Look! Gabriel Medina IS human! Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Gabriel Medina isn’t generally thought of as a foil guy. Like many of the world’s best, though, it’s well within his wheelhouse. A long time ago, Grant “Twiggy” Baker said he loved foiling because it makes him feel like a kook again, which is a feeling he enjoys.
Foiling is incredibly difficult. The people who make it look easy — people like Adam Bennetts, for instance — are wildly talented individuals who have put in the time.
“It took me a long time to learn,” Medina says in the video you see here. “But today I’m able to catch some waves. The fin of the foil is really big, so you have to be careful.”
The good thing about foiling (one of the good things) is that the waves don’t need to be all that great for surfing. Days that might be considered flat for a regular surfer are considered pretty ideal for a foiler. That’s because the foil uses the energy from under the water and pushes the rider up and forward.
“[The hydrofoil] works under the exact same principles as an airplane,” Collin Bangs, a production manager for the company Air Chair, explained. “You have two wings, one in the back and one in the front as a stabilizer, and you have high pressure and low pressure areas on the wing. And as it moves through the water, that creates lift just like with an airplane.”
It’s slightly refreshing to see Medina on a board looking unsure. It’s a testament to just how difficult foil surfing is — if Medina, one of the most talented surfers to ever set foot on a surfboard — has a hard time with it, you know it’s not an easy thing to do. Nice to see the guy look human for once, isn’t it?
