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.
Moroz, a 23-year-old Lafayette native who is a six-time world champion in the sport and a favorite to win the gold in August, thought about her immigrant parents.
In the early 1980s, they independently escaped former Czechoslovakia and started over in the Bay Area. They stumbled upon the Cal Sailing Club at Berkeley Marina, where they first fell in love with windsurfing, then, each other.
“They were the ones that got me into the sport,” Daniela said. “They left their lives and left everything behind to chase the American dream and completely started new lives when they came to America.
“For me, to be going to the Olympics now, it feels like a culmination of that American dream.”
Daniela’s mother, Linda, was 19 when she and some friends put their most valuable possessions into a backpack, told their families and friends they were going on vacation and then hopped on a bus to Yugoslavia.
They didn’t plan on returning home.
Tired of living under communist rule, Linda and her friends sought asylum in Yugoslavia, where they were soon transferred to an old military prison in Austria and held in a refugee camp for six months.
“Nobody knew if it would even work,” Linda said. “It was scary because you left with the feeling like you might never be able to go back once you leave. But there was just something that I really wanted to experience, the freedom that other parts of the world experienced.”
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.
Linda got a full-time job cleaning houses and enrolled at San Francisco Community College.
“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.”
Linda soon became enamored with windsurfers she’d seen gliding across the choppy waters of the Bay. They looked so happy. So free.
She joined the Cal Sailing Club and, while teaching herself how to sail, overheard a few guys speaking Czech with each other.
“We realized we were all going through the same things, trying to learn the language, fit in and learn the culture,” she said.
One of the guys was Vlad Moroz. The two became fast friends and stayed friends for a long time before eventually deciding to date. They fell in love, got married, and had one child, Daniela.
Linda went on to get a sociology degree from the University of San Francisco, then put herself through law school, became a lawyer and now works as a hearing officer for the City of Oakland.
All the while, windsurfing was a constant presence in their lives.
“We were not good at it at the beginning, but we loved it,” she said. “We became quite good over the years.”
By the time Daniela was 10 and ready to learn the sport, kitesurfing was becoming more popular.
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.
Kitesurfing offered a new challenge, as surfers strap their feet to the board, then put themselves in a harness connected to a large kite some 100 feet away, and use an attached handle to steer. The kite allows for more power and speed, creating a wild ride with a much steeper learning curve.
Daniela began taking lessons with former pro racer Sandy Parker at Sherman Island.
Parker quickly learned Daniela was a prodigy. She could retain information and mimic her instructor with near-perfect accuracy. Show her how to do it once and she got it.
“She was like that with any sport she tried growing up,” Linda said.
Said Parker, “She was just more mature. She listened really well. It’s all about being ready. She just happened to be ready at a young age.”
At 13, three years after learning the sport, Daniela went to Mexico for a race on the Hydrofoil Pro Tour. She got second place.
When she returned to racing in San Francisco, she was beating everybody, including the men.
“I remember some of the older racers saying, ‘I can’t wait till she’s in high school so I don’t have to come home and say I got beat by a middle schooler,’” Parker said.
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.
That grew increasingly difficult when Daniela turned 15 and won another professional event. Other racers were suggesting she try competing at the 2016 World Championships in China.
Her parents packed their bags for a trip across the Pacific Ocean.
Much to their surprise, Daniela won.
“At 15 years old,” Linda said. “Our whole world changed after that.”
She returned to the United States and enrolled at Campolindo High School in Moraga. She swam competitively, loved her friends, focused on school and kept her kiteboard racing to the weekends.
During high school, she traveled to 18 countries and won every event she competed in, including four consecutive world championships.
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.
But with the pressure of Olympic trials delivering a jam-packed racing schedule that left her little room to have life outside of kitesurfing, Daniela was losing her love of the sport.
She began to dread training. She woke up in the morning and cried. She didn’t want to put her wetsuit on. Two days before the 2023 World Championships, she called her coach and said she couldn’t go in the water anymore.
She pushed herself to compete in the 2023 World Championships, which she failed to win for the first time in her career, but she did well enough to qualify the United States for the Olympics.
Desperate for reprieve, Daniela made the hardest choice of her career: she was stepping away from the sport. For six months, she barely surfed. She started swimming and playing tennis again. She picked up golf and pickleball. Anything that would let her compete with more joy and less pressure.
When she finally returned to the water earlier this year, Moroz felt back at home.
“I’m in a really good place,” she said.
She moved to France in May and has been training in the waters of Marseille, where the Olympic competitions begin July 28.
“I think she is so much happier now,” Linda said. “I feel like she is back where she should be.”
When Daniela takes the water with her nation’s colors on her back this July, she’ll be hoping for big winds and chaotic conditions that mimic her early days sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge.
“If you can kite Crissy Field, everywhere else is easy,” Parker said. “I really hope for strong conditions.”
If Daniela makes it to the podium in Paris and hears the national anthem, she’ll be thinking about her parents, how they sacrificed everything to move to the United States and give their daughter a chance at a childhood they never had.
“Obviously I’m going to represent myself and my country,” Daniela said. “But it’s for my parents too.”