The Open-C wing shape that won six world titles

First model year

2010

The shape

Open-C — C-kite feel, bridled behaviour

First

The first Open-C to win a world championship

Titles on it

Six, 2011 – 2018, across two riders

What were riders choosing between before it?

Two families, and a real cost either way.

A C-shape gave a rider direct feel and honest slack — you moved the bar and the kite answered without a committee meeting. It also asked for commitment: less usable depower, and a relaunch that punished mistakes.

A bridled shape forgave all of that and felt, to the people winning on C-kites, like riding through a blanket. Freestyle at the top level was decided in the tenths of a second between the bar moving and the kite answering, and that was exactly where the bridle sat.

The Open-C is the attempt to stop choosing. Keep the C outline, open the tips, add the bridle, and give up as little of the directness as the geometry allows.

Did it actually work, or did the riders?

Both, and the honest answer is that a result never separates them. What the record shows is a shape that kept turning up under people who were winning.

Note the tour column changing while the kite column does not. Competitive kiteboarding reorganised itself repeatedly across those eight seasons — the PKRA lineage, then the WKL, then the GKA — and the 2015 title in particular is often miscredited to the PKRA-descended tour, where Mario actually finished second that year. He won the WKC.

Getting that right matters more than it looks. Four straight titles is a real claim; four straight titles on the wrong tours is a sloppy one, and a reader who catches the second stops believing the first.

One more thing the table does not show: eight seasons is a long time for a competitive shape. Freestyle kites are usually replaced by the thing that beats them within two or three years, and the RPM kept being the answer across two riders with quite different styles and three separate governing bodies.

What in the kite was doing the work?

The outline gets the credit because it is the part you can see. Underneath it were two things this series has already covered: the split strut, which kept the canopy holding the profile it was drawn with instead of deforming into whatever the load made of it, and the one-pump manifold, which is why every one of those tubes was at the same pressure when the heat started.

Neither of those is visible in a highlight reel. Both are the reason the shape a rider tuned on Tuesday was the shape they got on Sunday.

Hood Memory Lane records what was built in Hood River before OXZA existed. None of these results belong to OXZA: they belong to the riders and to the company Tony designed at, which the press page states plainly. The dated record is on Tony's timeline, and the current work is the REVSTAR system, where the compromise being refused is a different one.