Duotone DRIVEN Magazine No.04

THE REBIRTH OF BIG AIR Lewis Crathern, commentator at the Red Bull King of the Air 2022, described a megaloop quite strikingly: “It's like you're shot vertically upwards like a cannonball, and once you reach the top, you're shot horizontally forward again.” Or, put another way, the statistics of Liam Whaley's jump, which catapulted him into the number one spot in the Surfr app's rankings as of February 8, 2023: Height 32.23m, Airtime: 10.15 s, Distance: 119m, Max speed: 103km/h. You have to pause for a moment to grasp the dimensions of Big Air. An athlete jumps with his kite to a height that exceeds a ten-story building, accelerates to the highway speed of a vehicle, and then covers a distance in the air that is longer than a soccer field. Even experts rub their eyes in amazement. When Duotone team rider Noè Font stood on the beach in Cape Town earlier this year, he just shook his head: “Madness. This year, the guys here are jumping higher than ever before.” And Thomas Kaiser, Duotone's Marketing Director, notes with slight concern, “The material has become so powerful that it pushes the riders' physiques to the limit.” Everyone agrees: Big Air has experienced such a progressive push in the last two years as there has not been in the previous ten years in kiting. This progress is driven by a generation of young riders who perform breathtakingly in the best sense of the word. All three athletes who stood on the podium of the Red Bull King of the Air 2022 participated for the first time in this competition of competitions in kiteboarding. All three were just around 18 years old. As these lines are being written, it is possible to follow on social media how Andrea Principi is practicing the Snake Loop, a double loop with an attached contraloop. It's only a matter of time before he lands it safely for the first time. This new generation’s difficulty and trick variance in combination with super high, radical jumps, is spectacular. In the past, one or two rotations were the limit for a megaloop. However, today, the riders already turn their body into a backspin during the takeoff, loop the kite in the opposite direction of their rotations during the contraloop, show crazy horizontal board- off varieties and add a one-footer or three rotations when they are five meters heigh at the end of their jump during the landing approach because they simply have some time left and are so breathtakingly safe. Additionally, the Big Air boom is evident in more than just professional sports. The sales figures of twintips also prove this trend. And you can also see this rapid development every day at kite spots worldwide: People are moving away from classic freestyle or strapless surf tricks to Big Air. The explanation for this is quite simple: jumping high is an incredible sensation. Every kiter can understand that. And even outsiders who don't practice the sport are amazed by a high jump. Big Air is the origin of kiteboarding and its very own identity. Kite Freestyle is strongly derived from wakeboarding, and Surf Strapless from surfing. But when Flash Austin and Robby Naish discovered our sport, they jumped first and foremost: as high as they could. Big Air is a return to the values of kiting. And Big Air is for many kiters exactly the fascination why they, and all of us, practice this wonderful sport. Copy Bernd Zerelles Photos Craig Kolesky, Toby Bromwich Rider  Liam Whaley