Israeli Olympic windsurfing champ blows into Bay Area

When he lounges on a couch in San Francisco, Gal Fridman looks like any other athletic 30-year-old decked out in casual attire befitting a tourist. Or perhaps, a rock climber.

When he's in Israel, he looks like a national hero.

"Mostly it's kids, or people who come with their kids or want a picture for their grandchild or for friends. But when I go to schools, some of those kids really come running," said Israel's first and only Olympic gold medal-winner.

"It's OK, because it's not too much. Mostly, I'm not going to places with a lot of cars and people. When you live on a kibbutz, you're in your environment, and everyone knows you already."

Prior to the 2004 Athens Games, Fridman was about as illustrious as any successful windsurfer. But after virtually the entire nation watched him execute a stunning come-from-behind victory to capture the gold on live television, he became well known beyond the confines of Kibbutz Sdot-Yam.

"In the Olympics, if all the nation is looking at one person for a gold medal, it isn't an easy situation. When they put the last race on live, it was mid-day in Israel, so a lot of businesses were closed and people gathered together to see it on the big screen," said Fridman, in the Bay Area last weekend for the RS:X Windsurfing Pacific Coast Championship at St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco, where he finished 13th out of 37 competitors.

Fridman's physique is as typical of a top-notch windsurfer as 4-foot-11 Willie Shoemaker's was of a world-class jockey. Fridman is 6-foot-2 with long arms and a noticeably lean build — extra weight is a detriment with only the wind to carry you along. He has dark, Semitic features and speaks English rapidly and quietly with a heavy Israeli accent.

And even though he has become a walking photo-op in his home country, life, he claims, hasn't changed that much. He's still training heavily on his kibbutz near Caesaria, still struggling to find more sponsors (windsurfing, he noted, is a hard sport to keep at if you don't hail from a wealthy family, which he doesn't) and still not on the level of Israel's soccer and basketball gods.

Most of his races aren't on television, and, to the uninitiated, the few that are can be a confusing muddle of sails meandering this way and that.

Like any good son, Fridman gave Israel's only gold medal to his parents, and it was international news when thieves stole it a few months back.

The brigands broke into his parents' home and made off with a safe containing money, jewelry and documents. They still have Fridman's bronze medal from the 1996 Atlanta Games, but, in the dark of night, they dropped the gold and some papers in a nearby forest.

Fridman plans on accumulating more hardware at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. He tends to plan his life in four-year increments, so he isn't sure if he'll take a shot at the 2012 Olympics in London — "How can you seriously say what you'll be doing in seven years? Four years is big enough."

In the meantime, he'll continue traveling around the world at a breakneck pace. His three-day stay in San Francisco left him only enough time to sleep, train and comment on the unseasonably cold weather; he had no plans to paint the town red or any other hue.

He'll soon travel to Brazil, South Africa, China and Australia, where he's "been like seven times already." On each continent, he's pleasantly surprised by the reaction he receives when he visits Jewish schools. At one in the Bronx he was greeted by large photos of himself exalting after capturing the gold and a crowd of thousands.

"That was a really big noise, there," he said with a laugh.

Still, the more he travels, the more he enjoys coming home.

"All around the world, Israel is still the best place for me."