Kiting

After several years of resisting, I've finally succumbed to the pull of kite boarding. I can no longer deny the rough ratio of epic surf days in SF to epic wind days being in the area of 65 to 300. I've taken a few lessons now, and am about ready to venture out on my own, and really make a mess of things.

The interesting thing about kiting is that despite some of the sport's best being able to do amazing things in the water, relatively, everyone sucks. I say that from the point of view of where people will be in 5-10 years. The sport is just so young that none of the driving factors that push progression in a sport have really kicked in yet:

• Every year there are drastic changes and improvements in equipment design. While this pushes overall progression, it does provide some drag as even the elite are still getting use to refinements in their equipment each season. Instead of having a standardized piece of equipment with only minor cosmetic changes, people are changing core features like board shapes, harness design, line set ups, kite shapes, etc. This creates a slight disruption in forward progression as innovators need to go somewhat sideways as they adjust to new equipment.


• The early adopters are in their mid-late 30's and 40's. Essentially, the folks who have been kiting the longest are starting to pass out of their athletic prime. In the upcoming years we will see people who started kiting at a young age progress into their athletic prime. This will create an exciting wave of innovation.


• There has been no "Endless Summer" moment. Surfing has had a few of these through its history where the general popular culture takes notice. While these can often be seen as upsetting to the actual devotees (Blue Crush, Laird Hamilton Amex commercial, etc) as robbing their passion of its purity, and expression of rebellion, it does have an impact on a sport's adoption curve. More people participating and more marketing dollars that flow in will enable the elite to sustain kiting as a viable profession, and will entice and drive people with the potential to achieve elite status to make that commitment.

I predict a kiter will appear in a mainstream network TV commercial in the next 2 years, and for better or worse, that's when we'll know that the sports time has come. Those who have been around since the sport began in the mid-late 90's probably have already seen massive changes in their sport. For the rest of us who have only started in the past year or two, we should enjoy the last moments of kiting's purity, infancy, and true sub-culture status.