Table of contents for Issue 81: Spring/Autumn 2024 in Huck

Welcome TO THE IT’S MORE THAN A GAME ISSUE. HUCK STARTED NEARLY 20 YEARS AGO DOCUMENTING SKATE, SURF AND SUBCULTURES. 81 ISSUES LATER WE CONTINUE TO 'PADDLE AGAINST THE FLOW' IN EVERYTHING WE DO. THIS IS ISSUE IS A CELEBRATION OF THE BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS THAT ALL SPORTSPEOPLE - FROM ELITE ATHLETES TO AMATEUR HOBBYISTS - PUT IN DAY IN, DAY OUT. WITH A NOD TO OUR HISTORY OF CHAMPIONING PIONEERING SURFERS, WE'VE GOT THE INCREDIBLE LAURA CRANE ON THE COVER: THE FIRST BRITISH WOMAN TO SURF THE ICONIC (AND GIANT) NAZARE WAVES, AND A GLOBAL ATHLETE WHO’S PUSHING MISOGYNY OUT OF THE SPORT WHILE INSPIRING A NEW GENERATION OF SURFERS. ALONGSIDE THAT WE SPEAK TO ONE OF BRITAIN’S BEST BREAKDANCERS, B-BOY SHEKU, AS WELL AS GEORGE PEASGOOD, THE WORLDCHAMPION…

HE HAD CONFLICTING FEELINGS last October. It had been one year since the cycling accident where everything stopped. The next day was his 28th birthday. “Safe to say it was better than last year,” jokes George. “But it was emotional.” He cried more than 10 times by lunch, and then cried some more on his birthday. For many athletes, the afterlife is not death but retirement. And those dates packed a one-two punch, reminding him how close he came to the end. It’s starting to feel like spring in Loughborough, 100 miles north of London and home to British elite athletics. Trees are blossoming, days are longer, and George is lively after his first solo ride in a year-and-a-half. He greets me inside his townhouse. There’s relaxing ambient music playing,…

IT WAS DURING A TRIP TO HAWAII in her mid-teens, while staying at her sponsor’s beachfront house on the North Shore of Oahu, that Laura Crane realised the surf industry valued her more for her looks than her athletic prowess. “Some of the women surfers on the team would get up early to go and surf Phantoms,” she says, referring to a gnarly big wave spot that breaks over a sharp lava reef. “I wanted to do that. But we had to go and do a photo shoot in our bikinis. We’d surf three waves, come in and change, and then do the same thing again on repeat – it was pretty numbing.” At the time Laura had won two back-to-back British surf titles – her first when she was…

In rural Vermont, every February, you’ll find one of the hardest races on earth. Lasting over 60 hours, there’s no finish line. The organiser decides when it ends and the gruelling race comprises many soul-sapping ice and snow-based challenges. Photographer R. Perry Flowers went and documented the 2023 race and has just released his own publication of what went on. AM I RIGHT THAT THE CALL OF SHOOTING THE GREAT OUTDOORS PULLED YOU AWAY FROM LIVING AND WORKING IN THE BRIGHT LIGHTS OF NEW YORK? I grew up in New York and when I started working in photo, I began by assisting a lot of other photographers, who were primarily shooting fashion and beauty. Those subjects weren’t necessarily my style, but I learned to appreciate the technical aspects and fast…

ORIGINALLY FROM SHEFFIELD, SOUTH YORKSHIRE, ARTIST CORBIN SHAW EXPLORES IDEAS OF MASCULINITY THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF TEXTILES. BEST KNOWN FOR HIS UNIQUE TAKE ON THE ST GEORGE’S CROSS, HE PAYS HOMAGE TO THE PEOPLE AND PLACES THAT HAVE SHAPED HIS NORTHERN IDENTITY — THE PUB, FOOTBALL PITCHES AND BOXING GYMS. USING HIS EX-MINING TOWN UPBRINGING, CORBIN INVESTIGATES MASCULINITY AND HOW THAT WAS DEFINED TO HIM GROWING UP, BREAKING STIGMAS AND STEREOTYPES THROUGH HIS RE-IMAGINATION OF MASCULINE 'ICONS' AND OBJECTS. CORBIN SHAW IS HUCK 81’S ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE. YOU GREW UP WATCHING FOOTBALL IN SHEFFIELD PUBS. WAS THAT WHERE YOU FIRST WITNESSED ARTISTRY AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION? There’s a lot of art happening subliminally in spaces you wouldn't imagine. I think it’s how you look at it. I was formed by those spaces, that’s why they…

BREAKING BURST ONTO BRONX BLOCKS in 1973, thanks to Black and Puerto Rican youth as a powerful form of expression. By the ’80s, the rise of hip-hop propelled street dance from the boroughs of the Big Apple to concrete jungles worldwide. Fast-forward to today and the new generation of b-boys and b-girls represent some of the top athletes, dancers, and influencers on the planet. They’re landing sponsorships with Nike, Adidas, and Red Bull, roles in major motion pictures, invites to dance in different countries each week, and a chance to compete at the Paris 2024 Olympics this summer, where breaking will make its “one-time” debut. Sam Phillips, known as Sheku, is a self-taught pro b-boy and underdog on Breaking GB, an organisation for elite breakers in the UK, and a…

THERE’LL BE A FEW CERTAINTIES at the Euro 2024 tournament this summer – from the pints of warm lager tossed in the air with each goal scored, to the agony and the ecstasy of a penalty shootout – but nothing is more categorically, definitely going to happen than the complete and utter rinsing of Neil Diamond’s 1969 hit ‘Sweet Caroline’ in the pubs, clubs and fanparks across England. The story of the track’s rise to maddening ubiquity for English sports fans is a well-documented one: at Euro 2020, following England’s comprehensive 2-0 win on home turf against their imagined eternal rivals Germany, Wembley DJ Tony Perry was tasked with amping up the party following the customary post-match spin of Baddiel and Skinner’s England anthem ‘Three Lions’. Despite initially reaching for…

To be a skateboarder means spending some part of most days watching, thinking about, and discussing skateboarding. And though the same might be said for practitioners of other athletic pursuits, there’s a particular way that these extracurriculars of skateboarding quite actually are skateboarding. In other words, skateboarding’s borders extend well beyond the real time activities of doing it, all that standing and crouching and pushing around on a board. SKATEBOARDERS, AS SUCH, are all to some degree historians, theoreticians, and pundits. We disagree constantly. The vast majority of these arguments are profoundly, and proudly, silly. We argue over trick nom enclature and the proper amount of candle wax on a granite ledge. We get heated about whether drop-down manuals and ride-on grinds are as fried as some of us (rightly)…