Building a Board for a Champion

Having custom kite boards built by good friends and hand-delivered to Marseille is just the most recent display of community support for St. Francis Yacht Club’s Daniela Moroz on her journey to the 2024 Olympic Games. With the start gun for the first-ever Olympic race in Women’s Formula Kite Foil just weeks away, there wasn’t a moment to lose when, last month, Moroz knew she needed a new board with more stability. She asked her dad, Vlad Moroz, to reach out to Kenny Adgate, a family friend whose wingfoil boards are renowned. The project became a community affair with Kenny’s wife Judie stepping in to color the board, and world-champion kiter Johnny Heineken consulting.

“I thought it would be a cool thing to do and we’ve come up with a significantly more stable board for Daniela,” Adgate said. “[It] will offer her a less turbulent feeling and hopefully improved mental confidence as far as going faster—she’ll be feeling less vibration. It’s less input to your body which is sometimes better in certain situations.”

Adgate started making boards after his friend Mike Zajieck, owner of Mike’s Lab, began making kite foils. Back then Mike’s foils used tuttle boxes, which few board companies were using so Adgate decided to make some boards to accommodate them. When wingfoiling developed, Adgate started building wing boards.

It takes about 20 hours to build a board from start to finish, plus drying time for the epoxy. For Moroz’s board, the process was nerve-wracking, Adgate admits—after all, it’s for her first Olympic Games. Fortunately, Adgate and Moroz have ridden a lot together, so he had an idea of what she wanted, and Moroz was able to give Adgate a board she liked for inspiration.

“It did help to have something that she preferred so I could take some measurements off that…so it would feel natural to her when she hopped on it for the first time, and it sounds like it was!”
Adgate got Heineken involved to help with the decking and foil box locations. “Johnny has so much knowledge with that kind of thing which really helped make sure measurements were correct. The right height of the board is really important for racing,” he said. “There are racers who like their front foot higher than the back, or level. There are all different kinds of angles that each rider prefers so getting that measurement out of her team was important. Thinking through the stability improvement was a challenge as the technique I wanted to use was one that has not been done before but it ended up working out really well.”

Daniela’s dad is best friends with Zajieck, two Czech immigrants who met windsurfing at Berkeley Marina in the mid-80s. Zajieck switched to foil production 10 years ago and Moroz has won many of her six World Championships on Mike’s Lab foils.

“Being involved in this has been especially important to me because she is the daughter of my best friend,” Zajieck said. “I’ve known her since she was a baby, I watched her learn to windsurf—which she had no interest in—but by the time she was 10, kiteboarding did interest her. This board is special because she was able to get exactly what she wanted from Kenny, and yes, we were messaging many times a day while he was building it!”

Judie colored the board and collaborated with Moroz on a patriotic design. “Daniela wanted to go from a very light blue to a very dark blue on the board. It’s all hand-painted—I mix the colors and we put the epoxy into the actual paint. It’s very time consuming and you have to be quick—you have about 15 minutes to put it on the board otherwise it turns to gel, and you can’t ombre it. If only you could have heard Kenny and I anxiously trying to get it right!” Judie said.

Moroz was thrilled when Kenny agreed to make a board for her, trusting that he would do an amazing job. She’s branded it “Phoenix.”

“My gut feeling was really pushing me to try something new with the design that had never been done before and Kenny, taking all of my preferences into account, executed it flawlessly! And then riding it for the first time and seeing it actually worked was incredible,” she said.

To have the opportunity to build boards for Daniela Moroz at this point in her campaign is special, Adgate acknowledged. “It’s an honor for sure, it’s so cool, to have her on something that she wanted to ride, and I was able to build it in my backyard! A lot of really talented people ride my boards and it’s an honor every time I see someone on one of my boards.”

There’s now a second Adgate board on its way to Marseille as Daniela had to return the boards she was riding to her former sponsor by June 1. The second board is designed for a different foil set, and has a completely different shape and rocker, Adgate noted, based on specs from Moroz, and with Heineken involved again on calculations. The board was delivered to Santa Barbara by another of the local winger, Nils Stolzlechner, who handed it off to her training partner, Evan Heffernan, for the flight to France.

“It must have been a difficult and huge decision for her to switch out boards at this stage of the game as the sponsor provides up to three boards a year for free, but in her mind, it was the right decision,” Adgate said. “I want to say she’s probably going to call me again to get another one—I’m on board-production standby! But anything to help her, her family and the supporting crew around her. It’s an awesome place to be around here when so many people want to help her so that she has the best opportunity to do her best.”

“My team, Chris and Tucker, also worked with Kenny, Johnny and Mike on these boards,” Moroz said, adding, “They’re the best in the world with this stuff and to have a board that was designed and made at home in the Bay Area feels really special. It just means the world to me to have all of their support behind me going into the Olympics and I’m really proud to be able to represent the Bay Area in this way.