Competition, Innovation, Dedication

I was born on 4 October 1988 and grew up around the water in Cornwall. My dad was one of the first in the UK to take up the sport, and around 1999/2000 I'd tag along to the beach and fly his kite. A kitesurfing holiday in the Caribbean not long after is where it really clicked — he taught me to ride, and I never stopped.

I started competing in the UK and turned professional at the start of 2003, and by 2004 — at just 16 years old — I'd won my first PKRA World Championship title. What followed was five straight world titles from 2004 through 2008, a run no one else has matched. Winning was never the whole story for me, though — I've always spent as much energy on invention as on competing, developing new tricks and landing them in competition for the first time.

A serious ACL injury took me out of competition in 2012, but I came back to the podium and winning ways in the years that followed, and found a new arena in Red Bull King of the Air, debuting in 2014 and winning back-to-back titles in 2015 and 2016. I've since made ten consecutive King of the Air appearances, as recently as 2023 — you can see the full run on the achievements timeline.

Alongside competing, I've spent a lot of the last decade and a half building things off the water: two seasons fronting Red Bull TV's On The Loose, a run of personal video projects with Andy Gordon — Invent, ReVolve, Calibrate, and Aspire — and, most recently, the documentary TWENTY. It's been years of hands-on R&D, starting from a young age at Flexifoil with my own pro model kites, then a decade alongside kite designer Ralf Groesel on equipment at Duotone. You can watch a lot of that work in the media center. Since 2024 I've carried it into product design at Harlem Kitesurfing, helping shape gear like the Harlem Peak, the Thrive, and my latest pro model kite, the Hadlow Pro.

Twenty-five years in, I'm still passionate and still pushing. That longevity is the part of my career I'm proudest of — five consecutive world titles, ten consecutive King of the Air appearances, and a body of equipment and films that's shaped the sport for the riders coming up behind me. Kiteboarding has changed a lot since that first time I had a kite in my hands; I've tried to spend every one of those years pushing it forward rather than just riding it out.