“I feel like I’m floating on a cloud,” says Caroline Marks, filling my screen with warmth and breezy joy as she attempts to describe the euphoria of winning her first world surfing title. “I can’t even put it into a single word. It’s just something that I’ve worked toward every single day in my life since I started.”
It’s been three days since the easygoing American prodigy ripped and carved her way to the sport’s biggest prize, showing the power, form and preternatural instinct that have become her hallmarks in sweeping the best-of-three championship series against Carissa Moore at the World Surf League Finals at Lower Trestles, the revered break near the San Diego-Orange county border that has become so central to her journey.
It’s one thing to reach the pinnacle of your chosen profession at 21 years old. It’s another to do it against an all-time great whose posters adorned the walls of your childhood bedroom. Moore, the five-time world champion and Olympic gold medalist who went off as the favorite after an electric season that included titles at Pipe, Margaret River and the Surf Ranch, was unable to match Marks’ point-gobbling symphony of seamlessly linked backside turns along six-foot overhead walls fueled by Hurricane Jova. “I had a good vibe going,” Marks explains. “I was just in a really amazing head space and felt like I had a good connection with the ocean and was really confident on what waves to select and things were just flowing. You couldn’t have scripted the day better for me.”
When time was called, the judges’ scores handed down and Marks officially crowned the youngest world champion since Moore won her second title in 2015, the celebration was on. Six years after breaking in as the youngest ever surfer to qualify for professional surfing’s elite Championship Tour as a precocious 15-year-old, Marks had reached the mountaintop.
“All I’ve been able to think about since I’ve started surfing is reaching this goal,” says the goofy-footed Florida native, one of only three women on the tour to surf leading with her right foot and the first to win a world title since Australia’s Chelsea Georgeson in 2005. “I have so many heroes. I watched Carissa and Stephanie Gilmore win titles growing up and I was just like, ‘I want to do that one day.’”
Talking to me on Zoom from her San Clemente home, only a five-minute bike ride from the Trestles break where her dream became a reality, Marks admits the triumph was that much sweeter after coming so close but falling short at Honolua Bay in 2019 – four years and a lifetime ago – after a neck-and-neck world title race with Moore had come down to the final day. “I was kind of oblivious to how serious the situation was,” she says. “I don’t know if I was ready for it then. I knew it could have happened and I always believed in myself it was going to happen one day, but I think it happened exactly when it was supposed to. I really believe that it was really meant to be this year.”
At the same time Marks was chaired up by friends and family along San Onofre state beach, another sporting prodigy on the other side of the country fulfilled her own long-held promise when the American tennis star Coco Gauff came from behind to win her first grand slam title at the US Open. Although they’ve never met, the parallel trajectories of the fellow Floridians are uncanny. Gauff shot to global prominence after she defeated Venus Williams at Wimbledon when she was 15 years old – the same age as Marks when she became the youngest surfer to reach the Championship Tour. In the days leading up to the final, Gauff had spoken at length about the weight of expectations that she experienced from a young age, even admitting her fears that winning a major beyond a certain point would no longer feel like an achievement.
There aren’t many athletes who could identify with those unique pressures – a scrutiny only compounded by the harsh glare of social media – but Marks is one of them. “I totally can relate to that,” she says. “When you become super good and super successful at a young age and the expectations are very high, it feels like if you don’t live up to that expectation, anything less than that is a failure in a way, which is so crazy to say. So I feel like for me, I did have that pressure of everyone always saying, ‘You’re going to be world champion, you’re going to be world champion’, and then getting so close at 17 and then not having it happen, and then the next year in 2020, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s my year, it’s my year’, and then Covid happened.
“It does add that pressure, the feeling that if you don’t accomplish that, then you’re kind of letting people down. And I’m a people pleaser, so I don’t like that.”
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The third of six children, Marks grew up in Melbourne Beach, Florida, about 80 miles south-east of Orlando. A family backyard tricked out with dirt ramps, half-pipe, trampoline and swimming pool kept everyone busy and inspired her early love of sports, but it was the surf break across the street that soon drew her two older brothers toward the ocean.
Marks’ first passion was barrel racing, but it wasn’t long before she left behind competitive rodeo to take up surfing with the goal of winning her siblings’ approval. “I started surfing mainly because of my brothers and my dad,” she says. “My brother started competing and we lived right across the street from the beach. It was mostly just to be my brothers and just to kind of impress them.”
She was 11 when she first realized that her hobby might be something more. After entering the prestigious Under-12 Surfing America Prime competition at Trestles on something of a lark, Marks bested a stacked field of juniors from all over the country to come away with America’s top amateur title.
“I pretty much did the event because my brother was in it,” she recalls. “I showed up to the beach that day and there were all these tents and people and sponsors, and I was just like, ‘Whoa, this is a lot.’ Then I ended up winning and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, if I can beat these girls that are really being talked about and really, really good, maybe I am pretty good at this.’ I just remember that winning feeling that was just so euphoric to me – and from there I just was like, I never ever, ever want to stop.”
Buoyed and grounded by her parents’ sane and unexploitative support of her talent, Marks’ climb through the ranks was rapid. After one full-time year on the WSL’s developmental circuit in 2017 and only three years after launching her competitive career, Marks made history as the youngest female to qualify for surfing’s top flight. That’s when the tight-knit family made the decision to relocate and take advantage of the year-round surf at Trestles, where Marks had already become the youngest ever surfer to compete in a tour event as a 13-year-old wildcard – and where the journey would one day come full circle.
“Trestles is amazing,” she says. “The best way I can explain it, it’s kind of like a liquid skate park. You can do anything you want on the wave. You can go left, you can go right, and it’s a long left and right point breaks. I was coming out here a lot with my family [while living in Florida], but I’d say I permanently moved here my first year on tour in 2018 and it’s been a great move. I love the community here. I love the waves here and I think it’s been really helpful for my surfing.”
While Marks did miss things about her life in Melbourne Beach, from her longtime friends to her go-to Publix order (chicken tender Pub Sub, natch), it did nothing to compromise her performance. She was named the WSL’s Rookie of the Year in 2018, then won her first two events the following season to place second overall to Moore after their season-ending showdown. But even that bump in the road came with the consolation of qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics, where she finished just off the podium in fourth as the youngest man or woman in the competition. What’s powered her throughout her whole dizzying rise, she says, is her passion for the sport.
“I genuinely love surfing so much and it just brings me so much joy and I think that’s part of the reason why I got so good,” she says. “And my parents when I was younger didn’t really push me that much. They pushed me, but they didn’t push me in an unhealthy way. They always were like, ‘Hey, we don’t even care what sport you do, we just want you to do something after school so you’re tired at the end of the day. We don’t want you going on your phone. We don’t want you playing video games.’
“I think just always having that was really special because surfing was always fun. They never pushed me to the point where it wasn’t fun for me anymore. It never felt like a job or anything, and I’m really, really grateful for that. I just think my pure joy for the sport is what sets me apart.”
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But just when it seemed the world title was the logical next step, the pandemic turned the sports world on its head. Then a step-back 2021 season that she calls a “weird year”. All of a sudden, Marks found herself in a mental and physical funk, weighed down by the onerous accumulation of commitments and expectations. After withdrawing before the second event of the 2022 campaign “to deal with some recurring medical and health issues”, Marks missed half of the season and failed to qualify for the WSL finals.
“I got to a place where I just wasn’t really having that much fun anymore,” Marks explains. “I just wasn’t that happy. And it’s weird because I’d never experienced that in my life ever up until that point. I was just really confused. I was like, ‘Why am I feeling this way? This is weird.’ And I just put so much pressure on myself that it just kind of spun me out.
“I guess what I learned was just what works for some people might not work for you. I also learned who I really want there in my corner and who I don’t. And I’ve got such an awesome support crew and I’m really, really lucky to have that.
“It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and I want to do this for as long as possible. What’s one year when you have your whole life ahead of you? You’re nothing without your health.”
Back on tour and more confident than ever, Marks’ world title earned her automatic qualification to represent the United States for a second time at the Olympics next summer, when the surfing competition will be held nearly 10,000 miles from Paris at Teahupo’o: the infamous pillow break on Tahiti’s south-west corner whose name loosely translates to English as ‘to sever the head’ or ‘place of skulls’. For all its notoriety, it’s been a happy destination for Marks. She won the WSL tour event staged there in August after making her first visit a few years earlier on a strike mission – a last-minute excursion to take advantage of favorable surf conditions – that happened to fall on her 18th birthday.
“We flew in at 3 in the morning and woke up and were surfing Teahupo’o a couple hours later,” she recalls. “Tahiti is such a beautiful but scary wave at the same time. Looking at all the events on tour, Teahupo’o is definitely one that I think everyone wants to win at some point in their career. It’s definitely one that I really wanted to win, especially as a goofy-footer, so that win was really special to me. It just gave me a lot of confidence to take the win there. And now it’s an Olympic venue, so any time there’s a swell over there, I’m definitely going to try to take advantage and just get more experience out there.”
Marks says the place of the Olympics within surfing culture, and vice versa, is more certain today than before the sport’s debut at the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games. “I think before Tokyo, no one really knew how it was going to go,” she says. “At least for myself, growing up all I cared about was surfing, so I didn’t really watch the Olympics too much. Now that I’ve been to the Olympics, I understand why it’s so incredible to make it, because of the feeling that you get for representing your country. It’s powerful. I also think it’s brought a lot of eyes to surfing and that’s really special.
“On the tour, everyone’s ultimate goal and dream is to win a world title because [it means] you are the best surfer in the world. You have 10 events, every single different kind of condition, going against everybody and Mother Nature. But if you ask the average person that doesn’t know anything about surfing, they do know about the Olympics. That’s where the Olympics is so huge. So in a perfect world you win both.”
Even as she savors her career-best win and looks ahead to her unfinished Olympic business, Marks believes her most important victory came during her time away from the spotlight and will continue to serve her in the deepest waters. “There were moments when I doubted myself and I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to find that happiness again in my surfing and in myself,” she says. “It’s just a win in itself that I’ve been able to find that place of happiness and become more secure in myself.”
