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Austin's Power
Austin's name is everywhere. It's emblazoned like a superhero's crest across his orange-and-gray rash guard; it's on his orange-and-white kite; and it might as well be scrawled in the sands of this windswept strip of Maui's North Shore -- popularly called Flash Beach -- where few other kiteboarders launch. Austin's nickname has even rubbed off on his 67-year-old mother, Marjorie, a.k.a. Mama Flash. Nearly every day during a three-week visit from her home in Florida, Marjorie has sat in a striped beach chair and watched through binoculars as her son flipped and twisted through the air 25 feet above a treacherous reef. "I've seen him spend five hours at a time out there, totally focused," she says. "Where was kiteboarding when he was a kid?"
Kiteboarding as Mama Flash has been observing here on Maui hardly existed until her son, whom she still calls by his given name, Marcus, stumbled upon the nascent sport seven years ago. He embraced it with missionary zeal and started testing the limits of how much fun a man could have while tethered to a wing 10 stories above him. "Before Flash and two other guys -- Lou Wainman and Elliot Leboe -- came along, this sport was just guys riding behind a kite," says Ryan Riccitelli, editor of Kiteboarding Magazine USA. "These guys added aerial tricks and made us realize the potential of the sport. Flash, though, is the sport's first superstar. He's the one who put competitive, professional kitesurfing on the map."
Kiteboarding is exploding much the way snowboarding did a decade ago. Last year 50,000 kites were sold, compared to 250 in 1998. More than 20 companies are making kites (compared to fewer than five in '99), and while there was one official kiteboarding event four years ago (with beer as the first prize), there are more than 30 scheduled worldwide in 2002, with purses of up to $50,000. Austin, 28, is the young sport's most iconic figure, the kiteboarder most likely to be recognized in a European airport or to have gifts thrust upon him by admirers. (In Tarifa, Spain, last year he was approached by a Russian fan who exclaimed, "You're Flash Austin! Here, take my watch!") Austin makes enough money to travel all over the world for competitions, buy a few antiques -- his collection includes a sword used in the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig -- and keep gas in his '96 Mustang. He has had, he says, "a taste of the rock-star life," but there's more he'd like to do.
He wants to recapture the world championship he won in 2000 before a serious rib injury dashed his title hopes last year. He'd like to take his graceful freestyle moves -- the so-called Flash Tacks that involve launching into the air in one direction, doing a flip or a twist and then hitting the water at full speed going in the opposite direction -- into wave-riding competitions. And he hopes to persuade anyone who will listen that kiteboarding is rapture itself, an experience akin to "touching the face of God," as he puts it. "This sport allows you to do superhuman feats you can't do in any other sport. When you're out on the water flying in the air, you get a sense of immortality."
Every time the unfailingly enthusiastic Austin launches into one of his evangelical riffs, he's careful to insert a note of caution. "Kiteboarding is like a rose," he says. "It's a beautiful, wonderful thing, but there are thorns. You don't reach out and grab it without caution." Make a single mistake over the reef off Flash Beach, for instance, and "you're hamburger over razor blades," he says. "People underestimate how powerful the wind is."
Austin admits he has been guilty of recklessness himself. Early last year at a windsurfing/kiteboarding event in Leucate, France, he took exception to a windsurfer's description of kiteboarders as "wimps" and attempted to ride in hurricane-force gusts. The wind tea-bagged him -- that is, violently dunked him in the water -- three times before he was able to disengage his kite from the harness. He broke a rib and considers himself lucky to be alive.
His other close calls have been primarily of the trespassing nature. Austin, the first person to kiteboard the 70 miles across the North Sea, from Norway to Denmark, was also the first person to attempt the nine-mile crossing from Spain to Morocco. Austin's shaggy blond locks and unconventional watercraft immediately drew the suspicion of Moroccan authorities, who were waiting on shore to arrest him; luckily for him a Spanish patrol helicopter turned him back a few hundred yards from his goal. He is probably also the only kiteboarder to get stranded on the rocks inside San Quentin State Prison's boundaries in Marin County, Calif. (He was briefly detained and, after a stern lecture by a burly guard, released.)
During a mid-June afternoon Austin was standing on a patch of sand just west of Flash Beach, holding his wind-whipped shoulder-length blond hair out of his face with both hands. Half a dozen kiteboarders skimmed over the whitecapped azure water, some launching off small waves to fly 10 feet in the air for a few seconds. A few others, beginning students at a kiteboarding school, bobbed in the water with instructors, trying to get their kites aloft. A few years ago, in the midst of tense turf wars with windsurfers, Austin and about 35 other kiteboarders reclaimed this former beachfront dump hard by a sewage-treatment plant near the Kahului Airport. They cleared out trash and rocks, and the ocean added sand. Ka'a Point, now better known as Kite Beach, has become a tourist attraction among kiteboard enthusiasts, although the smell of sewage lingers. So, too, does resentment from some windsurfers. In December 2000, Austin was allegedly run over by windsurfer Dane Barnhard, who left a six-inch gash in Austin's shin and now faces prosecution by the Maui district attorney. (The trial is scheduled to begin on Sept. 30.) "It's the same story as the skier-snowboarder rift," says Austin. "Every sport has its growing pains to get through."
While many kiteboarders are former windsurfers and wakeboarders, Austin brings a different set of skills to the sport. Growing up on Siesta Key, Fla., he was riding a unicycle before a bicycle and a surfboard before that. At age eight he joined a children's circus and learned the teeterboard from a former member of the Wallenda acrobatic troupe. As an adolescent Austin had a recurring dream about waking up to find huge, surfable waves; the reality of the Gulf Coast break was nearly always disappointing. So he took up skimboarding. Years later, when he was working in a Panama City Beach (Fla.) restaurant where everybody had nicknames and sported goofy hats, his manager noticed the lightning bolts on his hat and, having seen his speed on a skimboard, rechristened him Flash.
Austin's life changed soon after his name did. In 1995, after watching a guy use a power kite to drag his feet across the sand, Austin ran home and got $200 in $1 bills that he had collected in tips and bought the man's kite. He had an idea: The next day he jumped on the skimboard while holding onto the kite and hurtled down the beach as tourists cheered. With no harness, no foot straps, a flat board and a kite that didn't float, he had no hope of skimming upwind. Instead he took a taxi 15 miles up the coast and kite-skimmed back down. It was two years before he realized that other people were doing the same thing -- that, in fact, kiteboarding had been more or less invented in the mid-'80s in France by Bruno and Dominique Legaignoux, brothers who made the first water-launchable kite with inflatable spars and leading edges. In '97, after someone showed Austin a magazine article about Manu Bertin, a Frenchman who had adapted the Legaignoux brothers' kite design for surfboards in Maui, Austin sold everything he owned and moved to the island. Within two weeks he had won $600 in a contest. Within a year he was winning enough to give up his job waiting tables at Mama's Fishhouse, one of his early sponsors.
In the five years since then the burgeoning popularity of kiteboarding and the relative ease of mastering the sport have created a fresh generation of stars such as Mark Shinn of Great Britain and Martin Vari of Argentina. The competition keeps Austin honing his craft and his body every day. Besides spending two to six hours a day on the water, he watches his diet, takes vitamins and avoids alcohol and coffee. "Four years ago it was easy to beat 12 other people," says Austin. "Now you have to beat a thousand. But that competition makes us all try harder in coming up with new moves and in building better equipment."
While the speed of technical innovation in kiteboarding equipment has slowed after a three-year surge, the influences of wakeboarding, surfing, windsurfing, skateboarding and snowboarding have made kiteboarding the fastest-evolving water sport in terms of maneuvers. "What was difficult four weeks ago is basic now," says Austin. The most difficult trick, he adds, is to please the judges. "You never know what they're looking for," he says. "One day it's skatie stuff [in which the boarder doesn't use bindings or straps], the next it's wave riding. In order to be Number 1 now, you have to be all-around."
Given the sport's still mutable judging criteria, the two existing professional tours (the Professional Kite Riders Association and the smaller Kiteboard Pro World Tour) and kiteboarding's several disciplines (wave-riding, hang time, freestyle, racing), it's hard to predict what the sport will look like a year or even six months from now. "Kiteboarding hasn't been finally defined yet," says Riccitelli. It will have to be if Austin is ever to realize his dream of seeing it in the Olympics. But for now he is happy to keep trying new things and seeking converts.
Marjorie Austin, alas, will not be one of the converts. For all of her son's rhetoric about the sport's universal accessibility, he won't let his own mother try kiteboarding. He cites her "lack of athleticism at this point." Sitting in her beach chair as the wind tears at her straw hat, Mama Flash is wistful. Where was kiteboarding when she was a kid? "It looks fun, doesn't it?" she says with a sigh. "If I were 30 years younger, I'd be out there myself."
