Remember that bit in the 1997 action film ‘Face/Off’ where Nicolas Cage and John Travolta swap identities by slicing each other’s faces off with a hydrofoil board? Remember that bit? No? Well that’s probably because the film ‘Face/Off’ didn’t, more’s the pity, feature a single scene involving a hydrofoil.

Japanese surfer Yu Tonbi-Sumitomo, who we wish well, recently found out the painful way exactly how much damage a hydrofoil board can do. In a photograph uploaded to the big wave professional Jamie Mitchell’s Facebook page, the result of Sumitomo’s confrontation with a hydrofoil board was there for all the world to see. Mitchell did it to illustrate how dangerous the increasingly popular hydrofoils can be and to warn others of what can happen when it goes wrong. Kai Lenny recently went viral with his infinite hydrofoil surfing (see below).