Taming the Wave
Her ears were bleeding. It was February 2023, at Sunset Beach on Hawai’i’s North Shore midway through the World Surf League Championship Tour’s second event of the season, when Caroline Marks woke up feeling like something was stabbing her face from the inside. Her pillow was soaked in blood. On her way to the hospital, she couldn’t stop crying.
“So much pain,” she says now, during an early-January drive north on the Pacific Coast Highway from her home in San Clemente, Calif., to Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point. Her ear canals had closed and ruptured, she explains. Issues related to her deviated septum and an influx of seawater had created infections in her sinuses, adenoids and ears.
That night, the doctor ordered immediate surgery. “Well,” she replied, “I have to surf.”
She returned to finish the event in second place, passing off her illness to reporters as a mild ear infection. “It was so gnarly,” Marks says now, laughing. “So hectic.”
She’s O.K. now. After the WSL Finals in September—when she won her first world championship—Marks had surgery in October, fixing her deviated septum and removing her adenoids. “I’ll probably still need my ears drilled soon,” she says, “but at least my nose is working right now. I’ve been able to breathe way better. I didn’t realize I couldn’t breathe that well until now.”
That’s a fitting metaphor for the 22-year-old superstar. After becoming a globally recognized phenom as young as 13, Marks endured an experience all too familiar for celebrity wunderkinds. She found herself—and her surfing—suffocating under the weight of the world’s expectations. What she did over the past year wasn’t just an incredible performance. It was a reclamation of herself.
About that performance. After forgoing surgery in February, Marks surfed through the next eight months of the season, winning three times and finishing in the top five in eight of nine events. She qualified for the Paris Olympics and won that world title, fulfilling what had long seemed to be her surfing destiny. Marks has dominated the sport at every level since she was 11. At 13, she became the youngest surfer to appear in a WSL Champions Tour event. In 2021, at 19, she was the youngest surfer in the Olympics. “The potential has been there for years,” 11-time WSL champion Kelly Slater said in September. “It’s great to see it come together.”
The world title came after a year when Marks’s surfing future seemed in doubt: She stepped away from the tour for several months in 2022 to do a full reset for her mind and her life, leaving California for some much-needed time with family in her home state of Florida. “Every moment away from the tour felt like an eternity,” she says. “But that made me really focus on what I needed to focus on, and not run away from it.”
This year, Marks is eyeing a medal at the 2024 Olympics and a defense of her world title.
Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated
Born on Valentine’s Day 2002 in Boca Raton, Fla., Marks grew up in Melbourne Beach, on Florida’s east coast. Darren and Sarah Marks already had three sons; Caroline’s arrival made Sarah cry in joy. “Oh yay,” she recalls thinking. “We can do girly stuff!” Sarah loved horses and introduced Caroline early. “Braids and pink boots,” she says. By the age of 7, Caroline excelled at barrel racing. “She had no fear,” says her brother Luke, three years her senior.
The Marks were an active bunch. Surfing, horses, motocross, skateboarding—they had a full halfpipe along with a dirt track right in their backyard. And Caroline had energy to burn. When Sarah went for walks on the beach, Caroline “ran laps around me,” Sarah says, “for miles and miles.”
At 8, Caroline’s love of horses gave way to passion for the waves. “All she would say,” recalls Sarah, “is, ‘I wanna be with my brothers, I wanna be with my brothers!’ ”
Luke, the family’s best surfer, gave her an old board. They took her out on a Friday afternoon. She caught waves by the end of Day 1, riding what’s known as goofy-footed, right foot forward instead of the traditional left. “Just felt better,” she says. “I went with it.”
By Saturday she cruised, riding waves with ease. By Monday, she carved, making sharp, controlled turns. Every day afterward, she crossed the backyard for the beach and waves beyond. She hung posters featuring surfers like Carissa Moore, the Hawaiian who won her first world title in 2011 at age 18, when Caroline was 9. When her grandfather offered to buy her a horse, she declined, saying she just wanted to surf now.
Soon Caroline didn’t just surf with her brothers; she tried to beat them. Some sessions ended in tears, but she always went back. “They were hard on me, but it came from love,” she says. “They saw something in me. And I just wanted to impress them, make them go whoa!”
In her very first competitive event, a neighborhood contest, 9-year-old Caroline beat everyone her age, boys and girls. She finished fourth the event after that, a result she
hated so much she wanted to quit. “You can’t quit,” Luke told her. “You’re too good.”
She didn’t quit, but after that she trashed any trophy that wasn’t first place. During competitions, she surfed even while waiting for her heats, catching every wave she could. “We have a term for surfers like that,” says Darren, a longtime amateur surfer himself. “They’re ‘frothing.’ ” They can’t get enough.
At age 11, Caroline put herself on the surf world map. She swept the U-12, U-14 and U-16 divisions at the Atlantic Surfing Federation championships at Sebastian Inlet, Fla., where she also caught her first barrel. “The ultimate goal as a surfer,” she says. It takes most surfers years to catch one. Team USA signed her within a week, its younger surfer ever. The following year, at the National Scholastic Surfing Association championships in Huntington Beach, Calif.—the country’s largest amateur competition—Caroline won the all-ages women’s Open contest. Surfing in a powerful squat, with strong legs and a low center of gravity, she overshadowed the best amateurs in the country and carved the tops off California’s larger waves with ease, even at her young age. “Her feet seemed stuck to the board,” says retired pro surfer Mike Parsons. “Nothing could knock her off her board.”
Parsons soon became her coach and agent. Over the next few years, Caroline ripped through amateur competition, winning more than a dozen national and international titles across a slew of ages and divisions. Along the way, at 13, she became the youngest surfer to make the WSL Champions Tour, the sport’s highest level of competition, after receiving a wild-card placement at Lower Trestles, a breathtaking and iconic location with a gorgeous beach and waves that break long and high and smooth. Suddenly Caroline found herself in a heat against Moore, the hero from her posters. And she held her own.
“She was this radical little spark plug of a power surfer,” says Matt Biolos, founder of the Lost surfboard company and apparel brand and Marks’s exclusive board maker since she went pro. “She’s like a Simone Biles. Whatever she tells her body to do, it does it well.”
Most of her competitors used boards with thinner, curved rockers to help them gain speed and power on the wave. Caroline was so strong she needed the opposite; Biolos made her boards increasingly thicker and nearly flat. “She needs the resistance,” he says.
By 16, Caroline made the tour full-time and soon became known as its happiest surfer. Cold and rainy conditions would leave everyone miserable—except Caroline, who’d smile and laugh, going, “Isn’t this great, you guys? Isn’t this great?”
“She just drove everyone nuts,” Parsons says. “Then she’d hit the water and go full assassin mode.”
At her San Clemente home, Marks enhances her natural surfing talent with a diligent workout regimen.
Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated
Marks finished her first full season ranked No. 7 in the world and was named WSL Rookie of the Year in 2018. In the season opener the following year, she defeated Moore in the final heat to claim her first career WSL win. At 17, she became the No. 1–ranked surfer in the world.
Now everyone noticed her. Her Instagram following skyrocketed. When she casually went surfing in San Clemente, people knew her in the water. Most of it was good. But some of it wasn’t. And what wasn’t good got to her.
“You have people that love you, and you have people that hate you,” Marks says. “And you have people that think you look good, and you know, people that think you don’t look good. And that’s hard, because to me, there could be 99 positive comments, but it’s so easy to fixate on the negative one.”
Then there was Instagram. “Anyone in the world can get into your phone now, right in your pocket,” Caroline says. “Which can be amazing! But sometimes …” She laughs. “Sometimes, really not good! You just do your best to block it out. It was all so new to me and it was shocking, like, people can really be this way? It’s like, you know you should just ignore them, but it’s hard.”
Marks quit reading social media comments, and, when she turned 18, she posed for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, trying to kill her fears by embracing them. She moved into a home she purchased in the hills overlooking San Clemente, claiming a sense of strength from the independence of living alone for the first time.
Still, breaking free of the expectations that came with stardom was difficult. With people constantly telling her how great she would be or should be, she says, “I started to feel like I was letting people down if I lost.”
She just trained and surfed, obsessed. No parties, no prom, not even nice restaurants on the road. “It was just the hotel to the beach and back,” she says.
Marks finished 2019 as No. 2 in the world, just behind Moore, and made the ’20 Tokyo Olympics. When COVID-19 hit and postponed the Games to ’21, Marks coped by training twice a day. At the Olympics, she recorded the highest score of any surfer there, male or female. But two rounds later she lost, placing fourth and failing to medal.
“That was rough,” she says. She began breaking down. Smiled less, stressed more, doubted herself like never before, didn’t feel good in the water, and spent less time in it. “I just wasn’t having fun,” Marks says. “And then I was feeling guilty about that. That’s where I really struggled, too. I was like, Why do I feel like this when I have this dream life?”
Marks had long conversations with her family about stepping away. “It was really confusing,” she says. “Like, ‘What’s going on? Why don’t I feel like I normally do?’ I was just lost in the sauce, and it was bleeding through a lot of other things that led me to a really dark place.”
“I think if you don’t take a break and reset,” her father told her, “then you’re going to stop liking surfing, and even get bitter at it.”
She kept pushing, kept surfing, not wanting to let anyone down. “Trying,” Darren says, “to be what people wanted her to be instead of what she was.”
The 2022 season opened in January at Pipeline on Hawai'i’s North Shore, where sharp coral reefs wait just below massive, fast-crashing waves. Marks had no feel for the ocean anymore. “She looked like 50% of herself,” Luke says.
“I was just numb to everything,” she says. “I felt like just a shell of myself. Like, barely existing.”
After Pipe, Caroline took her family’s advice and left the tour. “Sometimes they know me better than I know myself,” she says. “I needed to completely let go, and not think about anything else besides working on myself.”
Marks went to stay with her parents in Florida. “I was really hard on myself,” she says. “I felt ashamed for even needing a break.”
After a five-month hiatus, Marks finished in the top five in all four events she entered in 2022.
Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated
Her family told her not to. Even if she wanted to quit surfing for good, they’d love her the same. “You should be very proud,” Darren told her, “that you were big enough of a human being—strong enough of a woman—to say, I need this.”
She rested, maybe for the first time since she was 11 years old. “I was under so much pressure at such a young age for so long,” she says. “It was probably always going to happen.”
Doing deep work with her psychologist, Marks realized, “I was dealing with depression, 100 percent,” she says. “It’s f---ing gnarly. … In that dark place, your brain is not functioning properly. And your body’s like, what’s going on?”
She quit Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. Researchers have well-documented evidence of social media’s detrimental effect on teens’ mental health—Meta’s own studies show teenage girls who struggle with body image issues feel worse after using Instagram. Marks learned, “When people are saying mean things, a lot of times it’s coming from a deeper place that isn’t even really about the way you look—it’s about something to do with them.” Coupled with that, she also learned that she’s a people pleaser. “I’m always wanting to make sure everyone’s good and happy,” she says. “But it’s impossible to please everyone.”
So she quit trying to. “I just took care of me,” she says. “I’m taking care of me, and honestly doing the best I can do, then what other people say doesn’t matter.”
Caroline went fishing with her brothers. She got a Goldendoodle puppy named Axel. “I just tried to have her focus on having fun,” Luke says. “And kinda put the whole tour scene out of her head for a bit.”
It worked. “In California,” she says, “I can go train and the waves are always good, but there’s always people around, and there’s always someone you compete against out in the water, and it’s kind of hard to turn your mind off. … There’s just something about being home in Florida that feels so grounded.”
And she went surfing with her family, right back where she caught her first waves. “It was so nice going surfing just, behind the house, with nobody else around,” she says. “Nobody taking pictures. Nobody else trying to surf with me. Just how we did it growing up.”
After five months away, Marks returned to the tour in June 2022. She kept social media off her phone for another few months; her team posted to her accounts.
She cruised through the end of 2022, finishing in the top five in all four events she entered, and opened ’23 by placing ninth at Pipeline on Hawai'i’s North Shore. Then came the Sunset competition, with the bleeding ears, the doctor ordering surgery. “I should’ve seen it coming,” Marks says. She’s suffered sinus and ear infections most of her life. Three years prior, another doctor recommended surgery, to avoid, well, this. But same as she trusted that she needed to step away before—now she trusted that she should keep going.
USADA, which sets anti-doping rules for all Olympic and Paralympic sports, prohibits prescription painkillers and antihistamines, leaving Marks to manage her symptoms and pain with over-the-counter medication and holistic treatment. Those methods didn’t do much. Nevertheless, she finished the Sunset event by placing second on her 21st birthday, telling reporters she just had a minor ear infection—but she was suffering. Throughout the season she postponed multiple flights, spent entire days in bed and went virtually deaf. “The best thing to do was to stay out of the water,” she says. “But I couldn’t stay out of the water.”
In El Salvador in June, Marks notched her first win in two years. At Teahupo'o in Tahiti in August, she caught one of the best barrels of her life on one of the tour’s most intimidating breaks. “That showed me, O.K., you really got this now,” she says.
Marks entered September’s WSL Finals ranked No. 4 in the world. The event was back at her adopted home break, Lower Trestles. After winning the semis to qualify for the 2024 Olympics, the finals put her against none other than Carissa Moore once again, bringing her career full circle. Eight years before, she had surfed a heat against Moore at Lower Trestles in her first tour event. Four years before, she defeated Moore to win her first tour event.
This time, Marks upset Moore to win her first world title. “She just had this demeanor in the water,” Sarah says. “She carried herself with this energy that said, This is where I belong.”
To claim the world title, Marks defeated her childhood idol in the WSL Finals at Lower Trestles.
Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
One morning in early January, Marks sips coffee in the living room of her two-story San Clemente home; a hairstylist and makeup artist prep her for a photo shoot. “Glammed up to put on a wetsuit and get in the ocean,” she says, laughing. “I should show up like this to Pipeline. You gotta win if you do that, though. You can’t do that and finish, like, third.”
High above San Clemente, windows provide panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean, and Marks’s home is filled with surfing trophies and memorabilia. On her dining table, there’s the World Surf League championship trophy, in all its 75-pound glory. Outside, a sauna covers half the courtyard. In the garage, a just-installed cold plunge tub—complete with purple rubber ducky—sits in front of three electric bikes, beneath an array of surf jerseys. Fifty-plus surfboards lean against the opposite wall.
After loading her SUV to make for Dana Point, Marks sits in the vehicle for a while to snap selfies. She’s back on Instagram now, and working on a post. “ ‘POV I’m going surfing’?” she asks. “Or, ‘POV going surfing?’ ” She laughs and shakes her head. “These filters are so crazy. I don’t even look real.” Without posting anything, she closes the app and drives.
Naturally, she’s intent this year on winning gold in the Olympics, and then defending her world title. But she has another goal that’s proved even more elusive for her until recently. “I’m trying to really enjoy the moment and be present as much as I can,” she says. “And not worry too much about the future, or dwell anymore on things in the past, and just stay focused on what I’m doing right now. The only thing I can control is being a better person. … And just live.”
Over dinner at Nick’s Restaurant in San Clemente, where she ate kale and quinoa salad with steak three straight nights before the world title, Marks and some friends polish off two bottles of cabernet and gush about Caroline finally allowing herself to just live. She went on safari in South Africa, tried amazing restaurants around the world, and even went clubbing with them in Los Angeles. “This past year was probably the most fun I’ve ever let myself have,” Marks says. “Making memories outside of surfing. And it was so cool to see that translate to success in surfing.”
Because here’s the thing about her best moments surfing, like that barrel at Teahupo'o. “I don’t even remember what happened,” she says. “I just don’t even remember dropping in on the wave. I don’t remember being in the barrel. I don’t remember taking off on the wave. I kind of blacked out. It’s pretty crazy.” Afterward, she says, “The joy you get is so awesome. But I never really remember what happened.”
Dessert arrived—the house delicacy, butter cake, presented to Caroline with a candle. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday”; it wasn’t her birthday. She laughed so hard that her face turned red. Then she dug in.
Later, she publishes her Instagram post. “POV going surfing.” No filter.
