it didn't pay more than pocket money. The best trial athletes maybe got their bikes for free. That was all there was to it.

In the old TV reports, you were often presented as freaks with a completely absurd hobby. Didn't that bother you?
That's probably why we were so popular on TV. People wanted to show something new. Even in America, I was often ridiculed at first because I went my own way. I remember when I met Thomas Frischknecht in a bar in 1990 and told him I wanted to ride in the Mountain Bike World Championships. He said: "What do you want to do at the World Championships? I've never heard of you!" Two weeks later, I was riding slalom and trials at the World Championships in Durango and put on a few shows. Frischi happened to pass by one of them. That's when he realized why I wanted to be at the World Championships. That was the beginning of our friendship.

The bikes you rode on trails and hopped over boulders back then were cross-country bikes from today's perspective. How difficult was it to ride them?
We had and knew nothing else. But I do wonder today how we managed it back then, with the unsprung forks and those weak brakes. There were hardly any stems under 120 millimetres. I was the first to fit curved and slightly wider handlebars. These handlebars were otherwise only on the cheap bikes. The real mountain bikes had narrow flat bars.

When did you first ride a full-suspension mountain bike?
That started around 1992 and 1993 with the GT RTS. But freeride and bikes with 150 to 170 millimeters of travel didn't appear until four or five years later. I got my start when I rode a trials show in Vancouver in 1998. The freeriders came and wanted to take me to the Northshore. I said: I only have my trials mountain bike, the GT Zaskar. They said that would be fine. The next day I was standing with my hardtail and cross-country helmet between all the guys with gigantic suspensions, full-face helmets and pads. The trails came towards me with the narrow wooden footbridges at a height of three meters. Somewhere they just ended and with the hardtail I had to hit the landing really precisely to make it work. A year later, I was back on the Northshore. This time, however, I had rented a full suspension bike from GT. I laughed out loud on the first descent - it was unbelievable how easy it was all of a sudden! It felt like I was sitting on the sofa and someone was pushing me over the drops. From then on, I only got on the hardtail for hardcore trial stuff.

What the freeriders did was also your thing from the mid-nineties: extreme descents in spectacular scenery.
That's not true. I was doing freeride descents in exotic locations years before the freeriders came along. But I called it extreme mountain biking. I was influenced by the extreme skiers. They were jumping down high cliffs, riding the steepest slopes. I did the same on the mountain bike. I wanted to be the one riding things that nobody had ridden before. Back then, the Americans gave me the nickname "No Way Rey" because I rode down things that others said were unrideable. Incidentally, I wasn't the only one who did things like that before the freeriders. For example, I was one of the mountain bikers in Willy Bogner's film "Fire, Ice and Dynamite", which was released in 1990. We filmed two weeks of mountain bike action for seven minutes of movie. One of them jumped backflips years before the freeriders did.

But at some point, the freeriders did show more spectacular descents than you. What was that like for you?
For a long time, I said: Wherever someone else rides down, I'll ride down too. Then came people like Josh Bender, who threw themselves down somewhere at random. Then I corrected the statement to: I ride down everywhere that someone else rides down twice or jumps. In the meantime, I can no longer say that. I never had the level that today's freeriders have. But I also pushed the sport for years and did things that nobody else did.

What was it like for you back then to no longer be the best?
I had no problem with that. At some point you have to make way for the youngsters. The decisive factor for me was that I kept reinventing myself. When I founded the Hans Rey Adventure Team in the mid-nineties and focused on photo stories and films, nobody understood that at first. I had to explain to the team boss at GT: I don't want to leave GT, I just want to leave the GT Racing Team! Later, as more and more freeride videos came out, I moved towards mainstream media such as television and published my story on these channels.

Today, many people dream of making a living from biking without riding races.
I was the first to do it consistently. I only inspired people like Danny MacAskill with my skills in his early days, but to this day I'm still a sponsored mountain biker at over 50 and can make a living from it.

How did you convince GT that they would finance you without you having to deliver competition results in return?
I realized that I could offer them much more this way. If I won a competition, at best there would be a picture of me in a magazine. Two weeks later, nobody was interested anymore. My travel stories were ten, sometimes twenty pages long, and many appeared in over twenty magazines around the world. You could see me on my GT bike and maybe another rider I had invited. That made a lot more money for the sponsors.

About GT. You've been sponsored by the brand since 1987. How is that possible?
I recently got to know the skateboarder Steve Caballero. He has been sponsored by Powell Peralta and Vans for 40 years. That's probably a world record. It was always clear to me that I wasn't sponsored out of goodwill, but because the companies expect a return. That's why I was always looking for new ways to present them. But I had to work for it. Nothing was handed to me on a silver platter. You wanted to talk to me about my contribution to the sport of mountain biking. One was certainly that I paved the way to being a professional biker without riding races.

You also seem to have made the technological transition from VHS videos and TV reports to the internet and social media without any problems.
I was one of the first bike pros to have a website, it went online around 1998. I was also one of the first to use Twitter. Then came Facebook and I built a community there. When Instagram got bigger, I initially thought to myself: not something new again and not one more channel! At some point I joined in after all, I couldn't do without it, even if I think social media is overrated.

Why?
Because of the influencers. For me, most of them are self-proclaimed experts with bought followers and nothing behind them. Many thought: At last we can measure the contacts, at last we have binding figures! But they're all lies. There are people who collect sponsorship money, but all they have are bought followers from Russia. They steal money from honest people just like doped athletes steal prize money from clean athletes.

You sound frustrated.
It may sound that way, but I also see the benefits of social media. I can use it for so many things that I do. But I'm also still a big fan of analog media: first and foremost magazines and television.

Did you have goals that you didn't achieve?
Sure, I could say: Gosh, I was never in a video game or I never had Red Bull as a partner! On the other hand, I've made so many good decisions, been able to do so many awesome things that I wouldn't have even dreamed of.

How does it feel to be called a legend all the time?
This word is used a lot and misused for all sorts of things. But I already have deep roots in various disciplines. Nobody knows the best slopestyler in the world at a cross-country race and vice versa.

Today there are only niche celebrities?
Niche celebrities and influencers!

The media personality Hans Rey

From the TV show "Wetten dass...?" to the closing ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, from the American TV series "Pacific Blue" to the Hollywood film "Fire, Ice & Dynamite" (starring Roger Moore) - Hans Rey fitted in everywhere somehow. In the nineties, he produced numerous videos and distributed them on VHS through his partners. By his own count, he has appeared on over 400 magazine covers (over 60 since 2014 alone). Today, he primarily communicates via his social media channels, with around 49,000 followers on Instagram and 45,000 on Facebook.