Sean Christie tells how Cape Town – with its “French Alps of wind” – became the hottest kite surfing destination in the world. Again.
It was a fun game, to imaginatively drop the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões among the crowds gathered at the Big Bay life-saving club on February 2.
Camões, in his epic poem Os Lusiadas, gave the world the mythological figure of Adamastor, the Cape storm god who appeared to Vasco da Gama when he tried to round the Cape in 1497.
Check out the video: Kings of the air
Da Gama attempted this feat in late November and the Adamastor would have appeared in the guise of the Cape’s infamous summer Southeaster, which, in the intervening centuries, has driven countless ships ashore, razed homes, flattened gantries and flipped cyclists when they rounded Chapman’s Peak during the 2009 Cape Argus Cycle Tour.
King of the Air
The Red Bull King of the Air competition, which was resumed in 2013 after being suspended in 2005 (because freestyle kite surfing was no longer about “big air”), is very much a part of the diversification – a harking back to the earlier focus on sensationally high jumps.
In this event, it is perhaps the younger, less experienced riders who are most at risk of injury: at this year’s event, for example, Smith was concussed and suffered a bad case of whiplash, and 2013 winner Jesse Richman (21) broke a leg.
“Most of the competitors will only fly like this once a year, and that’s what makes it such an exciting event: the way the crowd senses that each rider is pushing beyond his limits,” said Andries Fourie, a local kite-surfing instructor, who placed fifth in last year’s event and fourth this year.
By all accounts, the competition has been a boost for kite surfing both locally and internationally, though those who know the sport remain concerned about its development.
“The traditional media doesn’t report on kite surfing, which has implications for sponsorship, which has knock-on implications for the development of the sport, because practically no professional kite surfers have the support of trainers, nutritionists and therapists, without which it is very difficult to push boundaries,” Lenten said.
Although undoubtedly true, one only has to look back at the world’s great sports stories, almost all of which predate professionalism as today’s sports stars would recognise it, to know that a certain narrative richness is lost when the big endorsements roll in.
Fourie, for example, after recording the second-highest jump of the day at King of the Air and beating most of the big endorsed names of kite surfing, had to be back at work the next morning – teaching others to kite surf. To be able to compete on the world kite-surfing circuit in 2014, Dutch kite surfer Jerrie van de Kop, another of the King of the Air contestants, launched a successful crowd-funding project, and young Smith gets up at 5am every morning to do his homework, so that he can pursue his passion when the wind is up.
Red Bull appears to have recognised the power of the underdog by creating an event in which contestants are only as good as their last 10 minutes on the water, after which one rider can be dumped out and all other scores return to zero. It’s an epic event, in the non-surfy sense of the word, and so, perhaps, Camões, who also liked heroes, would not be so aghast after all.
For full article go to Mail & Guardian
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