Sam Medysky Interview | Airush and the Early Days of Kiteboarding

Pat: This is Pat with MACkiteboarding.com and we're with Sam Medysky today. We're going to catch up and get a little bit of background about him.

Sam: How's it going, guys?

Pat: All right, Sam. So you grew up on Lake Huron, right? How was that growing up? I know you were influenced a lot by your dad being a windsurfer back in the day, so wind sports are kind of second nature to you.

Sam: Yeah, when I was growing up my parents had a summer cottage on Lake Huron in Sauble Beach, so I'd spend my summers there. We had a bunch of dinghy sailboats--a Sunfish and a Laser--so I sailed with my dad growing up. Then in 1998 my dad came home with a windsurfing magazine, and it had an article in it that said the sister sport to windsurfing was kiteboarding, and it was the latest and greatest thing. There were some photos of Robbie Naish and Lou Wainman and the early Maui kite crew, and for whatever reason, my dad was really interested in it and ended up ordering a kite from Hawaii. It was a Wipika Classic 8.5 meter two-line kite. It came with the lines, but it didn't come with a bar; it had instructions on how to make a windsurfing boom into a bar. We had a Hawaiian ProLine windsurf boom, and he cut it down to their suggested size, which was like a yard. It was just massive. Then we put some small cabinet door knobs on the ends to wrap the lines around, and he figured it out somehow. We got thrashed a lot in the early days, but we did that with the Wipika Classic- the inflatable kite. And then we rode quite a bit with foil kites. My first time actually on a board in the water, riding, I had a 6'7" directional board and a foil kite, a 3.6 Concept Air Traction X on handles, and between the handles it had a rope, and I had an old Dakine Speed Seat. I was eight years old at the time, and that was my first ride kiteboarding. Fast track to today, and I'm like, "What were we thinking?"

Pat: Yeah, can you imagine giving an eight-year-old one of those today?

Sam: Sometimes I question some of the decisions my dad made when we were young. A little later on when I was 12 or 13, there was a group of young kids kiting on the Great Lakes in the Sauble Beach and Oliphant area. One of our friends who had a cottage nearby had this little electric golf cart, and we'd drive around the beach. We used to do tow-ups on the beach with these old Gaastra kites back then. So we were doing tow-ups with a Gaastra GXR on two ski rope lines 60 feet or something over the beach and my dad's like, "Yeah! Good work, boys!" Now I'm like, "What was he thinking? We could have died!"

Pat: That's so awesome. That's incredible!

Sam: Accidents obviously started to occur around the world with kiteboarding, and then safety became more of a concern and everyone came out with quick releases and all that kind of stuff, but yeah, it was kind of the Wild West back then.

Pat: I think of the things you'd never be able to get away with today, and it's hilarious, some of the crazy stories that people have from learning back then.

Sam: Yeah, it's definitely pretty wild, but it makes me appreciate where the sport is today, and it's been cool to have been a part of kiteboarding for that long. Sometimes people ask whether I've become jaded by it, and there are days where I feel like maybe I am a little jaded. But then I've also had a constant progression through the sport, whether it be a career in it or seeing the gear progress, as well as being a part of all these different milestones within kiteboarding, whether it be the different disciplines or now, wing foiling, this brand new sport. It's like kiteboarding all over again: a whole new sport, but again, using the wind and the basics of sailing.

Pat: It's kind of crazy. You are one of those people in the industry who have literally been here since the beginning as a kid, and then growing up in it, and you've pretty much done just about any discipline you can think of. I'd say you're probably one of the more all-around riders that has done literally everything at this point.

Sam: I've tried to always stay as open-minded and as involved as possible in all disciplines of the sport. I think that as an athlete you have to be well-rounded, especially in a smaller sport like kiteboarding. You can't pigeonhole yourself into a corner, but also, for me, it's always been fun to be able to do all these different disciplines. I rolled with the trends a little bit. In the early days it was all about big air and then freestyle, all the unhooked stuff. Then I got into park and it kind of came full circle and we're back to big air now, but it's progressed a lot, which is awesome to see. I remember my first time coming down to Michigan in 2005 for the King of the Great Lakes. Alex Fox was there and Damian LeRoy was there. We all work in the industry now, which is funny.

Pat: Yeah, it wasn't even on my radar in 2005; I was 10 or 11 years old and was not even thinking about it. I probably saw it a few times since I grew up right on the beach where that event was actually held, but I never even realized what was going on until I was probably 13.

Sam: I think that with you guys being on Lake Michigan, it's something special. I find the communities really come together there a lot. It's not like Hood River or Hatteras where it's constantly windy; the conditions change so much and they're so variable, and that's why I love coming to the MACkite event in the fall. It really brings me back to my roots. You're standing out there and sometimes it's a beautiful, sunny day and 30 degrees Celsius, and then sometimes it's pissing down rain and blowing 30 out of the north and you're shivering, but the same number of people are out there because they're chasing that wind.

Pat: Yeah, it is funny seeing you on the beach compared to someone like Neil, where no matter what the temperature is, he's always cold.

Sam: It's so true. You can definitely tell who's grown up on the Great Lakes vs. the Florida boys who are coming up.

Pat: Yep, it is funny seeing that bit of difference between the reps. You get the northern reps and the southern reps and who's dressed for what. The water might be 70 degrees F the week before the event, and all sudden the week of the event, it's 40 degrees.

Sam: Yeah, and that's kind of a nice thing. Where I live now in Squamish, we basically have one kite spot and the conditions are phenomenal, but it's the same every day. It's consistently windy during our main season, May through September, and we kite almost every day. We're very fortunate, but it's always the same conditions. I kind of miss the variety of growing up in the Great Lakes where conditions are always changing, wind directions are different, and you're going to different locations for different wind directions. That adds a lot of variety to your riding and always keeps it interesting, I think.

Pat: Yeah, for sure. I mean, consistency would be nice, but having the mixed bag of things definitely keeps things fresh and interesting. Pretty much every session you're doing something different, it seems like.

Sam: Growing up there, you're constantly motivated to ride and get out, so you'll go wherever and ride in whatever conditions. It makes you a stronger and a better rider. There's something to say about consistency on the water, and it is important, but if you look at some of the top guys on the world tour, they train in all sorts of different conditions around the world. Usually it's the guys who can do their tricks in really challenging conditions, whether it be gusty or windy, cold water or choppy water, that usually tend to succeed overall. Training in Cauipe Lagoon or Taiba Lagoon all the time is great, but it's almost like fake kiting because, while you learned the trick, you've still got to train for it in real life conditions somewhere else where it's more challenging.

Pat: Going back to your pro riding days, how did that all start? I know you did a bunch of trips to Hatteras with your dad back in the day. How did you end up getting noticed and picked up? Did it happen organically, or was it you reaching out to people and trying to figure out how to make it work?

Sam: I started out kiting with my dad. My father was a high school teacher, so to pay for our new kiteboarding hobby, he decided he was going to become a kiteboarding instructor and start a kiteboarding school when he was on summer vacation. We went to Hatteras in 2001, he got his certification with PASA, and he started a kite school on Lake Huron. When I was young, I would help teach with him a little bit, and then as I got older I got more and more involved in the business. In the early days we were working with Gaastra Kiteboarding, which isn't really existent anymore in North America, but they were my first sponsor. I was 13 years old and they gave me a 10 meter GXR. It didn't matter if it was 12 knots or 30 knots; I was riding the 10 meter GXR. That was in the days when Martin Vari and Andre Phillip were winning the tour, and then when the new generation with Aaron Hadlow, Kevin, and Reuben were starting to come on tour in their early days before they were winning the events, I started to learn how to do kiteloops. All the videos were Bertand Fleury unhooked, doing these huge F-16s on Maui, so kiteloops were a big thing.

In 2004 my dad thought, "Well, let's see how he does in events." I was getting pretty good and I was better than most of the locals at our kite spots, so we went to Corpus Christi to the US Open for the Velocity Games. I think I was 13 at the time, so I competed in the junior event and I won 16 and Under. It was a big deal; that was my first time meeting any of the pros. I'm 13 years old and I'm star-struck by Andre Phillip and Martin Vari and all these guys whose kite movies I would watch before I went to school every day and read about them in the magazines. I was just in awe, so to do well at that event really kick-started it for me to want to follow that career path. Of course, both my parents, being teachers, were like, "No, you're not going to be a pro kiteboarder. You've got to go to university." So I followed that path, and as I got older I started to compete more. I started to go to the Gorge Games and all the North American-based events, including the King of the Great Lakes, and the Red Bull Fly to Maui that the Broneah Brothers did up in Traverse City. I did all the events that I could do, and then when I was 15 I won the Canadian Men's National. I ended up getting a wildcard spot into the PKRA by winning the Nationals, so I did a few PKRA events, but the problem back then, and it's still an issue now, is there aren't really any World Tour events in North America, so it was super expensive to travel to all these stops. In 2005, I switched to Naish from Gaastra, and Naish was amazing. They had the Torch then, and arguably the Torch was the best kite on the market for many years in the early days. But I was only getting gear, so I couldn't afford to go and travel. My parents also wouldn't let me drop out of school. They insisted I at least finish high school, so I did that.

In 2008 I finished high school and I was like, "Okay Mom, Dad- I'm going to pursue this kiteboarding career." I'd been working at restaurants through high school and teaching kiting in the summers to save up money so I could go and follow this dream I had, so I went to Taiba, Brazil. All the videos I had seen said that's the spot, so I went there with my best buddy Dave, and we spent four months there just kiting. I was at a decent level but there was no way was I going to do well in the World Tour, and by the end I had a bunch of my double passes down, so that was amazing. I was only 17 or 18 at the time, so that was really cool, but that was a year where there was a bit of a change on the World Tour and people starting to ride boots more, so during that stay in Brazil in 2008/2009, we started riding boots a lot more. We built some janky features and we had a rail over a buggy, which was pretty cool back in the day. They had the wildcard video submission for the Triple S, so I put together a wildcard video and I got in the 2009 Triple S, and that really is what kick-started my career with kiteboarding.

Right before the event, I made the change to Best Kiteboarding. At the time, they were a big brand and they were doing a ton with all sorts of different events, so I got on with Best Kiteboarding in 2009 and they supported me with travel and gear, and I started competing. I tried to do everything; on the World Tour I would do some stops here and there if I saw fit, but I tried to do a lot of different events as well. I would do a lot of the park events, I competed in the Red Bull King of the Air for five years, I did the Kite Tour in Asia for one season, and competed wherever I could. I was with Best for that, and then when Best had some financial issues in 2017, I switched to Airush. The distributor was based in Vancouver and I was living in Squamish for most of the year, so it made sense to switch to Airush.

I was 27, so I was starting to think about the future a little bit. Am I going to be a pro kiteboarder forever? Am I going to get more involved in the brand? With Best, I had started to work more with the development team, so I was working with the designers and testing stuff. I went to Sri Lanka a few times to the factory, which was really cool. They really took care of me with Best and got me more involved in the R & D process, so I was a lead tester with them for a long time. In 2017 when I switched to Airush, I got more involved in sales. I was the Canadian sales rep for Airush in 2017, and then I slowly worked my way up and grew my territory. I took over the West Coast and Canada, and then Airush took over the distribution from the distributor, so we brought the distribution in-house. In 2019 I took over as sales manager for Airush and AK, so I now manage a group of sales reps around North America and South America.

It's kind of funny, growing up, getting into kiting, and then having those questions of what you are going to do after your career as an athlete. I naturally followed the path of getting more involved in the industry, and that's where I am today. Wind sports are kind of all I know, but I've grown a lot within that field, working through R & D and then sales. It's been a cool career path. I didn't know what exactly I was going to do, but I knew out of high school that I was gonna kiteboard, that's for sure.

Pat: It's awesome to see how you've evolved and changed with everything and how this kept progressing you forward, both in riding and career-wise, too. It's neat to see this fall into place. It doesn't work out for everybody that way, obviously, but it's super neat to see that progression. You're one of those guys that I watched when I first came into the sport as a 13 or 14-year-old, back in the King of the Air days. It was super cool watching that, and all of a sudden I ended up meeting you at the King of the Great lakes back when I was 14 or 15. There were all these people I always grew up watching, and it was super cool. I had the same star-struck moment you probably had at your event down in Texas. I kept my foot in the door at the shop here and kept rolling with everything, and it's kind of neat to see everybody grow up in the industry together.

Sam: For sure. Look at Sky Solbach, Jaime Herraiz, or Andre Phillip and where they are now. Sky is doing a lot of the designing of the surfboards and foilboards for Duotone, Jaime Herraiz does distribution and his own shop in Tarifa, and Dre has Tona. It's interesting to see that there are some people that got completely out of kiteboarding, and then there are a lot of people that still stayed in the industry. Kiteboarding is a small industry, but it's got really good roots to it and a real family kind of atmosphere. I never really feel like it's too competitive among brands. Obviously, everybody wants to be the best brand out there and sell lots of gear, but at the end of the day, everybody's in this for the right reasons. People want to make good quality gear and people want to get water time.

Pat: Exactly. No one's in this industry to really get rich, and everyone's here to kite more. So you've been all over the place. What place sticks out to you the most? If you had to narrow it down to one spot you'd go a year, no matter what, where would that end up being?

Sam: That's a tough one. I was very fortunate to get to go to a lot of places around the world for kiting, and there are a lot of cool spots, but somewhere that I always really enjoy going is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It's not because it's conveniently close, though I definitely enjoy not having to get on a big, long plane ride, but it's probably because, with the conditions there, you've got a lot of different aspects of riding. When the ocean's firing, you can do a big northeasterly downwinder in scary big, dredgy, shorebreaky waves. It's so much fun. Riding in The Slick and riding in the park there has its benefits and aspects that I really enjoy. There are also the downwinders on the Sound side, riding through all the slicks and whatnot, so I really enjoy Hatteras for riding. You're on a sandbar in the middle of the ocean, so there is not a lot to do there and there's not a ton of restaurants, so that's always challenging, but I do find it's nice because there are a ton of people that come down from the Great Lakes. Every time I'm down there, there are a ton of people from Canada, from Michigan, and from the upper states that are just looking to kick off their season a little bit earlier. There are also loads of good spots around Europe. One of my other favorites is where the Airush headquarters are based in Cape Town, South Africa. They've got loads of different spots within an hour's drive and tons of different conditions, and there you've also got a lot of stuff you can do off the water as far as hikes and lots of cool nature and animals, as well as loads of good restaurants, so that's another one of my top spots for sure.

Pat: Awesome. How did you end up in Squamish, of all places? I know it's one of the kite meccas of Canada, though I don't know if it's that well known outside of Canada. I never really knew about it until I started talking to you and saw stuff getting posted for there from you and Rieder. It was never really on my radar as a kite spot or a kite destination to visit.

Sam: Yeah, Squamish is a funny area. It's based right in between Vancouver, a big cosmopolitan city, and Whistler, which is the "Disney World of the ski world", I guess you could say. It's about 45 minutes to Vancouver if we go south, and it's about 30 minutes to Whistler if we go north, so it's well-located for geography. The Canadian Nationals went from being on the east coast of Canada to the west coast, so I started coming out here in 2006 for the Nationals and competing, and the rest of the year I was traveling all over. Then when I'd come back home to the Great Lakes, it was awesome. My family was there and I would teach kiting, but I just wasn't getting enough time on the water, so I decided in 2014 to spend the summer in Squamish.

I'd normally come out here for a couple weeks throughout the summer, but then in 2014 I made the move to Squamish and spent the whole summer there. I still went home during the winter, but I spent the summer here and I was like, "Man, Squamish is great." I rode every single day. It's crazy here. The way the wind works is similar to Hood River. It's a thermal effect, so up north of us there's a big valley called Pemberton, and that area heats up. South of us you've got Vancouver, which is on the Pacific Ocean, so it stays a little cooler and it sucks the wind in between the mountains through the corridor. In the First Nations language, Squamish means "Mother of Wind", so if they were calling it that, it must have always been windy, right? It's always windy here in the summer, which is great. It's amazing flat water and you've got some good bump and jump stuff, but we don't get waves, which is a bit of a bummer. We don't have a ton of opportunities for downwinders and stuff like that, but you can kite almost every day May through September.

So that's why I came out here originally, for the wind, but then I fell in love with everything else that was here. I was traveling, but I was always thinking, "Where am I going to settle down?" You can't just be a vagabond on the road forever. Being a Canadian with family here, I wanted to be in Canada, and Squamish was the windiest place. I had started to get into other sports like mountain biking, and I found out that Squamish has world-class mountain biking and snowboarding and all that kind of stuff, so it's got a lot to offer outside of wind sports. It's just the community here; everybody's quite athletic and always down to session, which sometimes makes it hard to work. Everybody's texting, "Hey, you want to go do this right now?" and you're like, "No, I gotta work right now, sorry." But I think the sense of community here and the amount of water time I can get is why I ended up here.

Pat: That's awesome. I love seeing the videos you post of yourself doing the backcountry snowboarding. Mountain biking looks sweet out there. It does look like a really cool spot. It seems like Hood River in a way, but almost a little bit better on the other side of the off-water sports. The skiing looks a little bit bigger.

Sam: It's very comparable to Hood River as far as geography goes. You've got Mount Hood there and you've got Portland, so it's set up very similarly to Hood River. I would say Hood River is a little more dialed for wind sports. You've got so many more locations and you've got really good wind swell, so Hood River is definitely set up a little bit more for that. As far as winter sports go, it's hard to compete with Squamish and the coastal mountains of British Columbia. We've got so many different zones we can go to, so it's awesome for that. But it's only six hours to get to Hood River, so it's a quick and easy drive to go down there in the summer, and vice versa. A lot of the guys will come up here to ride, and nowadays, most of the time, they have their mountain bike with them, so they're mountain biking up here more than they're kiting, but yeah, it's very similar to Hood River, for sure.

Pat: That's awesome. That wraps up everything I had to talk about with you today. Thanks for giving us that whole background of how you grew up in the sport and how the whole transition worked. I think it's cool to get an opportunity to get that background of the people actually running these brands now. Running the inside sales at Airush, it's really cool to see how you grew up in the sport from a kid to pro rider to now working in the industry to where you're at. It is neat to get that story of how everybody has gotten to where they're at in the industry and how it's changing and how things are going to continue to change.

Sam: Nowadays at my local spot we don't have nearly enough young kids in the sport, and hopefully we can make the barrier to entry to the sport easier. What you guys do on MACkite, creating good packages that are affordable for people to get into the sport, but also being a resource for people for learning is so huge. I look back on my early days of kiting, and there was one VHS set--it wasn't even a DVD--that I had called "Boost Kiteboarding", and it was Shannon Best and a few guys on Maui who were coaching you through how to do a backroll, backroll to toeside, a mobe, etc. Nowadays I can go on MACkite's YouTube and I'm like, "Oh geez, they've got it all on here. Learn to foil, learn to do this and that," and it's awesome to see because it definitely helps everybody to progress. Especially for young kids getting into it, it's such a resource for them, and that's one thing where I hope we can keep the momentum going in this sport: getting young kids into wind sports, whether that be windsurfing, kiting, or now winging, because that's really what drives our sport forward. If you look at the age of the guys on the World Tour and the guys competing in King of the Air, my generation--Nick Jacobson, Kevin, Lewis, Aaron--a lot of us are no longer competing; we're doing stuff behind the scenes or whatever it may be, and there's this whole new generation of young kids and it's awesome to see.

Pat: Yeah, it is. I'd agree with you; I feel like there definitely needs to be more young kids in the sport. It's a tough sport to get into if you're not either coming from a wealthy family or a family that is already in wind sports. It's one of those weird things where there is definitely a hard barrier of entry there, and I think, as an industry, we need to come up with a way to somehow make that easier for those kids that are looking to get into it. But then, it is kind of wild to see all those young kids coming into King of the Air. It's been, what, the last two years, and all of a sudden we've seen that influx of those 15-year-olds, and now they're 17, 18, coming in. That's almost turning the whole competition side of that upside-down as far as how fast those kids have progressed.

Sam: Yeah, the barrier to entry is definitely tough, and I think in North America it's even more challenging. When you look at the geography of our continent, we're pretty landlocked. You've got the Great Lakes with loads of water, the East Coast, West Coast, and the Gulf, but a lot of the U.S and Canada are landlocked where there's not a ton of water access. But I do think winging is really going to open up a lot of new locations for people to be able to do wind sports. Also, snow kiting has been around way longer than water kiting and it's still going. I wouldn't say it's gone mainstream, though I would say it's definitely steadily growing.

Pat: For sure. I do think winging is going to fill in that gap to where you don't need that giant beach to launch and rig a kite, so it does open up a ton of those bodies of water that are more inland and smaller. It'll be neat to see how that changes in the next couple years.

Sam: Yeah, for sure. In kiting and wind sports in general, I find that everything comes full circle. Look at the way the disciplines have gone within the sport. And I remember back in the day Rush Randall was kite foiling. He had snowboard boots mounted to his board and some old Carafino foil on there, but he was kite foiling during the Laird Hamilton days of foiling big waves, and now kite foiling is huge, so it'll be interesting to see what happens with kiteboarding next. I think we'll probably get back into the low powered handle passes at some point in the next few years, and then it'll be interesting to see where winging goes, because there are so many different disciplines of winging. I know within our company we're developing a whole race series because loads of people are getting into the racing side of it, which will ultimately be the Olympic class for winging. There's freestyle, which the GWA is doing, and then wave riding. I grew up on a lake, and it's amazing what wing foiling can do on a lake. With the shorter, quicker period of waves, wing foiling is the ticket for riding a wave on the Lakes.

Pat: I agree. It's super fun; you can connect so many more waves than you ever could have traditionally on anything else.

Sam: Yeah. That day we had at the Mac event this year was insane. It was side or almost side-off I, remember. I went out on a 6m wing. There was nothing on the shore, and then there were these peelers coming in. I felt like I was at Kanaha- it was amazing. They were waist-high, perfect, and you could go forever. It was really weird, but it was perfect for wing foiling. There was nothing on shore, which was too shallow on the sandbar anyways, but just out from there it was windy enough to pick up waves. So I'm pretty excited to see where kiting and winging go in the next few years.

Pat: Yeah, that'll be neat. Well, thanks Sam. I won't take up any more of your time, but we'll have to circle back to another one of these in a month or two and catch back up and see what's been going on.

Sam: Awesome, thanks Pat. Appreciate it.

MACkite Subscription Links:

YouTube  |   Instagram

Contact Us Below:

800.622.4655  |   Kiteboarder@MACkite.com  |   LIVE Chat Messenger