The 2013 sweep: a wing brand's best year on paper

Best Brand 2013

IKSURFMAG Readers Awards — reader vote

Best Male Rider 2013

Sam Light, same awards

Triple-S, Sliders Only

All three podium places, plus the overall

Rookie of the Year

Alex Fox

Why does a readers' vote count for anything?

Because of who is voting and what they are voting with. A readers' award is not a test bench and it does not pretend to be — it is tens of thousands of people who bought gear, used it all season, and had an opinion at the end of it. It measures satisfaction, not physics.

The magazine's own explanation named the Rally and the RPM. Not a marketing campaign, not a team, not a video: two kites that a lot of people had spent a year on.

What made the Triple-S result different from a normal win?

Depth. One rider winning is a rider. Three riders from the same team taking every place on a podium is harder to explain that way.

The last two rows are in that table on purpose. The King of the Air that year was won by a rider on another brand — naming who came third and fourth is more useful than claiming a podium nobody had, and the fact that two of the four finalists came out of the same team is the actual story.

Awards and podiums also measure two different things. The readers' vote is a year of ownership — whether the gear kept working, whether a warranty claim was painless, whether the kite you bought in March still felt right in September. The podium is one week and a set of conditions. A brand can buy its way to the second. Nobody has worked out how to buy the first.

What was the design side of a year like that?

Unglamorous. A park rider is testing whether a board survives a metal rail, whether an edge holds when the landing is flat, whether a construction still works on its fortieth impact rather than its fourth. A freestyle rider is testing whether the shape a kite was tuned to is the shape it still has in year two.

That is a different question from the one a magazine review answers, and it is why a team that lives at an event like the Triple-S is worth more to a designer than a team that turns up for the photo. Both of the patents this series has covered so far — the split strut and the one-pump manifold — are answers to durability and repeatability questions, not to feel questions.

One thing this series will not print: 2016 gets described elsewhere as the year the same brand took an industry Brand of the Year award, and two different companies claim that award in the same month. Until that is settled it stays out. Hood Memory Lane records what was built in Hood River before OXZA existed — the dated version is on Tony's timeline, the press page states what belongs to whom, and the current work is the REVSTAR system.