5x World Champion Carissa Moore Stepping Away From Competitive Surfing
With less than two weeks before the start of the 2024 WSL Championship Tour season, five-time world champion and Olympic gold medalist Carissa Moore has announced her intentions to step away from competitive surfing and pursue other aspects of her career. She will compete a the upcoming Pipe Pro on the North Shore of Oahu before shifting her focus to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Tahiti this July.
"I’m excited to see what else there is, outside the jersey,” Moore said in an official statement released from the WSL. “I don’t like the word retirement. I like to say a departure from the tour, or just stepping back, or switching gears, or, like, evolving.”
Heralded as a future champion from a very young age, Moore’s been a force in surfing from the start. Breaking records amongst America’s amateur ranks as she was coming up, she’s been on the Championship Tour for the last 13 years. In that time she’s collected five world titles and won 28 events, as well as the first-ever Olympic gold medal for surfing. Winning her first title when she was just 18 years old, the last two years has seen Moore finish runner-up at the WSL Finals at Lower Trestles—a Southern California surf break that she considers a home away from home.
With her Moore Aloha Foundation, an organization that seeks to empower young women from Hawaii and around the world, Moore has already become an agent of change outside of the competitive space. No doubt she will continue to lean into her philanthropic endeavors and make the world a better place in the years again. One of the most dynamic, successful surfers the sport has ever known, the future is wide open for wherever Moore goes next.
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With more than 25 years of writing about surfing, the ocean and action sports, Jake Howard continues to share stories, profiles and issues that shape the surfing world. One of the premier subject-matter experts in the field today, he's savvy in the ways of print, digital and social media, his breadth of work is expansive. Getting his start writing Surfline surf reports and recording the phone reports for 976-SURF in the late '90s, Jake served as the managing editor for Surfer Magazine in the early 2000s before moving on to launch RedBullSurfing.com and cover surfing for ESPN and the X Games. Over the years, Jake has also enjoyed time behind the edit desk at The Surfer's Journal, as well as the World Surf League, where he worked as the Senior Editor for a number of years. Beyond producing editorial content, Jake has served as a digital marketer and copywriter for iconic surf brands such as Quiksilver, Roxy and Rip Curl. Writing thousands of pages of copy for Surfline, he has deep SEO experience as well. The surf columnist for the San Clemente Times, Jake continues to dedicate himself to the culture and history of the sport through his involvement with the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center in San Clemente.