Gabriele Steindl: Professional Kitesurfer & Freelance Writer - Action, Lifestyle & Travels

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PKRA World Cup Joao Pessoa, Brazil

I arrived in paradise brazil about 2 weeks ago, unfortunately TAP (portuguese national carrier) managed to lose my two huuuge monsterbags and I ‘had’ to spend my first week in a beautiful place, wavesurfing … soooo sweet!!

The stuff finally arrived and I could make my way to Joao Pessoa, south of Natal for the PKRA World Cup final. Today is the last day of quite an exciting week.

The event was certainly the ‘lightes wind competition EVER’ in PKRA history, however, the event organisation decided to push it through….

So riders were using 14s and 16s (that usually NEVER happens) and still had to run upwind on the beach in order to perform tricks and to stay in the competition area at least for 2 moves or so….

I did very well the first days and ended in 5th place in the single elimination. In the double elimination, however, there was absolutely ZERO wind in my heats and as the heaviest female competitor (most of the girls are teenagers and tiny) I literally drowned :o( honestly, I could pull the bar whereever and as hard as I wanted and was still only being dragged around, kneedeep in the water… so finished 9th in the double.

nevermind, I had really good heats when the wind was ok and that it’s impossible to ride without wind, is very obvious.

yesterday we started the boardercross. I got into the final but unfortunately one of my fellow competitors didn’t play quite fair and simply just beacuse she wouldn’t have made it over one of the obstacles, crashed her kite on top of me (I was just about to make it!!!)… for now, I’m in third place but we’ll start another round of boardercross today and things can still change… the wind’s R E A L L Y light today again and I hope I will manage to do the boardercross on my board without being knocked out and without drowning to my knees…

Will keep you updated!