For years, I’ve been listening to all the pros on podcasts talk about how Kai Lenny and Alex Aguera invented modern SUP foiling. It is certainly true that Kai’s April-2016 video was critical in kickstarting the modern excitement about foiling, though I honestly think it has more to do with the foils being available to purchase. I know that as soon as I saw that video, and especially the later one connecting a wave two for one in July-2016 hooked me forever. I called Alex and got him to sell me an original blue Maliko foil - one of the first sold to California. And then promptly upgraded to the Kai and then the IWA the very moment they came out.
It was Bruno André behind it and I figured out he had shaped some of my all time favorite windsurf boards for AHD. I called around to try and get a foiling board all the way back then, but wasn’t successful getting in touch with the right people. I never forgot about it, but to be honest I didn’t chase it as hard as I should have.
And now, finally 15 years later, I am riding the foils that came from what I consider the ORIGINAL creator of modern surf foiling - what has now become AFS foils. Proof they came first is right here with a photo from 2010.
I love the history of this amazing sport, and would love to gather in this thread more of the really early history and stories, whether on video or not.
Credit should be given where its due. You could buy the crossover windsurf/sup AHD sealion wings with a foilbox in 2015 if you wanted to so through the trouble of getting it imported. I remember trying. The kicker is that the AFS-1 was a windsurf foil, and getting it going with a sup paddle would be a challenge for any foiler even with a decade of experience.
The innovation that Alex had with Gofoil was that he developed a wing that was user friendly enough to make sup and prone foil-surfing possible and then gave it to one of the most skilled multi-sport watermen of a generation to show the world how to do it. hydrofoils have been around for a long time. The breakthrough innovations that brought it to the masses were the usability of the gofoil and the skill sets developed to ride it.
Kinda like how the Wright brothers were hardly the first to get airborne but still remembered as the fathers of flight because their refinements were the ones that opened the door to modern flight.
It really was that. Look at how thin and flat the foils in those videos were. But that slow fat foil gave people the tools to learn and develop the skills and techniques we have today. I remember being aware enough of kite and windsurf foils to not be super shocked at the first sup and surf foiling videos, until I saw Kai pumping out to link a wave. That was the point I saw that we had a new sport on our hands.
wow! thanks for sharing that, I hadn’t seen it. Looks like a kite foil with a pretty high stall speed. Yeah, I agree with some of the other comments that one of the things that brought this more mainstream was larger/thicker foils that could go slower.
