Many sports that become popular are simple and require little technological innovation (eg soccer), so anyone could start playing once they learn the rules. Others require more complex equipment but are straightforward reapplications of already-profitable technology stacks that had commercial demand (eg sailing). Still others could attract a large interested group of paying users even with limited new technology (eg downhill skiing), which funded the development of more enabling technologies that expanded the sport (eg ski lifts, snowboards, half pipes etc). Finally, others are entertaining enough to watch that audience ticket sales can fund their development (eg drag racing).
Paragliding has none of that. It did benefit from some enabling technologies that had commercial applications, primarily the ram-air parachute, which self-inflated and was steerable unlike previous parachutes. The inventor thought it might be useful for steering returning spacecraft to Earth, and while NASA abandoned the idea, he was able to eventually make money off of selling these designs for military paratroopers about a decade later. The inventor was primarily just a person obsessed with human flight -- he was a kite-maker who was crazy enough to prove the capabilities of one of his large kites by lifting his own daughter with it.
However, modern paragliders are very different from 1970s-era paratrooper parachutes. Paragliding is only a sport because a lot of people with some aerodynamics knowledge and an extremely high risk tolerance were willing to spend a very long time tinkering with different design approaches and then testing them out, gradually improving their designs first through trial and error and later through special-purpose CAD software, with little market to speak of for their products until they had made a lot of progress.
Basically, this sport only exists because people really want to fly. The desire to fly is at least as old as the Icarus myth, and it drove a lot of people to work very hard to create a hyperspecialized set of enabling technologies to make it possible at all.
Anyway, I'm at a class this week, and I'm bouncing around in the sky with 15 other students learning how to do cross-country flights, where we take off in one area and fly many miles before landing.
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