Duotone Magazin No.01 2019

American and a teacher. 20 years ago she drove across South America on a dirt bike. She met Mikaili’s father Marcio, a Brazilian, and stayed. Together they run several hotels – and both are enthusiastic kiters. Jodi: ‘Ever since she was tiny, Mikaili was very, very sporty. She grew up on the beach and in the water, and she’s not afraid of anything. She surfed and rode the sand dunes on a motocross bike. By the age of four she was already galloping without a saddle on horseback, climbing the palm trees. Since Mika was five she’s been nagging us to let her go kiteboarding. But the sport we were familiar with used 2 line kites and we felt that was too dangerous. We said we would reconsider when she was ten or twelve. But as developments made the kites increasingly safe, we couldn’t keep saying no. At the age of eight, Mikaili learned to use a small 2.5 square metre kite with short lines in Preá. It’s worth mentioning that Preá is extremely windy, usually 30 knots, big waves, a challenging environment. But none of that bothered her. She learned so quickly and easily, it was incredible.’ Enthusiastic parents and the right environment – these seem to be the ingredients for building the foundations of a successful future in competitive kiting. But the initial spark came from outside: shortly after this Bruna Kajiya, a Brazilian freestyle pro-kiter, spent a while living in one of the pousadas belonging to Mikaili’s parents. Mikaili went kiting with her and Bruna taught her how to do her first S-bend. Mum Jodi: ‘Mika came back totally fired up and said: one day I’m going to compete against Bruna and beat her.’ Mikaili was nine years old at that point. After taking part in a local freestyle competition that same year she got a wildcard into the PKRA event in Barra Grande; her introduction to the competitive sport. She learned her craft on the junior team for a French kite manufacturer, collecting an array of junior titles. Her big breakthrough at Duotone came last year. Jodi: ‘Maybe she inherited some of our genes. Marcio was a theatre dancer and I was a competitive gymnast at the national level in the USA. Mika has an incredible talent for movement, an instinctive understanding of her body, exceptional coordination. You give her some advice and she can implement it straight away. It’s fantastic.’ Her coach Fabio confirms this: ‘Mikaili is a special talent, she stands out with her mentality – she can be really pushy on the water – and her physical attributes, she has a natural strength. Mika understands immediately how she can make tricks happen and how to correct mistakes. And she loves to win.’ This is evident in the fact that Mikaili doesn’t just enjoy success in her preferred freestyle discipline, but also in Airgames, where boardoffs and kiteloops contribute to the scoring. Tricks she specifically practised with Fabio for the event, because it’s another genre of kiting and requires a different repertoire. Not without some pride, her trainer Fabio declares: ‘She is better than ten-time world champion Gisela Pulido. Mikaili will dominate this sport for the next decade, she will be untouchable. And she can open the door as a role model for a whole new generation who will come to kiting in the next 5 to 10 years.’ An essential part of her preparation for this competitive career at the highest level has been the fact that Mikaili has been taught at home from a very young age, by teachers from the USA – specifically not by her mother, as Jodi is keen to emphasise. The family’s motivation to home-school had nothing to do with a potential sporting career, but was driven by a belief that the schools in the sand dunes of North East Brazil couldn’t offer the kind of education the parents wanted for their child. And now Mikaili is reaping the rewards from this freedom from the normal school day. At the age of twelve she received a grant from the Kiteboard World Class Academy, an approved private high school, where pupils travel the world and their education goes hand in hand with kiteboarding. In 2018 she took a semester off so she could take part in the competitive season, but this January she re-joined the current semester. Mum Jodi doesn’t appear to be the kind of over- involved parent who pushes her daughter to top performances, an all too common phenomenon with up-and-coming talent in competitive sport. And there’s no reason to doubt her when she said after Mikaili’s victory at the Airgames in Tarifa: ‘Mikaili loves it. I let her do her thing. Yes, she’s really good, she’s the best. But I have no expectations. I don’t want her to burn out. She needs to love what she’s doing. I was pushed too hard as a young gymnast, and it stopped being fun for me. She is too young and too talented to stop having fun. Life is so short, even when you’re only 14, you have to enjoy it.’ Mikaili is doing precisely that. Her smile says so. mikaili_sol “Mikaili will dominate this sport for the next decade, she will be untouchable.” “Ever since she was tiny, Mikaili was very, very sporty. She grew up on the beach and in the water, and she’s not afraid of anything.” T R U E T R U E 100 101 N E X T G E N E R A T I O N