Let the Moment Unfold
Freestyle is about letting the moment unfold. It is about expressing yourself as an artwork carved in the wind, on a quarter-pipe or in a powder bowl. It is about balancing yourself with the forces of nature - dancing with gravity, riding the wind, or carving the snow. Freestyle is everywhere. It is the way of the Tao. Everything flows.
Freestyle is not just another word for "trick flying". Sure, freestyle flying will often include radical tricks and extreme moves, but the two are not synonymous. Freestyle is about Freedom and Style. Freedom to express yourself and explore the moment, and to do it with style. Freestyle flying can be any kind of flying. That's where the freedom comes from.
Traditional kite flying competitions generally don't have the freestyle nature. They require strict discipline and a great deal of preparation and practice. They are hard work and not as much fun as you might think, and I have great admiration for those who have the dedication required to do it.
I competed in this kind of competition for a number of years at national and international level. However, I wasn't very good at it (ranking eigth in Europe at one point was more of a reflection on the ranking system than my skill :-) and didn't particularly enjoy it. It was too much like hard work for a lazy person like me and I didn't like having to fly what someone else told me to fly (e.g. precision figures), or having to adapt my style just to earn more points on technicality (more straight lines, less tricks). So I devised a competition format that emphasised radical flying, innovation, improvisation, self-expression and above all, fun. It was a competition designed to emphasis the freestyle nature of kite flying. The Freestyle Trickout is now a regular fixture at UK festivals.
The trickout competition got exceptionally popular in 2003 and 2004, thanks to a surge of talented and enthusiastic new pilots becoming interested in competing. It was used as the basis for a National Freestyle Championship over these two years, but eventually started to show signs of stretching at the seams.
Trickout was always intended to be flown "just for fun". It was something to do at kite festivals to keep us occupied with a bit of friendly rivally, to show off our latest tricks and combinations, and to provide entertainment for the watching public. The judging is ad-hoc, the random draw can result in unfavourable matches between pilots (e.g. having two of the best pilots go up against each other in the first round may be exciting, but it means that one will get knocked out straight away, and their final position may not reflect their overall skill). These things generally don't matter for the trickout, because it is just for fun. The pilots are relaxed and take things with a pinch of salt. But it's not so good if you're running an ongoing league or even national championship on the back of. So we needed a new format, one that still had the spirit of freestyle, but provided a more rigorous framework for scoring.
Some time between the trickout and the league format, I devised the "Technical Freestyle" format which tried, but ultimately failed, to capture the essence of freestyle in a more rigid structure. The pages are here for posterity, but the format is all but dead.