Axel Pons, formerly a competitor in the Moto2 World Championship, changed up his lifestyle dramatically six years ago when he decided to travel the world barefoot.
Son of the legendary Sito Pons, two-time MotoGP winner, Axel Pons had a lot to live up to early in his career as a motorcycle racer. Expectations were very high, but so was the pressure on his shoulders, and despite some promising results in the Moto2 World Championship – a 16th place finish in the 2016 season being the apex of his racing career – he decided to take a break from motorcycle racing and focus on fashion. He did some work as a fashion model, then disappeared only to resurface in 2019 to do an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais in which he said he wanted to slow down and put his past life behind him. But no one expected the kind of change that was coming.
“At some point, I started to question what is the point of living such a fast life,” Pons recently told a roadside interviewer. “My story is very long, but I can tell you since I started walking three years ago that I decided to release all the weight and just get a backpack and walk.”
Axel Pons recently went viral after being featured in a YouTube video walking through Pakistan. Sporting thick dreads, a dirty look and no footwear, he told the person filming that he had been walking barefoot for the last six years, only putting on a pair of crocks when he absolutely had to. He even showed his black, hardened soles to the camera as proof and they definitely looked like they had been through a lot.
Pons, who raced 10 seasons of Moto2 from 2008 to 2017, started his journey in his native country of Spain, in Western Europe, walking slowly towards the east and just enjoying the beauty of the world around him.
“Around 15 months ago when I felt ready I decided to start walking east, towards the sun. This is what I’ve been doing this last year, and it’s been beautiful,” Pons said in an older video posted on the Wahaj Ali.B YouTube channel. “I started going slower, slower, slower, until now where I’m walking around slowly, slowly, appreciating the details of life.”
“It’s nothing special, it came naturally,” the former motorcycle racer added. “At some point, nothing else made more sense than to walk and to surrender all the weight that we were accumulating during our life, and just desire complete union with Allah, or with God. This is our way of practicing, by walking.”
Axel has been walking barefoot around the world for about six years now, but his journey from Spain to Pakistan (6,500 km) began 15 months ago. He apparently wanted to continue on to India, but was unable to cross the border due to visa problems. He is now considering walking into China and trying to cross into India from there.
