Carissa Moore

BACK ON BOARD FOR THE BIG TIME

As four-time world champion surfer Carissa Moore has discovered, the quest for greatness sometimes begins with a journey to figure out who you really are

Words JEN SEE Photography TREVOR PIKHART

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2019, Carissa Moore made an announcement that shook the surfing world. Via Instagram, she explained in a video message that she’d decided to take a year off from the World Surf League (WSL) Championship Tour. “This is something that I have given a lot of thought,” said the pro surfer from Hawaii. The post came only three weeks after she won the championship for the fourth time. Only five female surfers before her have ever achieved this feat. Being interviewed right after taking the trophy, she seemed overwhelmed and visibly touched. “This has not only been a year of work but three years of growing and learning,” she said. “It’s been a journey.”

Why would a top athlete who just scored what’s arguably the most important victory of their career decide to take a break? Why not trying to sustain the momentum and enter the next season full of self-confidence?

It seemed that Moore had figured out that balance is the key to her long-term success. Balance that she planned to improve in a year of just being Carissa. “I have dedicated the last ten years of my life competing at the highest level and want to continue to do that well into my thirties,” she said in the Instagram video. “This break is a press-refresh so that I can come back to the tour happier and more excited than ever in 2021.”

This is the story of how Carissa Moore set out to find herself, and how she turned this past year into a personal victory.

First steps

Born in Honolulu, Moore learned to surf at Queen’s Waikiki Beach when she was four years old. Her father, Chris, who competed in open-water swimming, wanted to share his love for the ocean with his daughter, so he taught her to surf. Moore believes that her father wanted to strengthen the bond between them. “He wanted to find a way to keep me home,” she says. “If I fell in love with the ocean, I wouldn’t move very far.”

It would be easy to assemble snapshots of an idyllic childhood. She surfed in the clear waters of Waikiki next to the Diamondhead volcano, where people have surfed for centuries. Surfing history infused Moore’s childhood.

But the truth is it wasn’t always an idyllic childhood. When Moore was 10 years old, her parents got divorced. “I didn’t surf when I was with my mom,” she says. “Just on my dad’s days.” She bounced between her parents until her senior year in high school.

Surfing brought Moore closer to her dad, who drove her to the beach before and after school. When she was about 12, surfing switched from being a fun afterschool activity to a competitive passion. “I remember having a conversation with my dad on a car ride home from the beach,” she says, recalling being asked how far she wanted to go with surfing. “I told him, ‘I want to be the best in the world.’”

Moore was a precocious talent from the start. “We saw her as the next Kelly Slater when she was 12 years old,” says seven-time world champion Stephanie Gilmore. As a teenager, Moore travelled to contests around the world. By the time she’d turned 17, Moore had reached the Championship Tour, an elite selection of the top 17 female surfers. During her first year on the tour in 2010, Moore won two events and finished the season ranked third overall.

The following year Moore stormed to her first world title. She opened the 2011 season with a win at Snapper Rocks, a righthand point break on Australia’s Gold Coast. By year’s end, she’d won three of the tour’s seven events. With her world title secured, Moore accepted wildcard invitations to compete with the men at Haleiwa and Sunset Beach on Oahu’s North Shore. She was the first woman to compete in a prestigious Triple Crown event.

Moore, who won her fourth world championship in 2019, is hardly afraid to address her journey to get back on top and find herself

Under pressure

As she rocketed up the rankings, Moore struggled to navigate life outside of surfing. The shape of her body changed very quickly – unpredictably, it seemed to her. She was trying to finish high school and enjoy a normal social life, but her competitive career took up an ever larger part of her life. She missed parties with her friends and her high school prom. While she loved surfing, she felt uneasy about its demands and uncertain about how to strike a healthy balance.

With the various stresses of her life and career escalating, the relationship between Moore and her mother, Carol Moore, deteriorated. They were frequently at odds, and Carissa recalls feeling overwhelmed. “And just feeling like you want that acceptance from your mom and that love from your mom, but you guys are on two opposite ends of the spectrum,” she says.

Things felt out of control, and her changing body became the focal point of her anxiety. She felt a lot of pressure to excel in her sport and unmoored in her life out of the water, despite the support from her father. Surfing’s culture imposed its own set of pressures. “Look at the surf industry at that point in time,” she says. “They were like, ‘Hey if you gain too much weight, you’re not going to have sponsors, and if your boobs are too big, your surfing is going to be off.’” Like many elite athletes, Moore is intensely selfcritical and demands perfection in a way that made it difficult to shut out all of the criticism.

Food became the one thing Moore felt she could control. She fell into an unhealthy cycle of overeating, starving herself and overtraining. “No one really understood why I was gaining weight, because I wasn’t really truthful about it,” she says. She’d binge on food, feel guilty and then try to deprive herself. Hurtful comments about her appearance followed her on the internet. No matter how beautifully she surfed, Moore feared that she couldn’t succeed if she wasn’t thin.

As she claimed her first world title, she struggled with her weight and eating disorders behind the scenes. “I was still working very hard,” she says. “But because people were judging a book by its cover, they didn’t see all that training behind the layers of fat that were there because of a lot of different things that nobody understood.” Though Moore says she was heavier than she’d ever been before (or has been since), she still won a world title.

Surfing magic

Time has helped Moore move past the stresses that drove her to obsess about her weight. She’s come to understand that her strong body gives her surfing its distinctive style. Thinking back to her first World Championship victory in 2011 gives Moore some perspective. “Hey, this body has won me several world titles,” says the 28-year-old with a laugh.

An unpredictable dynamism makes Moore’s surfing magic. “She’s coiled up and then, when the right section comes, she’ll just open up her whole body, her whole strength and power,” says Gilmore. But Moore is also one of the few women who can consistently complete the aerials that now define high-performance surfing. While Kelly Slater’s

“If you think too much about the future, you can get anxiety”

vertical turns set his generation’s standard, younger surfers such as two-time world champion John John Florence have taken surfing to the air. Moore isn’t far behind. “She’s willing to risk a good score on a wave, because she wants to do an air and prove to everyone that girls can do this as well,” says Gilmore. The same power that Moore harnesses for her big arcing carves launches her into the air, where she spins above the water.

Moore achieves her best results when waves are good and tactical gamesmanship is minimal. She isn’t a fan of safety surfing, the tactic of performing just well enough to win a heat. “Just doing the same stuff – I don’t want to do that,” says Moore. She often feels torn between her desire to land big manoeuvres and the need to win heats that add up to titles.

As Moore has pushed her own boundaries and expanded her repertoire of turns and airs, the sport has grown around her. The level of women’s surfing is far higher than when Moore’s career began, with the likes of Gilmore, two-time world champion Tyler Wright and Caroline Marks all performing well. “The rivalries aren’t just the two or three girls at the top,” says Gilmore.

Time for balance

“A lot of people look at pro surfing and it can seem glamorous, and it is in a lot of ways. But there is a lot of blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice that goes into it,” said Moore in an interview with The Lineup podcast in 2019. “It’s a lot, mentally and physically. These girls are competing at the highest level, they give their best every day.”

The constant level of stress and the constant pressure to compete led Moore to make a decision a year and a half ago at the surfing event in Jeffreys Bay in South Africa, a moment she considers the lowest point in her career. “I lost in the event, I was really unhappy with everything I was doing, and it was this turning point where I asked myself: What am I doing? This isn’t why I started surfing. Something’s got to change,” she remembers.

As a result, she promised herself to take a time out after the 2019 season. When it became clear in early 2020 that the rest of the world would join her in taking a break due to the pandemic, Moore tried to see the positives. “It would have been really tough for me to watch the tour happen and not be a part of it,” she says. “I knew that was going to be something I was going to struggle with. Not to have it happen allowed me to really just relax.”

In Moore’s case, that meant spending more time with her husband Luke Untermann, who she married in 2017, doing some skateboarding and bingewatching Peaky Blinders. But it was also a challenge for her to sit still. “I enjoyed my break, but I also came to a new appreciation for living the competitive lifestyle and being an athlete,” she says.

This time, though, her goal is to re-enter competition with a new mindset. She works with a mental coach, is quick to highlight the importance of mental health and sounds excited when she talks about strategies that she’s been practising recently. “I try to focus on being present,” she says. “If you think too much about the future, you can get anxiety. The stress can also come from the past, when you overthink things that have already happened. But the present, that’s what you can control, it’s when you should give everything that you have.”

This more holistic approach seems to work for her, and she scored second place at the first event of the 2021 WSL season in Hawaii. “There was expected nerves and a little bit of cobwebs,” she says. “But the challenge of performing under pressure, I enjoy that.” The successful comeback has also boosted her confidence ahead of the big competition getting under way in Tokyo. “When I was a little girl, I never dreamed of competing in the Olympics. I’m just excited to be a part of the movement. To have my name tossed into the conversation is really special.”

Moore considers the past year one of the most important of her career, despite or perhaps because she didn’t compete in any mayor tournaments. It’s the mental work that’s made her a calmer, more mature and happier person, she says. It’s also equipped her for the next season and ones to come. “I’d love to win another world title, sure. But more importantly, I would like to perform at a level that is timeless, and I want to continue to help the progression of women’s surfing,”she explains. “Basically, I want this to be the start of my second chapter.”