Davis Hermes Wins Freestyle Highline World Championship
Author: Justin Wagers
In July 2022, Swiss Slackline in collaboration with LAAX and the International Slackline Association held the Freestyle Highline World Championship in Switzerland. Unsurprisingly to those who have seen his work ethic, Trickline Collective’s very own Davis Hermes took home a monumental victory over a field filled with international athletes.
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Davis Hermes for almost 10 years. He was just a kid when we met, but has grown into one of the most talented and driven slackliners I know.
After watching him win the Freestyle Highline World Championship, I knew I had to get him on the phone to ask about the experience.
Davis, thanks for taking the time! Huge congrats on the victory. We were all pulling for you back here in Colorado. First off, I’m hoping you can give us some context on your history with slacklining. How did you find out about it and when did you start?
I started slacklining in 2012 at the GoPro Mountain Games. I remember seeing Gappai on the line doing some static tricks at the very tail end of the event and that’s all I needed to see to convince me that I needed a slackline. So I convinced my mom to split the cost of a slackline with me (which luckily she agreed to), and I told myself I would slackline everyday for 3 years, which I did.
I tricklined for the most part for 7 of the last 10 years. 6 months into slacklining I went to GGBY 2012 with my mom and neither of us knew highlining existed. So we walked over to the fruit bowl and the lines came into view and we were like ”What is this?!” At that event I ended up sending 3 lines that day (my first day highlining). Funny enough I still have the record for the world’s youngest highline send.
That’s crazy to picture 11 year-old Davis sending highlines. What got you into freestyle?
That happened much more recently, when I was in college in Boulder, Colorado. After a few years in college I found a passion for highlining and started getting out after class and on weekends. Then you introduced me to freestyle more or less. I mean before that I was trying to bounce a bit, but you were really the motivator for me to become a freestyler. I started more seriously dipping my toe into it, and then it was the Pandemic Open (online freestyle highline video competition) that drove that competitive side in me to really want to be a freestyler. So that was about two and a half years ago, maybe three.
I think what helped with my explosion of freestyle abilities was having such a solid slackline background in general. I was familiar with a lot of flips and tricks from tricklining and the exposure to heights from highlining so neither of them individually were new to me, it was really just the combination that was new.
What about freestyle pushed you to take it to the next level?
I think I was pushed to take freestyle to a much more serious level than tricklining mostly because of age and maturity. I’d always had the idea that slacklining was a huge part of me and that I wanted to take it seriously, and there was a really cool opportunity because freestyle was so new to jump to the top really quickly. And now I find myself putting more forethought into how I want to spend my time and it’s been easier to focus my effort into freestyle.
We all know you’re extremely dedicated to your training. What was your approach for this competition?
I trained super obsessively for 3-4 months before the comp, pretty much every day. Luckily in Boulder I was usually able to find someone to train with everyday, which makes a huge difference in motivation. But yeah basically it was all I wanted to do leading up to the competition, which turned out to be easy enough because I love to freestyle.
This was really the first major competition I have been a part of, and really the first one of its kind with the international caliber of athletes that were going. I didn’t really know how I would stack up to the field because I hadn’t seen 99% of the other athletes slackline in person, and you can really only tell how consistent someone is from seeing their tricks in person. But I had a feeling I was going to be able to do well.
I wanted to take it seriously because it felt like a big opportunity given my level and the relatively young age of the sport as a whole. I’m generally a pretty competitive person, and really was determined to find out how I compared to the best.
I was lucky to have some competition experience from tricklining, and from that I knew that big tricks and consistency were going to be key. In the training leading up to the event, I took a lot of my bigger tricks and drilled them for consistency. I was mindful of how consistently I could do each trick so that when I went to the comp I would know whether or not it was actually worth attempting.
How was the actual line setup at the comp? Was it what you expected?
Yeah, so normally I like training on 60-70m Rubbit (Slackhouse) but I knew that the competition was going to be on 65 meters of Pink Tube. At my training spot at home I setup that length exactly on Pink Tube to get super ready for the comp.
The actual comp lines were totally good enough. There are always things to complain about; maybe the line is a little surfy or has slightly different dynamics than you expected but at the end of the day those are just excuses. When it came to the actual setup it was more or less what I had been training on.
Talk me through the qualifiers.
That was the part of the competition I was most nervous for. There were about 30 competitors but only 8 qualify for the quarterfinals, so pressure is on. You had a 2 minute continuous running clock, so if you fall that’s a huge portion of your time down the drain. I definitely had confidence that I could qualify, but always had that doubt in my head that I wouldn’t, because that would’ve been a heartbreaker.
So I just told myself that no matter what happens, I had already put all the training in that I could have. The best that you can do is put the work in before the competition, and since I had trained pretty much every possible day that I could have, I was able to push that “lack of preparedness” doubt right out of my mind.
I ended up being really calm in the qualifier run. I threw some big combos that other people might not have taken the chance on in qualifiers, but my mentality was always “Go big or go home”. Honestly, I threw down and I was f***ing stoked. After my run I had no doubts that I qualified.
I ended up getting the second highest score in qualifiers which was key because your qualifier ranking was how you were seeded in the bracket for quarterfinals.
My other big goal was to compete against my Slackhouse teammate David (Sakalomo), who ended up being seeded first. That meant that we were on opposite sides of the bracket so the only way we would meet would be in the finals. He’s someone that I really idolize in the freestyle world, both for his style and consistency in competition, so that was a huge goal of mine to meet him in the finals.
How did the quarterfinals go?
My quarterfinal fun against Richard went well. I erred on the side of throwing more difficult tricks, while he throws the longest combos in the world. I had seen him slackline in Zurich the week before and I’d never seen anyone rage the line like him. I was definitely nervous to go up against him, and we are polar opposite styles.
I think I was a little lucky that difficulty was more weighted in the judging system, and I pretty much landed everything I wanted to land. I landed my first ever feet to feet doubles in competition that round which was a big deal for me, and really gave me confidence going in to the next round.
You had a big semifinal matchup that I know we were all excited to watch. How did that go?
My semifinal matchup was against Ian Eisenberg, who is obviously very idolized in the community. Everybody knows what Ian is capable of on a freestyle line, so that matchup came with some high expectations.
But because of the standard that I had set in the quarterfinals, Ian knew that he had to do big tricks. He wasn’t going to win by just combing his own unique tricks. It was going to be a big trick run vs. a big trick run.
The way the competition works is you each get a 2 minute run followed by 3 “Best Trick” attempts. Both the run and your Best Trick count towards your final score.
That run was really close. Ian had a couple mishaps, but by the end of the round I think he knew that I had had a slightly better run. So then it came down to best trick.
I had been training the Holy Grail (double flip feet to feet where the first flip is no-handed), but I didn’t know what Ian was going to bring to the table. Somehow I channeled the nerves into focus and ended up landing Holy Grail first try. I think that really just made Ian nervous. I watched his best trick and he ended up trying Supersonic 360, which is a gnarly unlanded trick that definitely could have changed the outcome. But because it’s such a huge trick, he got close but missed his three attempts. So I ended up coming out on top.
You said one of your goals was to compete against your teammate David, and met each other in the finals. Did you watch David’s runs leading up to the final?
Yeah, this whole time I was watching David’s runs as we both made it to the finals. He’s one of the best, if not the best, competition slackliner in the game so I was pretty confident that he was going to be in the final.
What was your mindset going into finals?
At that point, I was no longer nervous. I didn’t come to win. I came to show that I can actually slackline (laughs) and I wanted to just have fun after the quarterfinals knowing that I had already done what I wanted to do.
My second goal was to compete against David, and now we were meeting in the finals. So in general it felt like the pressure was off.
What happened in the final?
I started my final run off and started off with a huge two cans of soup combo to kind of set the expectation that this was going to be “big boy trick” time.
Meanwhile David fell on his first two combos. All of a sudden my mentality totally switched from “Oh, I don’t really care what happens” to “Wow, all of a sudden I really have a chance to win this thing.”
So when that shift happened I started cranking out the hardest possible combos that I had prepped. I think I had one or two falls, but I landed the hardest stuff I had all competition, including almighty to double yoda both ways.
At the end of the run you kind of got the sense that I had a better run. You could see that David was a little upset with himself, you know he landed some crazy stuff but had more falls than he wanted, and I could just read that in his body language.
When it came to best trick, originally I was planning on trying triple yoda. But now that I thought I actually had a chance at winning, I really had to think about it for a while. On the one hand, triple yoda is a massive trick that would win the competition for me for sure, but it’s super inconsistent. Holy Grail is still a huge trick, but was definitely going to be the safer bet to give me a chance to win the world championships. I also had the confidence knowing that I had landed it first try last round.
Sure enough, landed Holy Grail first try. I couldn’t believe it. Then I watched David land Darth Kako first try, which is a huge trick as well.
So then it was over and we just had to wait for the announcement of who won, but I think we both had the suspicion that I had won.
How did you react when they announced your victory?
To be honest I didn’t react much because I had already felt the emotions before the podiums. I was so sure that I had done my best, performed to the best that I wanted to perform, and that’s all I cared about. I couldn’t believe that I performed as consistently and well as I did.
I’m pretty hard on myself in training and in life. I put a pretty constant pressure on myself to do better. But this was one of those unique times where I didn’t think I could have done any better.
It was one of the few times in my life that I was genuinely and completely proud of myself, and that pressure to do better completely fell away.
What does this mean for you moving forward?
Dude, I’m more motivated than ever to keep training hard. I didn’t think I’d be able to stack up to the freestyle crew over here like I did. I didn’t really expect to win. Winning was really a validation of the effort that I had put in, and makes me want to continue putting in more effort.
For the next few months I’m really stoked on less of the consistency focus and going back to exploring new tricks. I don’t feel like my trick list is that big in the grand scheme of how many tricks there are, so I really want to broaden that category. Then later on I can revisit consistency for the next competition season.
Anything you’ll be working on in particular when it comes to tricks?
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want to play with some rocket tricks which I think is a big category I’m missing. There are also a lot of Ian’s tricks that only he does that I’d love to play with. I’d love to play with more style in my tricks as well.
Can’t wait to do rocket mounts with you. Any closing thoughts?
As a whole, I feel so blessed and privileged. I just can’t believe that life is this good and that I get to travel around Europe with this support system that I’ve built through this sport. The community is just so good, and there’s so much love within it. It just feels really special.
I feel like we have to give a shout out to your mom.
Yeah huge shoutout to Amy Hermes who came halfway around the world to watch me compete. I didn’t even put it together until she said it, but she said “Of course I couldn’t miss this, I was there the first time you stepped on a slackline.” She was there from the first time I ever tried slacklining, the first time I ever tried highlining, and now she’s here when I win the World Championships. She’s really special. Shoutout Amy.
Alright man, well thanks for taking the time. Huge congrats, you’re a world champion freestyle highliner now! I know we will all be watching what comes next for you.
