Europe’s most imfluential bike manager

A list of exactly ten people who have made an impact on you, professionally, and you would like to invite to dinner.

Ask this question to Tarek Rasouli and it will take him days to answer. Ten names. No more. No less. Legends from the early days, today’s superstars, visionary bike park designers, people who founded seminal events, legendary camera operators, renowned sports doctors, devoted coaches… the who’s who of the scene. Really, just ten names? Tarek crosses names out. Adds others in. But the list is still far too long.

If you want to know why this guy is so well-connected, you have to come on a little journey back in time to the turn of the new millennium. If you were a mountain biking fan back then, you were almost bound to have a Tarek poster or magazine at home.

The Munich-native was the only European amongst the legendary Fro Riders, the first professional freeriding team from cult manufacturer Rocky Mountain. This rare creature had roots both in a BMX and modelling career. Tarek has adorned international bike magazine covers in the double figures over the course of his career. He was good-looking and a damned good rider – a rare combination, especially in Europe.

That was how he started out in a career that he was managing himself straight after leaving school. “I was my own global one-man show: manager, press spokesman, coach and everything else too. I was overworked but often under-coached. Sometimes my training would just be a photoshoot itself!” he says.

But it worked. He also earned money via shows and BMX races. And then: “In 1999, I only finished second on my home turf. I was so disappointed I cried at the finish line.” Tarek was 24 at that point anyway. He put the BMX bike away to concentrate fully on mountain biking, but on video productions, not races.

He worked his way into the freeride scene coming out of British Columbia, Canada, at that time with increasingly action-packed videos. These were the days of VHS and the cult series of films back then was called Kranked. It was where the gods rode. Tarek rode all the way to the Fro Riders at the top thanks to both professionalism and style. His sponsors depicted him as the golden boy in a world of models, party and glamour, even if it wasn’t always actually that glitzy behind the scenes but who cared about that!

“After my first Kranked appearance I had to sign tonnes of autographs. All those magazine covers and all that success in BMX had never made that happen,” he remembers.

Filming for Kranked 5 was scheduled for late summer 2002 in British Columbia, the birthplace of freeriding. It was a new mountain. There was total bedlam regarding filming permits. It was all a mess.

When the riders finally got the lift up to the Sun Peaks Resort bike park to get a look at where they would be filming, Tarek said, “What a beautiful view from a wheelchair.” What he had actually meant to say was chairlift and yet his words turned out to be almost prophetic.

What very few people know is that Tarek’s half-brother, who lives in the Austrian state of Carinthia, has been in a wheelchair since a climbing accident. He thought of him for a moment. Lightning struck Tarek two hours after he spoke those words. The landing hill was too small and he had jumped too high. He threw the bike away midair. His first lumbar vertebra went as he landed on his feet. There was instant searing agony. He couldn’t hear. And a realisation came that his riding career was over forever.

Whenever Tarek Rasouli talks about that time when he laid the foundation stone to everything that has come since, he starts with being in hospital in Canada. The friendly 150-kilo care-worker with the squeaky voice. Then came the three-bed ward in the rehab centre in Murnau, back in Germany, where one of the other patients couldn’t move at all and the second one could only move one arm, which at least allowed him to chain smoke. Tarek lay there happily in between them. “I have luxury paraplegia! I had complete movement in my hands and arms. I could even move my stomach muscles. What did I have to complain about?” he recalls.

It is a quality trial legend Danny MacAskill admires in Rasouli. “I have never – not once – heard Tarek complain about his condition,” says Danny. Things certainly sometimes look different from his perspective. “Of course there is pain, on a daily basis, but others have it far worse,” adds Tarek.

After intense rehab, Tarek picked up where he had left off before the accident. He didn’t complain and looked after himself just as he always had. He made use of his contacts. He looked into Bike magazine and came out with a regular column about the scene. Then somebody asked him if he felt up to organising an event. He might never have done anything like it before, but he had long harboured a dream of getting people from outside the scene into bike events. So he didn’t choose a location tucked away in the mountains. Instead he went for Lake Constance, aiming for good vibes and a party atmosphere.

Rasoulution has 11 stars under contract. What does he look for in them? “Special talent,” Tarek says. “Their personality is also very important, whether they’re open, affable, have their feet on the ground.”

It all reads like a fairytale. But what we can say for sure is that the freeride scene wouldn’t be nearly so professional and presentable if Tarek and his crew hadn’t cranked up the standards. Gone are the days of only a few freaks having posters of mountain bikers in their rooms. Every kid today knows guys like MacAskill and Wibmer. And it’s also thanks to Tarek Rasouli – not solely, but in part – that the events have got so much safer, even as the stunts have got sicker.

When he says, from his vantage point in a wheelchair, that a landing needs to be made a bit wider, who is going to disagree with him? Or that there is a position from which the camera might capture the rider’s action better? Or thousands of other details that only someone who has given the sport so much for almost three decades could know? “And why are there only three pump tracks in the Greater Munich area but hundreds of football pitches?” Tarek asks provocatively, and you get a feeling you know what he is going to be busy with the next few years.

The only insolvable problem is the one with the ten most important people in his career. It is hardly fair to squeeze people with such a closely-woven network of relationships into such a tight strait jacket. They need events where they can meet everyone. So how fitting that Tarek Rasouli should organise these events. The guy is in exactly the right place.

Have you ever thought about where you would be now if the accident had never happened, we ask. “I’d probably just have stayed on as a rider for much too long and missed out on a lot,” he replies.

When he is sitting at the Red Bull Rampage in Utah, or Red Bull District Ride in Nuremberg or at a small event somewhere where the guys are out there riding, and everything is going according to plan, he sometimes remembers the sentence he once said, two hours before the big crash. “What a beautiful view from a wheelchair.”

All participants in the Wings for Life World Run start at the same time, wherever they are in the world. Everyone runs alone. An app urges you on and lets you know when the virtual Catcher Car has caught you up. 100% of proceeds go towards spinal cord research and you can join Tarek’s Rasoulution running team via the app.