Hello. I am
DOB: 13th of May 1990
Current Titles: British Champion, Triple S Champion
Lives: Hayling Island, UK
BEST RESULTS
4x Triple S Champion
3rd Redbull King of the Air
British Junior Champion
2x British Professional Champion
1st Ro Sham Throwdown
1st Russian Rail Masters
SAM LIGHT, UK PROFESSIONAL KITESURFER.
I started Kiteboarding in September 2003, I was always into sport growing up, especially water sports. My local beach; Hayling Island, is one of the best locations for Kiteboarding in the UK. So naturally I watched at the beach and thought it was amazing, then my cousin bought a kite and helped me learn, I was hooked! The next summer I was out kiting at every opportunity, and the British Kiteboarding Association came to my local beach for a national competition. I competed in the juniors and took home 3rd place, I really enjoyed it and my dad took me to the remaining competitions that year. I went on to compete in the British competitions while I was at school, winning the junior title and going on to win the professional British championship around the time I finished school in 2009.
At that time I was sponsored by Naish and heard about a trip in Maui called ‘the Naish house’, I paid for myself to fly out to Hawaii and worked as hard as I could to try and further myself within the company, they invited me back to the product shoot a few months later and the rest is history. I picked up O’Neill as a sponsor and I became an international rider, travelling all over the world from competitions to photoshoots.
At the time I was set on becoming world champion, as that’s the only real goal I understood at that age, but Naish encouraged me not to compete on the world tour, to do my own thing and produce high quality media. I only ever competed in a few stops on the PKRA, my best result was 5th place. I didn’t really enjoy it, I felt I had to force tricks I didn’t like, tricks that I didn’t think looked good or felt good. So I stopped competing on the world tour and focused on my freeriding, experimenting with new tricks that had not been done, at the same time I started riding at the cable park as much as I could, it was great practice when there was no wind and I really enjoyed it. Wakeboarding really helped my board skills evolve, I was able to start bringing wakeboarding tricks into Kiteboarding, and vise versa, they complimented each other so well as the tricks are so similar. My kiting became about producing media and freeriding, I enjoyed this so much more than competing, I learnt so much more about my riding and the industry. Then when I joined Slingshot in 2013 they also wanted me to continue to produce online videos and photoshoots, I learnt so much from all this, working with videographers and photographers.
I am a really competitive person and still had the drive to compete, and my freeriding was developing my ‘wakestyle’ riding, I started competing in bigger one off events such as the ‘Triple S’, and ‘King of the air’, these events were more aesthetically pleasing and attracted more media, I also enjoyed them so much more so it made sense. The Triple S felt like my competition, it was the style of Kiteboarding I really enjoyed and wanted to compete in. So I decided to really focus on my ‘wakestyle’ riding, training at the cable park to develop my skills on rails. I took 3rd place at the ‘King of the Air and won the Triple S sliders and overall title four years in a row! I still can’t believe it!
The sport continues to grow as one of fastest growing watersports, I will continue to push my riding, and strive to create the best visual content, push the limits of ‘wakestyle’ and ‘extreme big air’ Kiteboarding. I can’t thank my family, friends and sponsors enough for the opportunities I’ve had! I really believe if you just keep following your passion in life it will take you somewhere really cool!
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