THE ARCHITECTS & ICONS

In planning this issue, the obvious thing would be to try to summarise the sport and how far it’s come. When it came to sitting down and trying to do that, we realised we would need way more space than a single issue has to give. Once we got digging around in an old set of slide files that were submitted for our early issues, we found that the images naturally told their own story. Incidentally, many of these images somehow also never made it to production...

Looking over all these old slides, the ‘action’ is different. It somehow still seems more ‘connected’ to our own raw riding experiences than looking at today’s slick and measured pro riding. In the very early 2000s riders became heroes for landing a backroll to toe-side, today there are only fractions of a difference between the top riders when they do mesmerising double handle-passes. Evolution’s wonderful, but so are the steps along the way. Look closely, stare at an image for a while and see if you can imagine how it felt to be a kitesurfer back then.

Now imagine if your grandparents had known when they were children that in the future we’d be able to see and hear each other talk from across the world, via a black box in the palm of our hand, that turns on through facial recognition. Imagine if Flash Austin had had 100% depower and a click bar. I would also say imagine if those early legends had hydrofoils too, but then the shot by Rick Leeks is evidence that they were already on the case with that... but god knows how, considering the beastly flying tractors they were holding on to!

The whole process of pulling a magazine together was different in 2002. We were trying