While I am not quite down with this "airstyle" thing, I was surprised to see inverted front rolls in boots, scoring so highly.
The fact that it looks like Gisela won the women with back loop kiteloops is bordering on ridiculous.
From the limited vid available it seems that while Toby was doing stuff that by all accounts is technical, he wasn't doing them as high off the water, but I could be wrong.
Afterall this was a "big air" comp.
It's funny seeing a double handlepass as the winning trick.
I am on an 18, while others on 10s. I am challenging the smaller kites, but they go a bit higher.
On the video you don't see my highest jump, curious how high it was.
And I was happy to advance 2 rounds, so could do my show with different tricks in all heats (some never landed in any competition ever before) and entertain the crowd...too bad you can't hear them.
Tone: the level of the women isn't high at all, unfortunately.
Gisela was thinking about taking a board with straps and to do boardoffs, which she can do, even with a rotation. I think next time she will take straps for boardoffs and onefoots.
the double handle pass in the vid was all dangle. If there was a loop to it, you couldn't see it in the clip. To be fair, none of what the riders other than Toby did looked all that impressive. They did have more height, but I saw maybe one fast landing in there. Would like to see a little more comprehensive video that maybe gives a bit of perspective on loops. If Westozzy gets his kangaroo court up and running, Im afraid if thats the clip its to be based on I might have to side with what I already know he will choose!
that was a pretty sad looking comp, video from my home spot on any given 10m day would look at least comparable.
toby, although some of your low to the water tricks are powered and impressive, your big air (the tricks in the video) look silly. so boost, dangle, hang upside down, flip the board a couple times all while slowly descending to an almost stopped position. yeah....... thats the future of kiting alright
Jens has a point though.
The tricks that Toby does are impressive, but then again, a blind judge 7 is also impressive. But I don't think they are really stylish. In my opinion the tricks you see in the King Of The Air are way more stylish.
For example the tricks Kevin Langeree does, just go really high and do a normal board off with sometimes a slow rotated frontroll, or a big inverted frontroll are in my opinion way more stylish than the 1080 board offs where you flip the board 10 times in different ways.
Don't get me wrong, it's really impressive, but again, in my opinion it has the same problem as freestyle, it's impressive, but there's not much "style" in it.
And yeah, I can't do any of the stuff you do, I can barely do a normal board off. My kind of riding is just going as high as I can and do some inverted front/backrolls or doing high kiteloops, so it's totally different from yours.
the whole point to big air is to be a crowd pleaser. I felt the judging criteria in the red bull big air were no good, way too much importance on height not enough on technical difficulty of air tricks, and here the judging was 70% height 30% risk, what kind of criteria is that?
You could get a better show if you just judged it by how much applause the crowd showed for each rider.
Get your judging criteria together PKRA. This is supposed to be the audience friendly event!