Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Women’s surfing continued to evolve in ways that seemed to veer in and out of what was taking place in the sport at large. During the mid- and late-1990s, women's surfing was both dressed up and weighted down by Roxy Girl cuteness and the high-wattage glamour of four-time world champ Lisa Andersen. This was about to change. In the first decade of the new century, as other top women surfers came to prominence, and as the fashion imperative began to wane, the female presence became more nuanced and diverse—and as the process continued, the sport inched closer to a better version of itself.

Lisa Andersen quit the tour halfway through the 1998 season, a few months after winning her fourth straight world championship. She was exhausted, her lower back was chronically sore, and her daughter was ready to start kindergarten. For a while, it looked as if Andersen’s retirement would open up a Slater-like “who’s next?” void in the women’s division. It didn’t happen. Layne Beachley, a cheerful, driven, glam-free regularfooter from Sydney’s Dee Why Beach, matched Andersen’s four straight championships (beginning in 1998), extended the run to six, came up short for two years, then stormed back in 2006 to win a seventh and final title. Nobody could touch Beachley for range—and that included former champ Margo Oberg. She was quick and nimble in beachbreak waves and fearless on the North Shore. In 2001, while tow surfing with boyfriend Ken Bradshaw at Outside Log Cabins, Beachley became the first woman to crack the 30-foot mark.

The Beachley-Andersen comparisons were inevitable. The new champion was a classic overachiever who trained constantly. She was also friendly and foul-mouthed, witty, open and accessible. Unless you happened to be in her crosshairs during a heat, Beachley made the whole show more enjoyable.

Yet Andersen, even during Beachley’s long run at the top of the ratings, remained the era’s defining female surfer. She had the greater pure gift for riding waves. Surfing came naturally to Andersen, while Beachley had to work for it. But star power was the real difference. Andersen was cool and enigmatic and a known surf-world femme fatale. She played the sex angle. For a 1998 

 magazine portrait (similar to a 1980 shot of Jericho Poppler), she lounged in a bubble bath, one glistening leg resting on the edge of the tub, a coy smile playing across her face, and a bottle of champagne within arm’s reach. In homage to her big-wave gnarliness, Beachley was nicknamed “the Beast,” and for 

 big 1998 portrait shoot, she was photographed in the gym, drenched in sweat, wearing a men’s tank top and boxing gloves. It was a telling moment. Women’s professional surfing was at that point still firmly attached to fashion (“Skin Deep: Do You Look as Good as You Surf?” was the title of a 1999 

 cover story), and Andersen wasn’t just a title-holder, but the face of Roxy, the sport’s most fashionable surfwear brand. Beachley was a magnificent champion, and Billabong, her primary sponsor, did right to promote her as such—just as they did for team riders Mark Occhilupo and Andy Irons. But she was an athlete, where Andresen had been—and still was even in retirement—an icon.

Peru’s Sofia Mulanovich, the daughter of a Lima fish factory worker, took the 2004 world championship and helped change her entire country’s view of the sport. Surfing in Peru had long been an aristocratic boys-only club. Demographic change had already begun filtering into Latin America’s beaches and lineups, but Mulanovich—compact and sloe-eyed, with a low, fast, tightly-coiled wave-riding style—greatly accelerated the process. By the late 2000s, roughly half of Peru’s surfers were from the expanding middle class, and among this new generation there was a small but fast-growing number of females.

When the 2005 women’s world championship went to Chelsea Georgeson of Tweed Head, New South Wales, the message was simpler—Aussie women were becoming as dominate at the professional level as their male counterparts.

Meanwhile, Rochelle Ballard and Keala Kennelly, a pair of firewalking 

-Hawaiians, arguably had more effect on women’s surfing than any of the post-Andersen champions. Both had long world tour careers: neither won a title, but Kennelly was runner-up to Beachley in the 2003, and Ballard was runner-up to Mulanovich in 2004. Their reputations, in any event, had less to do with competition results and more with their pioneering work in hollow waves.

As of the mid-1990s, most women surfers, pros included, avoided the tube altogether. Those who tried didn’t ride it well. Some believed it was a matter of physiology—that women lacked the necessary leg strength, or they crouched differently than men. It didn’t help, as one surf journalist put it, that hollow surf in general is “fiercely contested, and in a dog-eat-dog lineup female surfers will always get axed by males.”

Ballard and Kennelly learned to surf in Kauai, home to Hawaii’s thickest, hollowest, least-crowded breaks. They were comfortable riding over shallow reefs, and learned early that getting bounced was part of the game. By the time they turned pro, both surfers had a growing collection of scars across their feet, ankles, knees, and elbows. Of the two, Ballard was the better tuberiding technician, ready to ad-lib trajectory changes as needed, and showy enough that she might glide beneath the canopy in a full standup display—the first woman to do so.

Kennelly, by comparison, was a slugger. Ballard took plenty of chances with her surfing, but Kennelly was borderline masochistic, throwing herself into one imploding dead-end tube after another. She also powered through the biggest barrels any woman had ever ridden up to that point. Kennelly was a four-time winner of the Teahupoo contest, and in 2005 she surprised nobody by becoming the first woman to tow surf there—at one point gunning her bright pink board through the middle of a full-blown 18'-by-18' reef-smasher.

Both helped to broaden the image of the female surfer. Ballard, freckled and moon-faced, with short wash-and-go hair—a board-riding “Smurfette,” as described by a friend—was the tomboy antidote to the Roxy Girl. She was cute but low-glam, and perpetually hardcore, and the sport loved her for it: Ballard won the SURFER Poll Awards three times running, from 2000 to 2002. Kennelly, a rave club DJ with spiky bleach-white hair, told surf journalist Matt George that “it took a woman to finally make a woman out of me,” and later became one of the first gay pro surfers to come out. Like Ballard, she reaped nothing but appreciation for being true to herself and picked up two runner-up SURFER Poll finishes. “Fans really do see themselves in their icons,” the magazine pointed out, adding that Kennelly’s high rank proved that surfers were “a lot more open-minded” than they’d been given credit for.

Indeed, surf-world homophobia, like sexism, seemed to be in retreat. A handful of ex-pro tour women were also out of the closet, and in 2007 MTV aired a Los Angeles-based reality series called 

, about a group of lesbian surfers. One year later, a former world tour backbencher named Matt Branson posed for the cover of 

magazine as a well-tattooed, pierced, head-shaved, openly gay man—the first male pro to come out.

If none of the 21st-century female surfers remade the sport to the same degree Lisa Andersen did in the 1990s, it didn’t matter. In the mid- and late-'00s, as Stephanie Gilmore of Australia and Carissa Moore of Hawaii came to the fore, it was obvious that the whole enterprise was ready to simply reward wave-riding excellence for its own sake. Sexism and inequality were by no means vanquished. But the burdon for Gilmore and Moore, and the women pros who followed, was lighter. In 2019, the world tour began award female pros the same prizemoney as male pros—surfing thus became the first American-based global sports league to offer gender pay equality.

Meanwhile, as the female surfing population increased during the 2000s, the skill-level distribution changed as well, with thousands of women each year riding their way up and out of the beginner breaks. Women’s gear fit better—wetsuits in particular—and there was a lot more of it. The fashion angle was toned down. Without making a fuss, Quiksilver brought the Roxy Girl campaign to an end. The little-girl pinks and blues that had colored women’s surfing in the 1990s would never completely disappear, but things were looking more adult at the pro level, where Gilmore—a radiant and relaxed five-foot-ten, 150-pound lioness of a surfer, all power and fluency—often used plain white boards and black wetsuits.

, and the rest of the women’s surf magazines died off one by one over the course of the new century’s first decade, and even this represented a form of progress. Most women surfers didn’t want to be partitioned off from the guys. Better to shoot for equal time throughout the near and far reaches of surf media. Moore wanted, and got, the cover of SURFER. And hot young Aussie rookie Sally Fitzgibbons was on the back cover, in the new all-surfing Roxy campaign, slashing off the top.

There was a small but noteworthy change in semantics, too. You still heard, pretty regularly, all the gender-signifying adjectives that could be tacked onto “surfer”—“woman,” “girl,” chick,” and the rest. But usage was no longer obligatory. Numbers brought acceptance, which in turn brought a form of nondifferentiation. The curvier ones with the chipped nail polish and tied-back hair—they were just surfers now.

Stephanie Gilmore was a radiant and relaxed five-foot-ten, 150-pound lioness of a surfer, all power and fluency.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

The Beast and Beyond

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