“There’s a risk to everything you do. You can take off on a one-foot wave and get hurt; you can take off on a ten-foot wave and get hurt. You just don’t think about it at all. You just go for it. When you kick out of a really big wave, it feels pretty damn good. You want to do it again.”
“Every part of me is a surfer. I love surfing, and I love the waves that I surf. So that’s the thing that I get excited about most: What kind of waves am I going to be able to surf? Am I going to be surfing alone, or will we be surfing waves that no one’s surfed before? Second to that is photography.”
“You just keep doing stuff, and one thing evolves into another. Then suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh, wait, I’m here surfing against Kelly Slater and all these guys I grew up watching.”
“The best version of surfing is not competing, I think. It’s just… it’s perfect. You’re perfectly present. You’re perfectly in the moment. You’re perfectly not thinking about anything else in the world. You’re just surfing. You’re surfing away with your friends or your family, and that’s it. You’re just there.”
I was at the at the 2024 WSL Finals and got to see John John win his third world title.