plummet wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 9:32 pm
He's my unfounded guess.
The top 10 dudes like Kevin, Aaron, Nick will be making $200-$300k plus travel/accom etc
The next tear down. maybe top 10-20 will be $60-$100k dependant on online presence.
Then after than. Rats and mice. Dudes will be lucky to scrape a living and will rely on other forms of supplementary income.
Equipment might be provided, maybe travel costs. Sometimes just discounted kites......
Totally unfounded. There were maybe a very few making close to or around 100k usd a year in the very early years of the sport, but that only lasted maybe a couple years, and those guys were working very hard, and that figure is probably an exaggerated estimate of the sum total of all their hard work, including all promotional deals, videos, etc. Guys like Elliot Leboe, Maruico Abreu, maybe Lou, and hell, I'm so bad at names I forget the rest... But that's just about all of 'em.
No doubt the "behind the scenes" guys did much better. Of course there's Robby Naish, but he was already a legend and when kitesurfing came around he attacked the market on all possible fronts, I doubt the income he made from actually riding a kiteboard could really be counted as anything significant.
Red Bull at some point was dumping tons of money into the sport in a campaign which apparently was very effective; free samples to any participants, delivered by good looking girls. At one point I went to "King of the ice" or something like that on lake Minnetonka in Minnesota... And "King of the air" or "King of the Great Lakes" in Grand Haven, Michigan...
But once they determined they had saturated this niche market, aside from "King of the air" in Hawaii, Red Bull's marketers were smart enough to move on to bigger and better things.