200 battles in 11 hours: Inside the record-setting freestyle feat of Spanish rapper Gazir

Imagine, first, freestyle rapping at all. If you can wrap your head around the art of spitting rhymes and punchlines on the fly, imagine doing it for more than eleven hours straight. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Then, imagine doing all the above while facing off against 250 competitors in 200 freestyle battles, and losing just three of them. On 7 November, 24-year-old Spanish MC Gazir, who moonlights as a physics student at the University of Oviedo, set a Guinness World Record by completing 200 freestyle battles in under 12 hours – an effort that seems to defy the very subject he studies in his spare time. When Gazir - born Gabriel Sánchez Poyal - speaks with Euronews Culture four days later, the first thing he does is apologise for his voice. It still hadn’t fully recovered. “Every part of my body, my mind and even my soul was involved to make this possible,” he says. In an ordinary freestyle competition, he explains, he might have three or four battles in a day. At Red Bull Gazir Contra Todos, held in his hometown of Gijón, he performed 50 times as many. To complete the challenge, he had to finish within 12 hours and lose no more than 10 battles. He needed 11 hours, 23 minutes and 14 seconds, and he won 197 of them. By the end of the event, he says, he was exhausted. Understandably. According to the fitness ring he was wearing, he had burned around 3,000 calories. Training like an athlete As Gazir explains, rapping is far more than an exercise of the mind. In September and October, he followed a very particular schedule with the help of a personal trainer, nutritionist, psychologist and vocal specialists. Preparing for the event was the biggest challenge he had ever undertaken, Gazir says. “My routine became like the routine of an athlete.” He ate specially tailored meals at specific times, went to the gym and spent hours practising his freestyle technique. Some days, he trained with other rappers, using their insults and improvisations as inspiration. On others, he practised at home alone, rapping about household objects or whatever random topics he found online. But the most important training revolved around his voice. Freestyle battles are loud, high-energy contests involving rapid-fire exchanges. If you watch the video, he says, “it looks like I’m shouting all the time.” Gazir worked with coaches to improve his breathing and projection so he could maintain his intensity for hours on end without damaging his vocal cords. And he really means hours on end. During the record attempt, he had just 20 seconds between each battle and a four-minute break after every 40 – barely enough time to catch his breath or eat a snack. He drank water and isotonic drinks throughout, eating mashed bananas and other fruit during his short pauses. And he estimates he drank a few Red Bulls, too, keeping his energy sources pretty much all natural. ‘No limits to the imagination’ No amount of physical preparation could guarantee that Gazir would have something new to say when it came time to perform. “I didn’t plan anything,” he says when asked how he kept his rhymes fresh. “In freestyle, you have to improvise all the time.” In each battle, the rappers traded four-bar verses, taking six turns apiece. Every insult, punchline or pun gave Gazir something new to work with, provided he could think of a comeback before his next turn. And after each battle, he had to start all over again. “Maybe your voice has a limit, maybe your legs have a limit,” he says. “But if you are with the flow, with the energy of each battle, each bar, each moment, the imagination has no limits.” Gazir won his first 115 battles before Babi finally defeated him in the 116th at 5:39pm – more than six hours after the marathon effort began. He later lost to Skone and Bnet – two Spanish rappers and former world champions – but he finished with a victory over Mexico’s Aczino, a three-time winner of Red Bull Batalla, the world championship of Spanish-language freestyle rap. That so many rappers came out to battle Gazir says a lot about the growth of freestyling in Spain and Latin America. Gazir, who has earned his living as a freestyler since he was about 17, says the Spanish scene is now a “mature” one, complete with professional leagues, national competitions and international tournaments. As for his own ambitions, Gazir isn’t planning to retire to a recording studio just yet. He’s happy to keep competing, although his university courses provide a welcome distraction. “Sometimes it’s useful to disconnect from your routine,” he says about physics. He is already considering another challenge, though, and it might somehow be even harder than his me-against-the-world marathon battle: learning to freestyle in English. “It’s really difficult, but it will be a good challenge,” he admits. “I will be making freestyle in English soon.”