In spring 2003, I went to a contest in Essen with Benjamin Wessler and Thomas Tröger, where there were quite a lot of skaters from all over Germany.
Michele also took part in this contest and ripped there.

On the way back to Hamburg, Michele struck up a conversation and I asked, among other things, whether Michel would drive for Morphium.
Quick-witted as Thomas is, he offered to call Michele directly and ask him. I was a bit perplexed, but I agreed and Thomas already had him on the phone.
After a bit of small talk, Thomas got going and asked Michele if he could imagine riding skateboards for Morphium. Michele said that Morphium is a cool company and that he thinks the style is good and that he can imagine it very well and is up for it.

So everything was clear and I finished the first stuff package for Michele the following week. Two months later, a Welfare Demo was planned with Morphium, Tupiar Wheels, Ayume Skateboards and Cleptomanicx. Michele was supposed to join us there and the first personal contact was made.
The demo went really well and Michele really impressed everyone there. But he also provided a lot of entertainment with his personal manner, which made us and a lot of other people on site laugh.

Unfortunately, this meeting was the only one that took place. After the demo in Nuremberg, I hadn’t heard so much from Michele and his external presence had also diminished. I called him and told him my concerns. In the end, we unanimously decided to give up the sponsorship relationship. I think he had reached a point as a skater where other things were more important than skateboarding. After the phone call, I never heard from Michele again.

We also thought that we could open up the skateboard market in Groningen and the Netherlands through Klaas van der Laan. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, even though he was riding for the biggest skateboard distributor in the Netherlands at the time.

So he had been selling morphine stuff among his colleagues and friends on his own for a long time.

Towards 2006 he withdrew from skating and told me honestly that as a sponsored skater he could no longer perform as well as he thought he should. They parted ways and shortly afterwards he and a few friends tried to set up a skateboard company called “Broken Skateboards”, which unfortunately no longer exists.