Back in the 1980s, Tom Magruder from the Columbia River Gorge in the USA invented the Wind Weapon (HERE there's an exciting report on it) a wing for windsurfing boards, with which windsurfing was to become a sport of flight: "Is the Wind Weapon the rig of the future?" was the headline of surf magazine at the time. This wing was firmly attached to the windsurfing board and the aluminium rods and battens established in windsurfing resulted in a fixed profile. However, this invention did not even begin to establish itself on the market. It was the same with the Wing rigwhich was trialled in the early 1980s.
Kitesurfing first began in the 1980s with Bill and Corey Röseler in the USA and Bruno and Dominique Legaignoux in France, among others. It was also the Legaignoux brothers who registered a patent for a kite with inflatable tubes in 1997, which forms the basis for today's tube kites. Flash Austin won the first kitesurfing competition on Maui and was the star of kitesurfing in the following years. The first inflatable wings are attributed to Tony Logosz from Slingshot, who tried them out on large, classic windsurfing and SUP boards around 2012. This development was not a resounding success either.
From downwinding to wingfoiling
Around 2014, more and more stand-up paddlers started doing downwinders on mostly 14-foot SUP boards in Hawaii, which was increasingly replaced by SUP foiling in the early 2020s. The idea behind it: The foil - which had already been gaining more and more importance in kitesurfing for several years and was constantly being developed further - allowed you to lift off the water with the board and, without being slowed down, easily increase your speed. Kitesurfing legend Flash Austin was one of the first to grab such a SUP foil board in Hawaii and pull it onto the foil using a wing. At that time, however, the wing did not have inflatable tubes, but a bulky aluminium frame.
Also in Hawaii at the time, kite designer Ken Winner was regularly doing downwinders on classic SUPs with fins, but had a shoulder injury that prevented him from paddling. When he saw Flash Austin on a day in March 2018 in Kanaha/Maui, how he easily got into foiling on a SUP foil board and a 3.5 square metre wing and was able to make speed not only downwind but also on cross courses, Ken Winner was hooked: "Flash gave me the impulse, but a question immediately arose in my mind: Why don't we use an inflatable wing?", Ken remembers his first contact with wingfoiling. "Just a few months later, in June 2018, I tried out my first self-built inflatable wing. I got on the board straight away and it was easy to use"recalls Winner.
Many more prototypes followed and in early summer 2018, he gave his kite test sparring partner and boardshaper Sky Solbach an inflatable prototype to take to a test event in Tarifa to present wingfoiling to the water sports retailers in attendance. The interest in this? Not a chance! It was Ken himself who took a prototype to another event at the Columbia River Gorge weeks later: "Nobody was interested"Ken smiles looking back.
The first wing was presented at a test event for surf shop operators. Interest? Not a chance
Klaas Voget, now Wingfoil Brand Manager at Duotone, remembers: "Ken Winner had developed wings quite early and very intensively, but nobody really took them seriously. Sometime in autumn 2018, I was out testing windsurfing foils at Camp One, Maui. Suddenly, Ken shot down the reef with a SUP foil board and an inflatable wing prototype, then went downwind at full speed to half wind and back onto the cross. Until then, I hadn't realised that you could be so sporty on half-wind and even upwind courses with a foil and wing. But it was clear to me that I really wanted to try it out. I had already spent the previous two years travelling to Pronesurf again and again (Surfboard with foil, the ed.) on the water and was pretty hooked. And if you could now combine that with a wing, then in my eyes it had huge potential"recalls Klaas Voget.
And Ken Winner? He continued to invest a lot of time in his wingfoil project and in autumn 2018, on a day with smooth water, he was finally able to meet Till Eberle, the managing director of the Boards and More Group, which also includes the new Duotone brand founded in 2018, to try out a foil board with a wing prototype. And perhaps this day was the key moment that this young sport needed to be launched. Till Eberle, himself an excellent kitesurfer and former snowboard pro, immediately recognised the potential behind this new sport, which didn't really exist yet: "Wingfoiling is easy, lots of people can do it!", summarised Eberle. In retrospect, he certainly demonstrated entrepreneurial courage, as he dared to invest money to provide considerable development capacity for Ken Winner.
I am a toy designer!
However, it would be some time before the idea was accepted in the water sports scene. Although Ken put a lot of energy into developing further prototypes and registered patents, he continued to attract little attention at the spots, and what's more, his activities tended to be ridiculed by other water sports enthusiasts.
A video clip goes viral - the breakthrough
A Duotone dealer meeting took place again in 2019. Various professional windsurfers and kitesurfers from the brand took part. It wasn't until one of the pros stood on a SUP foil board, picked up the inflatable wing and someone filmed the action that the ball started rolling. In response to the clip going viral, other brands came knocking to find out more about this new water sport. Klaas Voget brings the first wing to Germany and is responsible for the first nucleus on the Baltic Sea. Everyone can see for themselves what has become of it - in Hawaii, on the Baltic Sea and in the rest of the world.
Ken Winner - from then until today
Ken's father worked for a company that had a co-operation with the US military. And so the Winner family lived in Stuttgart for two years. "I was about 15 years old at the time, went to grammar school and discovered my love of classical music during that time. Franz Schubert, for example," remembers Ken. The family then moved to England for a year. Ken only started windsurfing at the age of 20, became a multiple world champion in his early years of windsurfing and competed in the Windsurf World Cup with legends such as Robby Naish, Alex Aguera and others. After his professional career, Ken worked for several windsurfing magazines and moved to the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon/USA.
In the summer of 2000, Dave Johnson, then Managing Director of North in North America, had the idea of founding "North Kiteboarding" under the North Sails Windsurfing banner. The green light was given from the headquarters in Germany "and so I was the first employee of North Kiteboarding," laughs Ken Winner. The now 67-year-old was originally supposed to work as a product manager, but this changed quite quickly. In November 2000, a Canadian was hired as a kite designer, but he immediately resigned due to "too much pressure". In March 2001, an Italian was then hired, who quickly resigned. And so it was Ken Winner who has been working as a kite designer for North Kiteboarding since those early days. "I am a toy designer"Ken Winner says jokingly today.
The fire in Ken is still burning brightly today: he lives on Maui and gets up at 5.00 a.m., 6.00 a.m. at the latest. Up to ten websites are checked as his first official act, starting of course with the pages for wind, swell and weather buoys that lie in the water far off Maui. This results in the daily programme for Ken: "It's either office work or a round of tennis. And working on the water depends on the wind and waves"Winner explains with a grin. If it's windy, it's straight out onto the water, of course, because improvements don't fall from the sky. Every week, he sends up to five data sets for prototypes to production in Sri Lanka. It takes around seven days from sending the data to receiving the prototypes. Then they are tested: "It can happen that we need up to 20 prototypes to achieve an improvement in a wing. It is always important for us to test all sizes of a model and not just to design the smaller and larger sizes on the computer based on a medium prototype size. Of course, the data is projected downwards or upwards, but it only provides an indication. Each size should also be tested on the water and the trim and individual data adjusted"Ken is determined. Ken can therefore be found on the water five to six times a week - fortunately, some things in Ken Winner's life never seem to change.
