How kiteboarding was invented

Chris Moore was one of my kiteboarding trainers in Providenciales, TK. While hanging out he shared quite a few stories. A few years ago, after I learned how to stay upwind in TK I flew to Maui. I flew Cabrinha and Naish kites only to realize that both were born in Maui. That prompted me to dig more into the Kiteboarding history, how things started, what everyone was doing around the world and how they intersected to merge into what is now kiteboarding. It was fascinating, I wish I had documented it ..

I'm glad this article came out, although I think it would be worth a deeper look and more details about how the hacking took place - the story of how a modern sport gets born. It's amazing how things that were happening across the world crossed paths and merged into the modern kiteboarding just before the Internet became a thing.

I think kiteboarding was very much a hacking exercise. Couldn't see the article mentioning this but here's a bit of youtube history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxtZzMMYO_I

The connection between kiteboarding and hackers might be a bit far fetched, but somehow there are many entrepreneurs who are into the sport. There is a Founders Kite Club, exclusively for entrepreneurs who kitesurf. In the Netherlands we have an Kiteangels community, who do regular kitesurfing "downwinders" along our coast, kitesurfing trips and network for our businesses.

Kitesurfing is now more or less mature, the hacking is now happening in foils: surf foiling, wing foiling, sup foiling, e-foiling, many people are tinkering and hacking to invent new sports.

https://www.founderskiteclub.com/

This article if fairly accurate. Kiteboarding is unusual in that everyone basically agrees it was "invented" by a bunch of people and not an individual. The contributions of the Legaignoux's, Roeseler's, Don Montague, and not mentioned Lou Wainman all helped popularized it.

A lot of this is captured in "UPWIND - Launch of a Sport"[1].

In terms of prior art, there's an amusing anecdote of Benjamin Franklin(!) pulling himself across a pond with a very large home built kite in the 1710's[2].

As a sport, kiteboarding is wonderful. It's mentally demanding in the same way piloting aircraft is while physically demanding in the way, say, snowboarding is. There is immense satisfaction in throwing around a huge 12 square meter sail with the flick of wrist while an intimacy and sense of flow that comes with riding out on the water in solitude exposed to the elements and not boxed in by a vehicle or craft.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLKMSJTtypU

[2] http://mentalfloss.com/article/71431/time-ben-franklin-casua...

They added the kite because they couldn't invent a proper hoverboard ...

" . . . he sold everything he owned, laid off more than sixty employees at the business he’d built, and moved east from Missouri to rebuild his life on the ocean."

Only an entrepreneur thinks that's OK.

Even though the headline contains the word “Hackers”, nothing in the article mentions anything about hackers or hacking.

I suspect this is another knee-jerk submission from someone with a Google News alert set up.

Isn't "inventor" just a meatspace word for "hacker"?