There have been lower than 10 minutes left within the semifinal spherical of the women’s Olympic surfing event in August 2024, and US surfer Caroline Marks was two factors behind French athlete Johanne Defay when she noticed the nice wave coming and took it. Marks acquired barreled within the Teahupoʻo tube, then switched to turns, incomes a 7.00 – the precise rating she wanted to advance. She matched Defay’s 12.17 factors and gained with the warmth’s highest-scoring wave.
Marks had scored greater with different waves that week, like her first-round experience with a late begin, which had her air dropping, extending, and compressing as she landed, incomes her a 9.43. Although earlier rides had delivered photographs of aggressive momentum, the semifinal win felt huge: it took her someplace she had by no means been. Marks’s first Olympic run at Tsurigasaki Seaside in 2021 ended with a fourth-place end in the course of the bronze medal match. After defeating Defay, she knew she’d be going house with a minimum of a silver medal. “In Tokyo, I got here up one brief, in order that felt so good,” Marks tells PS. “I truly acquired actually emotional after I gained. It was a very shut warmth.”
Later that day, Marks got here out of the finals towards Brazil’s Tatiana Weston-Webb with Olympic gold. Per week out, it’s nonetheless sinking in. “There’s been lots of emotion,” Marks says. “Plenty of good emotion, lots of happy tears, lots of adrenaline. A really proud feeling, a really surreal feeling.”
For Marks, that delight swells when she remembers the place she gained, as properly: She took gold at Teahupoʻo, a village on Tahiti’s coast. “Teahupoʻo” roughly interprets to “wall of skulls,” and it’s house to one of many heaviest waves on the planet. The high-volume, left-breaking Tahitian wave bends into stunning and harrowing barrels. To take a clear line out of that wave is among the final abilities in browsing, and it’s a rush that’s tough to explain, Marks says.
“Profitable in a wave of actually huge consequence and a wave like that, it simply felt that significantly better,” Marks says. “That’s an space of my browsing that I put lots of work into, that I wish to get higher at. The truth that I used to be in a position to win a gold medal underneath all that strain, in correct waves – it makes it really feel that significantly better, for positive. Actual proud second.”
It’s a historic second, too, for Marks’s area. Till 2022, ladies had been strangers to the feeling of profitable at Teahupoʻo for the higher a part of 20 years. Although Teahupoʻo tube driving is a rush, it comes with dangers: the wave pummels a shallow reef with sudden and singular ferocity. As a result of that hazard, the World Surf League pulled Teahupoʻo as one of many venues for its World Championship Tour in 2006 – however just for the ladies. Then, in 2020 – the identical yr the Worldwide Olympic Committee approved Teahupoʻo as the following Olympic browsing website – the World Surf League announced plans to convey the ladies’s occasion again to the Tahitian reef break.
In 2022, the WSL hosted ladies on the Outerknown Tahiti Professional (now often known as the Shiseido Tahiti Professional, offered by Outerknown) for the primary time in 16 years. It wasn’t the league’s solely transfer to place ladies on the planet’s heaviest waves that yr. The WSL additionally hosted the primary ladies’s Billabong Pro Pipeline and launched a fully-integrated world tour, which enabled the ladies to surf in any respect the identical spots as the boys all through the annual collection.
“Rising up, we didn’t have Teahupoʻo and Pipeline and all these waves on the schedule,” Marks says. “This can be a very new factor. We’ve solely been going to Teahupoʻo for 3 years on the tour. For some women, it was perhaps their first time ever being there, this yr on the Olympics.”
Although the Olympics at Teahupoʻo are over, the surf spot is right here to remain as a cease for girls on the World Championship Tour, which suggests Marks’s era of aggressive browsing may have the possibility – and the career-advancing incentive – to push themselves and the development of their sport there. For Marks, what’s to return can be simply as thrilling because the occasions of this summer season.
Marks surfed Teahupoʻo for the primary time in February 2020, her 18th birthday month and a month earlier than the World Well being Group declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In a video Marks shared on Instagram, she emerges from the tube in gradual movement with a smile and a dazzled shrug, and hops off her board with added pop. Right here, Marks is attending to know the distinctive wave. “It’s a spot that takes lots of expertise, lots of time,” she says. “You’re all the time going to be studying.”
Layne Beachley, a seven-time world champion surfer from Australia, agrees. It’s important to learn to place your self and decide up Teahupoʻo’s turbo-charged tubes excellent – to get deep within the barrel and outpace the whitewash that may swallow you complete, throw you over the falls, and pin you again onto the reef, Beachley says. Studying to take action on a giant day, with a cool head, takes time. “The profile of the wave because it breaks – it adjustments directionally,” she says. “It wraps a bit. It’s just like the wave faces you as you are taking off, as if to say, ‘How fucking dedicated are you?’”
When the ladies misplaced Teahupoʻo as a venue, they misplaced time on tour with the wave. Any extra hours and sources they’d put into browsing in Tahiti and studying Teahupoʻo could be their very own. It was “full and utter bullshit” to drag the occasion, Beachley says, given what her era had carried out with it. Beachley, Rochelle Ballard, Keala Kennelly, and different professional surfers charged waves competitively at Teahupoʻo for practically a decade earlier than the WSL took it off the world tour.
“Girls’s browsing was simply beginning to thrive in circumstances of consequence,” Beachley says. “Impulsively, these waves had been being taken away from us, which was bitterly disappointing.”
Because the ladies’s return to Teahupoʻo in 2022, Marks’s era has introduced vindication. In 2022, Hawaiian surfer Moana Jones Wong gained the primary ladies’s Pipe Professional as a wildcard, displaying her mastery of the North Shore wave she grew up browsing. Tahitian surfer Vahiné Fierro did the identical at Teahupoʻo in Could 2024, profitable the Tahiti Professional in massive swell and proving what ladies can do with sufficient time with a heavy wave. On the similar occasion, Brazilian-American surfer Tatiana Weston-Webb scored the primary 10 of the venue’s new period.
Marks won the Tahiti Professional in 2023. To psych herself as much as surf waves at spots like Teahupoʻo and Pipeline, she depends on her help crew and summons self perception, which grows the extra Marks will get on the market. “Typically, there are specific days the place it seems to be actually scary, and it seems to be actually intimidating, and also you sort of simply should be thrown on the market and present your self, ‘Whoa, I can do it,’” Marks says. “I believe that’s what we’ve all discovered, all of us women: you will have Teahupoʻo on the schedule. ‘Wow, that is so gnarly. That is gonna be loopy.’ However then, hastily, you go on the market and also you do it, you present your self you are able to do it, and it simply retains ratcheting up. It’s gonna be actually cool to see the place it goes in a few years.”
For now, Marks is absorbing what appears like the largest second in her profession up to now. She’ll have extra possibilities to get barreled, and to realize different objectives: making a cool surf movie, competing in LA in 2028, and profitable one other world title after claiming her first in 2023. “And placing a constructive mild on browsing, exhibiting the following era how superior it’s,” Marks says.
Suzie Hodges is a contract author drawn to tales in science, environmental conservation, and out of doors sports activities. Along with POPSUGAR, her work has appeared in Smithsonian journal, Blue Ridge Open air, and The Day by day Beast. Beforehand, she was a author at an environmental conservation group known as Uncommon and on the School of Engineering at Virginia Tech.