The first time I met Stephanie Gilmore, she was barefoot in a café on Marine Parade, asking the waiter if they had any decent decaf. It was 7:14 in the morning. The wind hadn't decided which way to blow. She had already surfed for two hours, driven home, showered, and changed into a linen dress the color of bone, and yet there was no trace of effort on her — no glow, no hurry, nothing of the athlete trying to settle back into a person.
This is what people miss about her, I think. The records, the eight titles, the easy archive of footage in which she does the same impossible thing again and again — these are decoys. They distract from the more interesting fact, which is that Gilmore has spent two decades refining the art of arriving, on a wave or in a room, as if she had been there all along.
I. Coolangatta, before the tide
We drive south. The hills behind Greenmount are the color of wet straw. She talks about the year she stopped counting heats — somewhere around 2019 — and how the counting had been the thing, all along, that was making her tired. "I love competing," she says. "I just don't love being the kind of person competition asks you to be."
The board she is riding this morning is a 5'10" twin shaped by a friend in Byron. It has a glass-on fin and a faint blush of pink along one rail. She doesn't ride it because it is fast or because it is loose; she rides it because it makes her laugh. "I've finally got to the bit," she says, "where surfing is what I do because I want to."
I've finally got to the bit where surfing is what I do because I want to. Stephanie Gilmore
II. The slow craft of staying
It is a particular kind of athlete who, having spent two decades on tour, returns to the same five-hundred-meter stretch of sand and decides that the project, now, is to stay. Most do not. Most chase the next thing — the brand, the foundation, the second act loud enough to drown the first. Gilmore did not.
Instead, she bought a small house with a sleeping porch and a lemon tree, and she began, as far as anyone can tell, to live there. She paints, badly and with great seriousness. She reads at the local library. She has a record collection that begins with Joni Mitchell and ends, after some debate, with Big Thief. She is forty.
The wave at Snapper, for those who haven't seen it, is one of the great machine waves of the world — a long, fast, indifferently beautiful right-hander that has produced more world titles per square meter than any other piece of coastline on Earth. Gilmore surfs it now the way certain pianists play Chopin in their seventies, which is to say: without urgency, with great accuracy, and as if listening to something the rest of us cannot quite hear.
III. After the tour
I ask her what she will do, in the broadest sense, with the next twenty years. She thinks for a long moment. "I would like," she says, "to be useful." She does not elaborate, and I do not push. It is enough, for now, to watch her finish her decaf and walk back into the morning, which has finally made up its mind about the wind.
Comments 9
The image of her asking for decaf at 7am after two hours in the water — that's the whole portrait right there. You don't need the eight titles once you have that detail.
Thank you, Maren. The decaf detail did more work than any statistic could — I'm glad it landed the same way for you.
I grew up surfing Snapper in the early 2000s. There was always something different about the way she moved on a wave — a patience most of us never find at any age. This piece captures exactly that.
Same era for me. That stretch of sand produced more world titles per square meter than anywhere on earth — and somehow she made it look unhurried.