BACKGROUND
I have never had any plans in life. I am not that type of person, I just go with the flow. I started windsurfing relatively late compared to a lot of the racers on tour. Guys like Ross Williams and Gonzalo Costa Hoevel both started much earlier, I did not windsurf until I was fourteen. I am thirty-nine now, so I have been sailing for twenty-five years. My parents live on a cliff which is about half an hour away from the nearest beach at home. Mum was a headmaster of one of the best music and art universities and high schools in Israel and later on became the head of culture in our city. She is now writing books and giving lectures and tours in Israel and around the world. Dad was self-employed and had a business of fixing car speedometers. They have a sea view of the Mediterranean but we could not access the water from the house, despite this we spent a lot of time in the water. Israel is a sunny, warm place so a perfect place for watersports.
COMPETITIVE NATURE
I was always into sport and very competitive at school. I loved sport and music. They were my two things in life when I was young. Any type of competition was appealing to me. Once I found windsurfing I was obsessed and all my other sports were put on the back burner! When I learned, windsurfing was quite popular in Israel, especially clubs that were established with Olympic windsurfing. My brother ‘Ori’ brought this massive windsurf board to the beach and we tried it and both fell in love with the concept straight away. A lot of kids were surfing in my local area and I was interested to learn to surf but we checked the surfing guys and they were only up on the board for one or two seconds and then they were back down. We calculated that the longest rides for the surfers were about 10 seconds on the waves. We then went to another spot where there were guys wave sailing and they were going in and out riding waves and the action just never stopped. That looked way more fun to me so we decided to learn to windsurf. I followed my bigger brother and we started out on a lake. That was it for me. After the first metre I was hooked. At the time I was really into all sports, tennis, soccer, and ping pong, anything to do with a ball. I was top in all sports at school in my year. I was always the group leader and captain of the teams in any sport but there was nothing close to windsurfing after my first go on the board.
