Moroz, 23, learned how to kiteboard on the choppy waters beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. She’s a favorite to win the gold in at the Summer Olympics in Paris.
Olympic kitesurfer Daniela Moroz of Lafayette holds the flag with her Gold medal at the Pan Am Games in Algarrobo, Chile, on Friday, Nov. 3, 2023. Three months before she was set to compete in the first-ever Olympic kiteboarding event at this summer’s Paris Games, Daniela Moroz sat in her rented room in France, reflecting on how she got there.
While in the refugee camp, she passed the time while learning English until she and her friends were put on a plane to San Francisco. There, they’d live in the house of one of her friend’s uncles.“I knew I belonged here,” she said. “Not everyone felt the same way. Many Czechs went back after the revolution. You either fit in or you didn’t. I felt like I could finally be in charge of my own life. And I just kind of saw the incredible opportunities. I could do anything. I felt the freedom.
“We realized we were all going through the same things, trying to learn the language, fit in and learn the culture,” she said. In windsurfing, the sail is attached to the board, but the surfer isn’t attached to anything, instead holding onto a bar that’s connected to the sail. Careful not to overwhelm her with too much, too quickly, her parents restricted Daniela to racing mostly on the weekends, insisting she stayed focused on school and let the sport be secondary to other things in life.
She graduated from Campolindo in 2019, then went to the University of Hawaii to begin her undergraduate life. In 2021, she learned that kiteboarding was going to become an Olympic sport for the first time in 2024. In 2022, she took a break from college to focus completely on racing and won her sixth world title.
Olympic kitesurfer Daniela Moroz of Lafayette, during the 54th Semaine Olympique Française in Toulon, France, on Friday, April 28, 2023.
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