LOADING …
Every entry is a checkable date — a patent grant, a company filing, a ship date, a result. Where the record is contested, it says so. Filter by sport to follow one thread through.
Tony starts building boards. Not for a company and not for a market — for himself, because the equipment he wanted did not exist yet. Forty-five years later the method has not changed.
He moves to the Columbia River Gorge, where the wind is relentless enough to make testing honest, and shapes windsurf boards under his own name.
A windsurf shape that got copied up and down the Gorge. The first time his design ideas escaped his own rack.
"Started in '95 and officially launched in '99." Four years of shaping before there was a business attached — the prototypes came first, which is the order everything in his career has happened in.
He co-founds Slingshot in Hood River with his younger brother Jeff, who takes the CEO seat while Tony takes design and R&D. He runs design there for the next twenty-five years.
He designs Slingshot's first hydrofoil. Foiling would not reach a mainstream audience until around 2018. This is the pattern the rest of the timeline repeats: the idea arrives long before the sport is ready to hold it.
Drawn in 2000, nearly two decades before foiling went mainstream.
Two patents filed four months apart, both granted in 2006, both naming him alone. One is the reason inflating a kite takes one hose instead of five. The other is the split strut, and between them they are almost certainly both in whatever inflatable kite you last pumped up.
The leading edge doubles as a manifold — one valve fills every strut.
The strut built into the span of the canopy — secured at two points around the tube instead of the canopy being sewn over it. The canopy holds its shape under load, and the deformable member bleeds power in a gust instead of taking the rider with it.
Two designs that outlasted their model years by a decade. The Fuel arrives in 2002 and the RPM in 2010, and between them they carry six world titles and the entire megaloop era. If you started kiting in this window, there is a good chance you started on one of them.
Debuts 2010. The original Open-C, and still the reference point for the shape.
Debuts 2002. The C-kite the megaloop era was flown on — Ruben Lenten rode Slingshot for roughly a decade to 2013, and the 2009 Fuel was the first Slingshot kite drawn around a single rider.
The wakeboard side of the shop. The binding problem — how much board you can feel through your foot — gets the same treatment as everything else.
The first truly bottomless base system: nothing between the foot and the board.
Two more filings on the same April day in 2005, both granted four years later: the control device and the trim line system. These are the only kite patents in his record with other names on them — John Doyle on both, Alex Peterson on one — which is worth saying out loud, because it is the difference between a design credit and a myth.
Depower trim run through the bar. Co-invented with John Doyle, and still an active patent.
US7621485B2 ↗He builds the first hand-held wing prototypes, then puts them away. The boards were wrong and the foils were wrong, and a wing with no foil under it is just a sail you have to hold. They sit in a closet for four years.
Slingshot takes Best Brand in the IKSURFMAG Readers Awards and Sam Light takes Best Male Rider on the same night. At the Triple-S in Cape Hatteras, Light, Alex Fox and Eric Rienstra take every place on the Sliders podium and the overall as well, and Fox is Rookie of the Year. The design work stops being a claim and becomes a scoreboard.
Voted by riders, not by a panel — the Rally and the RPM are the reason the magazine gives.
One brand, all three Sliders podium places, plus the overall.
He takes the prototypes out and pairs one with a large foil he happens to be developing. He is up almost immediately — cutting upwind, working swell, no mast, no lines, no kite. He is photographed with that prototype in Hood River the same year.
Sam Light takes the Triple-S Invitational on Slingshot gear.
The gear proves itself where it is hardest to argue with — a full park tour, start to finish.
Sam Light cleans up stage after stage of the Kite Park League on Slingshot boards.
The modular foil idea lands: one mast and fuselage system, wings that move between disciplines. A high-lift wing off a kite setup goes behind a boat without an adapter.
One modular platform across boat, kite, windsurf, surf and SUP.
Eight years after the first prototype and four after the first flight, the wing goes on sale. Within two seasons wing foiling is a sport with its own gear category, its own events and its own beginners.
Built 2011, ridden 2015, shipped 2019.
A powered hydrofoil hull: the drive works at displacement speed, then leaves the water once the craft is flying.
US10279873B2 ↗He leaves the company he co-founded and starts again in the same town, with nothing between the drawing and the rider. Twenty-five years of building through distributors, dealers and reps teaches you exactly what each layer costs — and it is not only money. His last filing there is a collapsible wing, priority September 2023; it publishes in 2025, under Slingshot's name, after he has already gone.
It starts as one-off boards for riders who need something the catalogue does not cover, and becomes a complete foil system: three families, one connection, built in Hood River and tested in the Gorge.
One of the first OXZA custom boards.
Frontwings, masts, fuselages, stabilizers and the OX Lock — designed as one system.
