THE NEW WAVE
It is poignant to title this piece ‘The New Wave’. I first wrote for Kiteworld in issue #58 nearly half the mag’s lifetime ago – that doesn’t sound very ‘new’ and so you might even assume that I have nothing ‘new’ to say. Yet here again, in issue 100, I am ‘talkin’ about a revolution’.
I write below about something completely new, something exciting, even mind-blowing. Maybe ‘old’ is the new ‘new’. Or ‘new’ is the new ‘old’. Anyway, the experiences in the article happened around the start of 2019, but we delayed its development a little bit to make issue 100.
What is so poignant? Well, in an activity that is only 20 years-old, I can think of five new developments that are so radical they have arguably birthed entirely new sports. Yet somehow they all still hang together (just) under the ‘kitesurfing’ umbrella. (They are at least all kite-somethinging). Kiting is adaptable, progressive and new (still). In my opinion kiting defines itself with progression. Newness and excitement run through its veins. It makes snowboarding look tired, decrepit even, and skiing like a cobwebbed, dinosaurian, ancestor. The newest (read only) thing to have happened in those two sports in the last 30 years is – yep – being pulled along by a kite! So, buckle up for the very new issue #100 and the New Wave...
It’s relatively easy to see revolutions in hindsight: France in 1789, Haight Ashbury in ‘67, The Ramones at CBGBs in the ‘70s, windsurfing in the ‘80s, aerobics (whenever that was). But it is much harder to know that you are in the belly of the beast, right here and now, as the swell is lining up on the horizon and
