Red Bull, therefore, really puts wings. That between Felix Baumgartner and the Austrian company that produces the most chemical drink there was a perfect partnership: the 43-year-old's feat of jumping from the stratosphere (39 meters) breaking the sound barrier, the only human being to succeed, coincided with yet another successful marketing operation by the mark of the red bull.
But how far does Red Bull's sports empire expand? To trace the stages of the ascent is the French newspaper Le Monde, which remembers how the company founded in 1984 by the then 40-year-old Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz, and now half-owned with Thai businessman Chaleo Yoovidhya, has sold 35 billion cans in a quarter of a century (4,6 billion in 2011 alone) and reached a turnover of 4,25 billion euros, covering 164 countries and offering jobs to almost 9 people.
30% of the turnover comes from investments in the field of sport, which has always been the flagship of a company whose fame has gone far beyond that of the sweet and mysteriously energetic drink, making the its inventor the richest man in Austria, with assets estimated by Forbes at 4,05 billion euros (which places him in 193rd place among the scrooges on the planet) and complete with a 1.000 sq m residence in Salzburg and a paradisiacal islet of his own in the Pacific.
Mostly, Red Bull is currently the best team in Formula 1, which is starting (Alonso permitting) to win the third drivers' title in a row with Sebastian Vettel and also the constructors' title, just 8 years after its debut, when in the very close 2004 Mateschitz took over the old Jaguar and a year later doubled it, transforming Minardi into Red Bull.
However, Red Bull is not just Formula 1: it is now a real brand that unites 500 athletes of various disciplines and about 600 sporting events all over the world. Yes, because Mateschitz is not satisfied with having his company logo stamped on the shirt of some football team, as is the case with most sponsors, but he wants to become the protagonist of an entire event or even of a sporting discipline. Or at least give names to the teams to which he associates his brand, as is the case for the football clubs Red Bull Salzburg, New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Leipzig, and Red Bull Brasil and Red Bull Ghana, which act as nurseries for their respective national teams .
And then there is the passion for extreme sports, one of the first loves, which came to the fore after Baumgartner's feat but had already existed for years with the spectacular Red Bull Cliff Diving, where the world's most daring divers leap from platforms almost 30 meters high positioned in the most disparate locations: from the steep cliffs of Wales to the canyon valley in Oman, up to the terraces of modern buildings in Boston. The leitmotif is therefore the high rate of risk and the leap into the void, like that of Baumgartner or again like the aerial vicissitudes of the Red Bull Air Race, among the skyscrapers of New York or around the Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro, not to mention the crazy freestyle motocross stunts of the Red Bull X-Fighters.
The brand of the energy drink, which among others has as its testimonial the rally champion Sebastien Loeb, the American skier Lindsey Vonn and the Bmx-Flat world champion Matthias Dandois, as well as the French handyman Luc Alphand (ski and then Paris-Dakar champion with cars), does not disdain winter sports either. It is enough to witness the unbelievable to believe it Red Bull Crashed Ice, a very unique ice skating competition in which the competitors challenge each other on a path at the limit of practicability, all curves and bumps, and with no holds barred. More extreme than that.
