28 minutes of old school freestyle at its best. Paul van Bellen has digitised another classic: The film of the 1996 North King of the Lake, where the discipline of freestyle is still in its infancy and there is a certain lightness combined with great enthusiasm in the air: Ian Boyd misses the super final, one-handed spin loops are celebrated by a cheering audience and in the evening the glasses are clinked with pizza and wine. It may sound absurd, but the moves that professionals like Kevin Pritchard, Robby Seeger and Josch Stone used at the prestigious King of the Lake to trick their way to stardom and make a living at the same time are now performed by every ambitious amateur freestyler during an after-work session: spinloop, willy skipper, backwindjibe and aerialjibe were among the hottest tricks - in this find from 1996, not even Vulcan and Spock had been invented yet.
Freestyle emerged in the nineties in the European flat water areas basically out of an emergency situation, because the guys from Hawaii like Robby Seeger, unlike their racing colleagues, missed the waves to be able to offer their fans a show on the water during festivals or dealer meetings on site and to be able to stage the boards of their sponsors. In short: they were bored. So they just grabbed their big wave stuff and started doing loops and gyrations on flat water right in front of the audience. The people on the shore went crazy - freestyle was born.
More Windsurf Classics:
Julian Wiemar
Editor surf
