Thoma Gendre - Interview

Hey! Just to get the Interview started some basic questions. Where are you from?  When did you start riding?

Hey wassup?! First sorry if my English is bad haha! I’m from a small village near Neuchâtel in Switzerland! I started riding ~7 years ago.

No worries! What was the scene like, back in the day when you started 7 years ago compared with todays?

I remember when I started riding there was already a few crews with some really good riders in my city, which inspired me a lot! Like Jojo Cajas, Remi Bouchard some big names in scootering history! The riding style changed a lot and scooter parts became bigger, better and stronger! When I started I knew only the scene of my city, but with my homies we started moving around Switzerland and after that in other countries. We discovered a lot of new scootering scene, with different style and different vibes, we met some incredible peoples and got so much memories with all of them!!! 

I think instagram is a good way to discover new scenes and new riders. When I started, nobody was posting instaclips, so you just know some riders by YouTube or by meeting them!

True Instagramm is a good tool to connect with others. What about your name on Instagram. How did you get the name "Chef"? 

The story of the name "Chef" started with Steve Petermann, in his city there is kebab, where the boss calls you chef at the end of every sentence. If you order one kebab, you get called chef 20 times, we found this funny and started calling each other chef all day long haha After that our friends started calling us chef and we changed our insta name, so we’re both a chef!

Always cool to hear how nicknames evolve ! haha
Recently you published your new Video on Trendkill, can you tell us more about it? 

This video got a special place into my heart! I put a lot of efforts while doing it! We got some problems with the camera too. We started filming it in September 2019 with a Canon 700D, but one of my friends go a Canon XM2 (it’s like a vx) and we wanted to film with a real camera, so I started another project with it, which I dropped one year ago, it’s a SD part. 

 And after that I started filming with Wonder-Crab, who got a HMC-150, so I started filming in HD again! Starting filming with this guy was one of the best thing that happened to me. He got a real vibe, keep going, we were always down to film each other, pushing our limits! After that I bought my own camera so I could film when I was in my town, because we lives like 2 hours away from each other, so it was hard to link up every weekend. And without him showing me spots in his area, giving me motivation, this video part wouldn’t be the same!

So was your latest video only filmed in Switzerland?

No, but most of the spots are in Switzerland but there is some spots from Lyon and Barcelona too.

Is it hard to ride Street in your country? 

Actually it’s quite good to ride! We don’t have a lot of big cities but it’s a small country, so we can reach every city in 2-3 hours by car! We just keep exploring and find some spots on the way to different cities, and with time we explored a major part of the big cities!
We don’t get kicked out too much, we got some spots in banks and stuff like that, so some of the spots are only rideable on Sunday!

Nice, from your videos I can tell there are some really good spots hidden all over Switzerland.

Yeah we have some gems!

What plans you got for 2021?

For 2021, I got a lot of video projects, filming and editing some of my friend’s parts! We already started filming and they have some really nice clips! I hope to have time to do a new part myself too!  And what we all want is to start traveling again, discovering new cities and new homies! As always, the most important thing is to keep having fun doing what we do haha! And drink some beers too ;)

True words! Can't wait to see more videos from the swiss scene. Anything else you want to say?

Thank you for this interview and for making great scootering content!  Keep shredding and have fun with your homies! That’s all we need!

Thanks for takeing the time!