Podcast Podcast, Season 4, Episode 7: Liam Whaley

Welcome to Season 4 of The Edge, a podcast by TAG Heuer. Our seventh guest this season is the world kitesurfing champion Liam Whaley. In this episode, He tells us about the different disciplines of kitesurfing, he looks back on the most important competition of his life and of his friendship with Gisela Pulido. Presented by your host Naomi Schiff, this is The Edge, a podcast by TAG Heuer. 

Here are a few snippets to put you on the starting line and get the adrenaline pumping. But don’t forget to subscribe to our Podcast so you can listen to the full, unfiltered episode later. The Edge is a series of conversations with extraordinary people operating at the edge of possibility. It’s about the thin line between taking part and tipping into victory; it’s about what gives us our edge and what we can do to go beyond it.

“My love of kitesurfing started at a very, very young age. Even though I was living in Ibiza, which is not the windiest place in the world, it is an island and it has many kinds of beaches all around it. So depending on the wind direction you can kind of always find somewhere to kite. But besides that, my dad is a very avid windsurfer and watersports person in general. And yeah, he got me into kitesurfing from a very young age. And I would always go down to the beach and see him kite surfing with his friends, and I was always too young to do it, because you need to have a certain weight to be able to get on the water. But I was flying kites on the beach from a super young age, I think from like 3 or 4 years old when I could hardly walk. So my love of kite surfing definitely comes from my father.”  

“I was in Brazil at the time, on the other side of the world, training, training, freestyle, preparing for the upcoming season. And about 4 or 5 days before the event, I get a call from Red Bull, and they’re like : “Do you want to participate in the Red Bull King of the year? Somebody got injured.” Nick Jacobson was his name. He was like a very good competitor at the time, and I didn’t know how to react at the moment because I was like, thinking, how am I going to get to the other side of the world? I haven’t trained for this at all, but I. I just said yes. I took a flight the next day. I couldn’t even go straight from Brazil to Cape Town, which was where the event was. I had to stop in Spain first to pick up my kitesurfing equipment, which is different from the freestyle one. So I flew to Spain the next day, just laid over there for like one day, prepared my gear, then flew to Cape Town and yeah, signed up, started that competition with absolutely no experience whatsoever. And yeah, it was the craziest event of my life.”

“I always compare kitesurfing to skiing. You can kind of take it to the level that you want, so anybody can do it. It’s not as crazy and dangerous as it seems. And it’s not as physical and as hard as people think. It’s actually just more, more technical. And it’s really easy once you’ve got it. But of course, taking it to the level that we take it, it’s extremely hard on the body. People think it’s soft because we’re kiting on water. But as I said, you know, we’re doing 25 metre jumps. We’re flying 100km/h through the sky. And if you don’t manage to control your kite before you land, you’re essentially landing on your board, which is a massive surface area onto the water. Water can be extremely hard. So imagine having a board on your feet and landing at, I don’t know how many kilometres per hour, but super hard. You can potentially break your legs or, you know, extremely hurt yourself. So yeah, we go through many injuries. you have to learn to kind of disconnect that, that fear. And, you know, I think it’s more of a fear when you’re when you’re training and you’re preparing because you’re kind of thinking about it and you don’t want to injure yourself leading up to the event. So you’re doing everything a little bit more cautiously.”  

“My friendship with Gisela goes way back. As I mentioned, I was born and raised in Ibiza. I got to know her pretty well because we would just spend so many hours on the water together and we all had it, like minded goals, which was to be the best at our sport. There was also other people, we had a really good Spanish crew at the time, and we all pushed each other. And Gisella and her family were always very supportive towards me.  Gisela and I travelled together for many years. We went all over the world together and we kind of supported each other. I was super young at the time and yeah, it was just I think it was a great, great friendship. And it’s always good to have people in your environment with a similar goal because you just end up pushing each other. Now she’s moved on to a completely different discipline. This also means we see each other a lot less because we train in different spots and and. Yeah, but we still remain very good friends to this day. So I’m actually going to see her today because we have an event with TAG Heuer today in my kite school.”