SAN JOSE, Calif. — Three months before she was set to compete in the first-ever Olympic kiteboarding event at this summer’s Paris Games, Daniela Moroz sat in her rented room in France, reflecting on how she got there.

Moroz, a 23-year-old Lafayette native who is a six-time world champion in the sport and a favorite to win the gold in August, thought about her immigrant parents.

In the early 1980s, they independently escaped former Czechoslovakia and started over in the Bay Area. They stumbled upon the Cal Sailing Club at Berkeley Marina, where they first fell in love with windsurfing, then, each other.

“They were the ones that got me into the sport,” Daniela said. “They left their lives and left everything behind to chase the American dream and completely started new lives when they came to America.

“For me, to be going to the Olympics now, it feels like a culmination of that American dream.”

Daniela’s mother, Linda, was 19 when she and some friends put their most valuable possessions into a backpack, told their families and friends they were going on vacation and then hopped on a bus to Yugoslavia.

They didn’t plan on returning home.

Tired of living under communist rule, Linda and her friends sought asylum in Yugoslavia, where they were soon transferred to an old military prison in Austria and held in a refugee camp for six months.

“Nobody knew if it would even work,” Linda said. “It was scary because you left with the feeling like you might never be able to go back once you leave. But there was just something that I really wanted to experience, the freedom that other parts of the world experienced.”

While in the refugee camp, she passed the time while learning English until she and her friends were put on a plane to San Francisco. There, they’d live in the house of one of her friend’s uncles.

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