Brent Bielmann / WSL
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.
