He once sang, “Venus”, with the Mayor of Tonglu, a place no one has ever heard of, in a KTV bar.

Maverick.

It’s a word banded about far-too often to describe those hardly deserving of such, particularly in our media-frenzy world. But a select few do-still stand out as truly the real deal.

For the past 30 years, I’ve been privileged to be close to Matthias Pichler, mastermind of SA, during his almost-monthly visits to China.

Many of us now eye an eco-friendly future, and solar panels on bags and backpacks may be commonplace these days, but Matthias was there with one of the first. Giving one such sample to me to test, it was soon pretty obvious he had actually done the work himself, likely even making the solar-photovoltaic cell. 

The horrid-gaudy-red-disgusting-PVC tube of a sack required the full force of the midday-summer sun in Nanjing, a city on the same latitude as Tripoli in North Africa, to generate any kind of charge. But charge it did, just not very well, and not as quickly as my phone lost power, in performing some mundane task, such as being on.

No. Matthias Pichler is better suited to vertically-aligned slopes and something a little more chilly. Write a weekend email to him between October and March and don’t expect a reply. The slogan of SA begins, “Our relentless passion for sports”, and Matthias stereotypically personifies the role, so long as it has two sticks. 

But being from Austria made him very familiar with the perils which an avalanche presents. So I recall him being one of the first to set about doing something to protect a skier were the worst to ever happen.

He sent me a video, probably in the early 00’s, of a test of his “invention”, an instant-inflation device conducted in the factory. I’m no expert, but it seemed to involve the reverse engineering of that employed for balloons at a child’s birthday party. To similar results.

These, plus many more exploits, many of which better not discussed here, were not lost on Matthias’ colleagues across China. Before long he had his Chinese name. Thanks to the transliteration of Roman lettering into the Chinese language, we then welcomed into the world one Horse’s Ass (Ma Pi in Chinese). Today though, and now that he is advancing in years, but with a certain amount of grudging respect, it’s just Old Horse.

But an Old Horse will always come through. And know this. In 1995, the Ass gave me a demo shirt which he had produced for Northland. I still wear that fast-dry, mesh-lined garment to this day. It has lost not one-single button, nor one-shade of colour. 

That’s why this website says, “Our products are designed for longevity”.

Now that’s what I call apparel.