Kitesurfing’s Olympic debut was supposed to be a groundbreaking moment for the sport— But did it live up to the hype or was it lost in the winds of poor coverage and missed opportunities? As the excitement of the Games fades, Rou Chater takes a hard look at what happened in Paris 2024.

Paris 2024: The debut of kitesurfing in the Olympics arrived on July 26th with the kind of fanfare only the French could produce. For the next three weeks, the Games enthralled the planet globally. Did kitesurfing get a fair representation, though?

For us kiteboarders, it marked the first time the sport had been involved as one of the sailing classes in the Olympics. Needless to say, there was a lot of excitement, not just for the athletes but for kiteboarders worldwide, to see our beloved sport being beamed around the globe to the masses. 

Personally, I’ve never been a massive fan of the Olympics. I’m not one for watching sports, and I have little interest in athletics or swimming, which seem to make up most events in the Games. The event has also been mired in corruption scandals and seems to be a very well-oiled money-making machine for a select few, which also doesn’t sit terribly well with me. 

However, I do recognise the challenge it presents for competitors and the glory bestowed upon an Olympic medalist. I can also appreciate how inspiring it is for youngsters and adults alike to become more involved in sports, which is so important in this era of lethargy. 

It’s a bit of yin and yang if you will; there are positives and negatives, as with all things. Kitesurfing has a long history with the Olympics, which spans almost half of its existence as a sport. Did you know it was officially voted in as an Olympic class by the International Sailing Federation in 2012 for the Rio 2016 games? For this article, it is worth noting that ISAF became World Sailing in 2015.

At the time, kite racing was a huge discipline within the spot, with big fleets in the US, Europe, and worldwide. There were large tours and race regattas happening all the time. I was a keen racer back then, competing in the UK and racing against the force of Olly and Steph Bridge from Exmouth, who regularly won world championships. 

The sport was well poised to be in the Games in 2016, and kite racing was at a pinnacle of participation. The backdrop to its inclusion was the hard work and lobbying done by a handful of riders and the International Kiteboarding Association under the stewardship of Marcus Schwendtner. They believed the fastest route to getting the sport into the Games was by getting kite racing classified as a sailing class.

Back then, kite racing was very much sailing with kites, and it still is to this day. The way the regattas run, the starts, the courses, and everything else are transferable to a different sailing class. As kiters, we inherently didn’t want to be sailors, but it is what it is. Kite racing is a unique discipline of kitesurfing, and that's the beauty of our sport. We can do so much with so many different types of craft under our feet. 

ISAF was limited to eight sailing classes in the Olympics, so simply adding kitesurfing wasn’t possible. The IKA lobbied to include kitesurfing, but this would have to come at the cost of another class, which was windsurfing at the time. In the end, kitesurfing was in, and windsurfing was out for Rio 2016

At this time, it felt very much like kitesurfing was the young upstart going up against a sailing federation that had been around for over a century. It was also interesting to see what happened in the various countries where the sailing governing body, not the kitesurfing one, trained Olympic hopefuls. 

This made total sense. The Royal Yachting Association in the UK has a storied history of winning medals in the Olympics with a training program that is second to none. This was born out around the world, and rightly so. Even though it hurt personally as a keen kite racer, it was easy to see why the RYA would take existing trained racing athletes and transition them into the new class. 

Then, six months later, at another ISAF conference, there was a reversal of the decision; windsurfing was voted back in, and kitesurfing was out! I wrote an article about it here: https://www.iksurfmag.com/kitesurfing-news/2012/11/kite-racing-the-olympics-and-my-view/

For the next eight years, kitesurfing was left out in the cold. Finally, in 2020, it was announced as a sailing class for the Paris 2024 Games. Why the history lesson? It gives you a bit of a backdrop of a small, young, cool sport going up against a huge sailing federation with over a century of history and a board of directors that doesn’t look like your typical kiter. 

By 2020, the racing scene globally had diminished considerably. The sport had changed and became an expensive arms race where you needed the latest and greatest gear to win. This put a lot of people off. Big Air was the discipline of the day, and the Olympic dream had already been dashed a while back for many, and they’d lost interest. 

Over the next four years, the hopefuls from around the globe jostled at the various events with the hope of being one of the 20 men and 20 women to qualify for the Games. During that time, the format bounced around a bit, with talk at one stage of a “team” male and female relay race, but in the end, enough medals were found to offer both the men and the women a trip around the race course in Marseille.

Like many of you, I was super excited about watching the racing on TV. We published an article explaining the format and how to watch the spectacle, and it was viewed over 50,000 times and shared 12,500 times in the space of a week, which is pretty unprecedented for a web article on our site. Clearly, the excitement in the global kite community was palpable. 

Unfortunately, that excitement was quickly met with disappointment… 

Filming at the Olympics is done by the Olympic Broadcasting Service. They are tasked with filming every event live and putting them all out as streams. Broadcasters then choose to purchase these streams to show to their audience and can choose to add their commentary or use the stock commentary provided by the OBS. There is no filming by anyone except the OBS within the Olympic venue; even the spectators are limited to the cameras they can use. Anything bigger than a phone and the security guards may ask you to leave the event.  

As you can imagine, this is a money-making machine. The IOC vigorously protects its interests where filming is concerned, and the streams they sell don’t come cheap. In addition to the available streams, they sell the rights to broadcast the games. In 2015, the European broadcast rights were sold to Warner Brothers Discovery for a reported 1.3 billion euros. 

Similar deals exist worldwide, but broadcasters like the BBC, ABC, and NBC will purchase the rights from these holders. This year, the BBC paid WBD for broadcasting two streams at a time. They had one network channel dedicated to it and another second broadcast stream running throughout the games. Rather than bringing you all the action live, they could then pick and choose what to show and when. 

The decision on what to show is based on what’s in the national interest; usually, a medal hunt is followed by the sports with the most participation and the flagship swimming and athletic events. The BBC only paid for two full streams this year, so the coverage was minimal. The chances of seeing any kitesurfing on the national broadcaster's channel were pretty much zero unless your country won a medal…

For this reason, I opted to pay for a subscription service that promised to stream every Olympic event live like many of you. In the UK, that was Discovery Plus; Peacock was the choice in the US. The premise was simple: pay the monthly subscription fee, watch all the kite races live, and cancel the subscription after the Olympics. Easy.

Let's just say this isn’t how it worked out for anyone…

The kite racing events didn’t start until the second week of the games, kicking off on the 4th of August. The sailing featured six different classes, with Lasers, 470s, 49ers, Nacra 17s, IQ Foil (windsurfing), and Formula Kite all representing. With so many events, there is a lot to fit in, and the schedule looks packed. The sailing started on the 28th of July, with full days of racing planned until the finals of the kite event on the 8th.

This is where things started to unravel: factor in the weather, which never plays ball when you want it to, the sheer number of sailing events and the costs involved for the broadcasters to stream them all, and you can start to see a storm brewing… Ultimately kitesurfing ended up on the wrong end of a shitty stick at Paris 2024. It wasn’t broadcast at all in Europe until the final day of the event when all the other sailing classes had finished, and kitesurfing was the only sailing class out on the water in Marseille. In the US, there was a bit of coverage of the racing the day before finals day, but you had to wade through the replay of the day's racing to find it 27 minutes in on Peacock. Unlike other fleets shown in their entirety, kitesurfing got a bum deal. 

This meant the supposed and oft-lauded global spotlight the Olympics was meant to deliver never happened. This was a massive disappointment for the competitors, the people who had campaigned to get it into the Olympics, and us, the kiters who were keen to watch it. The BBC in the UK had to give it a bit of coverage as Ellie Aldrige took home the gold in an incredible last day of racing for the women's fleet. Likewise, I am sure Austrian TV was giving Valentin Bontus a bit of love over there as he took home the gold for the men.

Despite five days of racing, albeit hampered by the wind, Discovery Plus only showed the last day's medal races, which meant the casual viewer was denied the spectacle of 20 kiters hitting the start line at 25 knots. Although the medal races only featured four riders on the course, they were still incredibly exhilarating to watch and about a thousand times better than the show any of the other sailing classes had put on.

Here lies the rub. We were shown holding screens of Marseille harbour for days as the dinghy classes and windsurf racing were postponed. At the same time, the kiters were flying around the course looking fantastic, but it wasn’t shown. I watched many of the sailing events, and seeing all the Lasers parked thirty yards from the start for three minutes before pootling across the line at barely six knots was a joke compared to what the kiters were doing. 

Despite asking lots of questions to the powers that be, I am still trying to find an answer to why a preference for coverage was given to a one-design dinghy class designed in 1970 with under 250,000 boats worldwide. There are way more kiteboarders globally than Laser sailors, and kitesurfing is more exciting and entertaining to watch. Yet WS, the IBS, and all the broadcasters somehow didn’t get the memo.

Surely, the message should have been spread that kitesurfing would offer the best chance of seeing races complete and not postponed or delayed, as kitesurfing can hit speeds of 30knots plus in just 10knots of breeze. Surely, the message should have been spread that 20 kites hitting the line at 25 knots at the same time was better than a bunch of dinghies parked “hove to” (dinghy speak for stationary) for three minutes would be more entertaining for the casual viewer.

It felt like kitesurfing was treated as the annoying little upstart of a sport it was back in 2012. We had this incredible opportunity, and we were robbed of the limelight by some outdated boats that offered no entertainment in the conditions found in Marseille. Kitesurfing proved itself to be far more dynamic and exciting than any other class at the games, yet it received the smallest amount of coverage.

The Olympics were meant to be a spectacle like no other, and kitesurfing was meant to play a big part in it. Yet, sadly, for reasons I am yet to discover, our sport was overlooked, ignored, and consigned to the shadows of the event.

In my opinion, it's a travesty that cannot be repeated. I have absolute respect for the racers who put in all the effort and showed how incredible our sport is when other classes just couldn’t sail. I praise the athletes who made the finals and put on a show for the public. To those who took home the medals, I salute you. 

Everyone involved in the decisions that sold kitesurfing down the river at the Olympics needs to take a long, hard look at themselves. They should be ashamed that we watched postponement screens and no action for days when our fantastic sport provided plenty of action. WS and the IKA say it was never filmed, and it was out of their hands, but I have it on good authority that it was filmed, and the footage shown on Peacock backs this up. In the end, the decision lies with the broadcasters as to what they show the public, but surely there should have been guidance from WS in the lead-up to the event, and this is what I find so difficult to understand.

I have asked David Graham, the CEO of World Sailing, for comment, but I am still waiting to receive a response. I did speak to Markus Schwendtner from the IKA about it, and he’s just as disappointed as we are. What is positive is how many people saw kitesurfing at the Olympics, albeit only a short highlight or snippet here and there. It definitely reached people who it might not have done before, but it could have been so much better. 

Let's make sure that in 2028, kitesurfing is front and centre as the premier sailing class in the event and not a sideshow that gets overlooked despite its obvious appeal for creating incredible action for the viewers.

In my opinion, the athletes put on the most incredible show that sadly wasn’t shown, and for me, this debacle highlights just what a load of sh!t the Olympics can be if you end up on the wrong side of it. The eight medal racers had their moment in the sun, but for everyone else to be overlooked by the broadcasters is a shameful situation that shouldn’t be repeated.

By Rou Chater
Rou has been kiting since the sports inception and has been working as an editor and tester for magazines since 2004. He started IKSURFMAG with his brother in 2006 and has tested hundreds of different kites and travelled all over the world to kitesurf. He's a walking encyclopedia of all things kite and is just as passionate about the sport today as he was when he first started!

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