When a few days ago I started writing down “the history of kiteboarding”, to put it in the new portal, my mind started a trip through the time to reach those pioneering days when a new amazing way of living the sea was starting to arise. In that period I was so lucky that I had the chance to live the true origin of this sport, since I was in the Maui island, Hawaii. Still today there are many doubts on who was the first real kiter, and answering this question is not an easy task.
Whoever was the first kiter, one thing is sure, the brothers Bruno and Dominique Leigagnoux gave a decisive impulse to the birth of our sport. Let’s see who were these brothers and how they invented the first LEI (inflatable leading edge) kite. The two brothers soon started to love sailing (Optimist, Vaurien, Laser etc.)so much that they became , at around 10 years old, the French junior champions in 1979.
Later on they started sailing driven only by their passion, leaving the official challenges, and in the breton seas they practiced windsurfing, but their true dream was to sail all over the word with a sailboat.That is why after years of adventures with their sailboat, in 1983 in Senegal they started to think about developing sails with a flat profile. But they kept on having windsurf as a source of inspiration, in particular one sail invented by another Breton(Roland Le Bai) which resemble a mix between a windsurfing sail and a kite (Birdsail). When they were in Dakar they stared at one guy using this innovative sail, and they understood that the concept of the Birdsail itself was limited by its dimension. At this point the Leigagnoux brothers started to project something really innovative, a kite for a nautical use.
In the first test they used a stack from 7 to 12 kites reinforced using rigid laths, all connected by the same lines, but soon they realized a single wing. In 1984 they developed the first LEI, patented in the same year.
It sounds strange that the brothers used for their test most of the times water skis, finding it difficult to use a common board to contrast the pull of the kite.
After hundreds of prototypes and skis of every shape in the 1989 their wing reached such an effectiveness, stability and capabilities of water-relaunch that it could be considered a product usable by kiters. In the meanwhile (February 1987) in the Usa, another pioneer (Corey Roeseler) studied with his father (aeronautical engineer at the Boeing) a marine system of traction using a big Delta kite with rigid laths.
Also Roeseler used for the first tests waterskis. After the development of this sport took place in the Hawaii islands, Maui, where the pioneers used not only the Wipika kites with inflatable bladders (Legagnoux Brothers patent) but also foil kites not relaunchable from the water, like the Flexifoil Blade.
The”kite crew” couldn’t be more eterogeneous, with windsurfer and non-windsurfer:
Manu Bertin, Flash Austin, Eliot Leboe (ex windsurfer and tester for a renowned American magazine), Lou Wainman, Rush Rande, Robby Naish, Pete Cabrinha, Fadi Issa, Dylan Gramfyre, Francesco Moretti, Mauricio Abreau and many more. At the beginning it seemed that kitesurfing had a big limitation: it was impossible to go upwind. Soon appeared a group of rider called “the downriders” arriving upwind from the Hookipa beach right to the beautiful beach of Kanaha, a few kilometers downwind. This limitation soon appeared to be fictitious, being it possible to go upwind with more aggressive rocker and bigger kites. Combining the shape of the board and the size of the kite going upwind was possible! We can say that kiteboarding became an “autonomous” marine sport at around 1997/98.Soon the storic brand of Wipica had to face new challengers, like Naish kiteboarding and otherbrands, some still existing, other not (like da Vinci kites..).
We are at the beginning of the new millennium, and you could find as products in the market 2 lines LEI kites and 4 lines depowerable LEI kites. Some kiters (like the American Peter Trow) kept on using foil kites, for their performances, but still they were impossible to relaunch from the water. Looking at the boards, the mono-directionals are used by most of the riders, being surfboards adapted adding the straps and changing the rockers. Flash Austin started to use the first RRD directional, changing them for the Mutant Boards producted by Naish (half-way between a twin-tip and a directional). Flash was the first actual champion of this sport. Another group of kiter, having the great Lou Wainman as a leader, started to use twin-tip boards coming directly from the wakeboard discipline (like the Liquid Force), tracing the way of the modern kiteboarding. In france the F-One brand, owned by Raphael Salles, started to develop and sell very innovative products. The twin-tips boards reached an high level of differentiation, with long and short boards, boards with 3 or 6 fins in the upwind side, asymmetrical boards etc. The directional boards survived, as well as the mutants, becoming the classic low-wind boards. Soon after, two “big fishes” joined the challenge of producing kiteboarding equipment, Neil Pryde with the brand Cabrinha, and North Sails. Now we can say that the choice that any kiter could make buying the equipment is interesting since there are many different products. The rest of the story is recent story. Another big innovation was represented by the bow-kites with their huge wind-range, making it possible to use the kite with strong gusty wind. In the challenges world the old-style (big-jumps,board-offs,rotation etc..) is replaced by the new-style also called power-style. In that context and at bigger heights the rider do what Lou Wainman did at the beginning: railey, handle pass etc…
But one of the newest and more destructive trick..for the bones of the expert kiters are the kiteloops, especially unhooked. Making a mistake during this maneuver must be avoided, otherwise the injury is sure!
In these last years also the wave-riding became an autonomous discipline, so that many ex-freestyle champions are enthusiastically exploring this world.
What is going to happen in the future? No one knows it exactly. Talking about the design of boards and kites, many things had been done, but still there is some room of improvement using new materials.
We’ll see. This short introductory story of kiteboarding was not meant to be exhaustive, but only to show how this sport is more alive and kicking than ever, ready to give us even greater satisfaction.
