Freight Trains just became a household name over the weekend. And for good reason. The surf world didn’t just get treated to highlights of your run-of-the-mill epic day on Maui – we vicariously lived through a historic moment thanks to social media and the hordes of clips Ma’alaea produced. The second part of that statement is largely what made the weekend so historic, because the last time Freight Trains did this, according to Kai Lenny, you’d still have to wait for the next month’s SURFER magazine to arrive in the mail before seeing the best moments.
“The last time this happened was 2005,” Lenny says. “I was 13 years old and it was 17 years ago now.”
This made the insane session at Freight Trains Lenny’s first ever, and likely the first-ever for most who were there. Even for those who might have caught the place on smaller days in past years, there certainly aren’t many people out there who had stories of a day this incredible before Code Red 2 came along.
Yes, the internet existed in 2005 but that was still all before Instagram or Twitter even existed. Facebook was in its infancy. And social media as we know it was far from spreading news of such rare sessions with the speed it does today. It’s hard to imagine the same instantaneous hype on a global scale for such a rare, special day.
“It’s the best it’s been in my lifetime, and I think everyone else’s,” he says. “That was a dream come true as a kid growing up on Maui. I really can’t believe that we scored it as hard as we did.”
