The Puncture-Kit Kid

“I don’t like the word ‘retirement,’” said Stephanie Gilmore. “You don’t see Mick Jagger saying, ‘I’m retiring.’ The Rolling Stones are still just doing what they love to do. It’s sad when someone says, ‘I’m retiring,’ like it’s all over. I mean, can’t you just evolve into something else?”

Steph and I sat at an outdoor table in an upscale Malibu plaza. She was fresh back from Mexico, where she’d zinged across long right-hand point waves with no trophy, no contest in her crosshairs, purely for fun. There was much to talk about: her stepping off the world tour, her new sponsorship with Rip Curl. 

I’ve known Steph for about a decade. We were neighbors in Malibu, where she’d based herself from 2015 to 2021. I was always struck by the Jekyll-and-Hyde way she could switch from ferocious in competition to totally relaxed, kind, and casual in person. That day, though, she exuded a different energy. Casual and relaxed, definitely, but also at a crossroads.

“I’ve really had to size up what the things are that will benefit myself, my career, and my sponsors—things that aren’t necessarily about raising another trophy above my head,” she said. “I’m looking forward to making films, trying new boards, and diving into surf culture in a way that I’ve never done before.”

She sipped a green juice. Her salt-matted blonde hair glistened in the sun. Her tanned, 36-year-old face defaulted to a smile. She wore a comfy-looking pullover sweater, faded 501s, and flip-flops. “I did 17 consecutive years on the world tour, except for 2020,” she said. “Now I just want to take a little breather.”

Her great style on a board was evident in the way she sat in the uncomfortable metal chair. Her posture, hand gestures, and delicate fingers invoked her elegant surfing. As she described a cutback to rebound, pointer finger sketching a figure-eight, I suddenly heard a revved-up Joe Turpel narrating one of Steph’s rides in a world tour final.

“Peak competitive moment?” I asked.

“I think there’s probably two,” she said. “Winning Keramas in 2019, where I got that 10 in the final, and then winning my eighth world title at Lowers in 2022.”

The 10-point wave at Keramas: steep, shimmering, double-overhead right-hander. Steph angles down the face, rail-checking, setting up. Swooping bottom turn to big slash under lip. Free fall. Bottom turn. Snap-under-lip stall. Terrific barrel in which her own spray envelops her. Matador exit. Late, super-compressed lip crack with bouncy landing. It’s not a long ride, but it’s dense. So much mastery, such perfect reading of the wave. The lines she draws are quintessentially Stephanie Gilmore. And, despite how compact and critical and 10-scoring, she still retains that looseness, that easy flow.

I watched the webcast of the 2022 Rip Curl WSL Finals from start to finish. There was a moment in her first heat where she looked a little shaky, but then she ascended, and kept ascending, getting better with each heat. 

“What did that feel like?” I asked.

“You’re just so connected, but you’re floating at the same time,” said Steph. “You feel invincible, but you’ve also almost got this bird’s-eye view over everything, like you’re attached to a drone and you can look down and see it all happening.”

Visualizing has always been a big part of her process. She compared that 2022 finals win to her first pro event, the 2005 Roxy Pro Gold Coast, which she won at age 17. 

“I had visualized so much that when I was actually in the moment, it was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before. Yeah, right. I just surf like this and I’ll get the trophy, no problems.’ It felt like I was vibrating at a higher frequency, like I was able to kind of float through it but also be connected to the source of energy, whatever it was, that allowed me to perform like that.”

We got onto the subject of the 2024 Lexus Pipe Pro. Off tour at that time, Steph watched from the sidelines as Caitlin Simmers, Molly Picklum, Bettylou Sakura Johnson, Brisa Hennessy, et al. made women’s surf history.

“I definitely felt like, ‘Oh, wow, my whole career just got diminished in one event,’” said Steph. “Which it didn’t. But there was a big part of me that was very jealous of the young women doing that. And that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m definitely still competitive, and I still have that inside me.’”

It’s hard seeing our surf heroes age. We want to freeze them at their peak, enshrine them. But there’s another education in observing them fall to earth. I experienced this watching Tom Curren. Like Steph, he was, for what now seems like a very brief moment in time, untouchable. He had that preternatural connection with the ocean where winning waves just appeared out of nowhere. And he never choked—filling us with the notion that we, too, wouldn’t choke. 

Then, around the time of The Search (mid-1990s), I watched him lose in the early rounds of a couple of B-grade events, and it broke my heart. 

I thought, Why erode your 10-foot-tall-and-bulletproof legend? But then I saw a sort of existential pondering at play. Unshackled from competition, just what does surfing mean to one of the greatest wave-riders who ever lived?

“Even while I was on tour, I knew that there was so much more to life than just competing and trophies,” said Steph. “Winning is awesome. But it doesn’t mean everything. I’m just now realizing that in that realm of competing, I was only able to connect with such a small number of surfers. As opposed to now, being on a different surf adventure, I’m probably going to connect with a much broader audience of surfers who really understand and can relate to what it is about surfing that we all love. And I think the beauty of surfing is that for everyone who does it, no matter what level they’re at, or if they don’t watch competitive surfing at all, it’s still just this pure feeling that they’re searching for. And now I’ll be able to connect with them on that same level, away from contests.”

•

In one of her earliest surfing memories, Steph is out at Greenmount on the Gold Coast. Age 10, she rides not a surfboard but a boogie board. Wave comes. She paddles for it, pops to feet, spins a 360—and immediately cranes her head shoreward to see if anyone saw it.

“I was trying to gauge if there was an audience,” she told me. “So I guess it’s always been in me, this showmanship kind of thing. And I’ve said it before: You can catch an amazing wave in a freesurf, but to catch an amazing wave in a contest, with thousands of people on the beach cheering you—it just heightens the whole experience. And that’s an addictive feeling.”

It’s there again in Stephanie in the Water, the 2014 documentary directed by Ava Warbrick. Fresh from the surf, board under arm, a towheaded, 13-year-old Steph asks the videographer, presumably her father, “Did you see me get any good ones? Did you see, like, my first wave back out here? I did a sick off-the-top. Did you film it?”

The youngest of three girls, Steph grew up in Kingscliff, in the wave-rich Northern Rivers region of NSW. Her father, Jeff, a devout surfer, let her loose with a boogie board at age 9. She was a natural, not only in her relationship with the water, but as an innately hungry competitor.

“I have vivid memories of being very young and just wanting to be the best at everything I was doing, whatever sport,” Steph told me. “I just wanted to win and be the best performer on that day.” 

She started competing in club and amateur contests and winning, profusely. With the wins came a deep-seated belief in herself—and the power of creative visualization:

“From a young age, I had envisioned being a world champion, and I knew that if I really believed it, I could do it. I remember watching my first professional event on the Gold Coast, the Roxy Pro. I was 15. I remember sitting on the beach and thinking, ‘Give me a shot. I can do this. I can beat these girls.’ It was like I’d just seen the whole thing. Then, a couple years later, when I won the trials and went on to win the whole event, it was like, ‘Alright, if you really believe in something and you want to outwardly say it, it’s okay.’ At the time, I was sort of saying, ‘Yeah, I think I could be a world champ. Why do you want to be top five or top 10? We’re here to win world titles, aren’t we?’”

She won four in a row, 2007 to 2010. No surfer had ever made it look so easy—in the water, on land, on the podium as she raised yet another first-place trophy overhead. The waters just seemed to part for her.

“Steph works on intuition,” her sister Whitney told me via phone. Whitney has worked as Steph’s manager and confidante throughout her career. “She’s all about intuition, being in the right place at the right time. And she’s lucky as fuck. We used to call her ‘The Puncture-Kit Kid’ because if she was riding her bike and got a flat, there’d be a puncture kit right there on the side of the road for her to fix it.”

December 2010 marked a pinnacle for Steph. Age 22, she’d just returned home from Hawaii, where she’d been crowned with her fourth world title and won the Triple Crown for the third straight year. She’d just signed a deal with Quiksilver: $5 million over five years, the richest contract in women’s surf history.

On the afternoon of December 27, Steph was arriving home to her Tweed Heads apartment when she noticed a suspicious man in her parking garage: 

“I saw him in my rear-vision mirror. He walked past my garage, and he had a big chunk of wood. 

And he was wrapping something around the handle of the steel bar, like deciding what to use. 

That’s when I thought, ‘Okay, that was weird,’ because there were no cars there, he wasn’t working on a car, and he had no shoes on. I started walking quicker. I remember taking one glance back and looking into the next hallway, thinking, ‘Okay, strange man, dark hallway that’s a dead end. Like, how fast can you run upstairs?’ We made eye contact. Before I could register what was communicated between us, he was just sprinting at me with a crowbar in his hand. I was like, ‘Okay, he’s going to hit me. He’s actually going to hit me.’ It was just so strange because he didn’t want anything. He just hit me over the head twice, and then that was it. He just rode away, and I was just left there, in my blood, and I think I screamed.”

This telling happens in Stephanie in the Water. The attack was likely random, the perpetrator a mentally unstable, allegedly drug-addled homeless man. He was arrested and sent to jail. Steph suffered a broken wrist and stitches to her head. Crying, palpably traumatized in the film, she talks about feeling uncomfortable in her own home, wanting to be elsewhere. “He basically knocked that happiness out of me,” says Steph.

She describes getting back to surfing after her injury—and struggling just to get to her feet. She talks about losing rhythm with the ocean, which had always seemed second nature. As the 2011 world title slips away, a surf reporter asks, “You’re 23. Do you feel old?” 

Steph says to the camera, “I wish I had the balls to turn around and just say, ‘Fuck off, I’m not old!’”

Later, the film shows her at the 2011 ASP Awards, passing her world-title cup on to Carissa Moore. “I’ll let you borrow it,” says Steph. The climax transitions to Steph on fire in the Roxy Pro Gold Coast, which she wins. She would go on to win the 2012 world title.

•

Fourteen years since the attack, leaned back on the sofa of her Byron Bay home, a Gibson ES-125 on her lap, her hands working the guitar through light, amplifier-less strums, Steph reflected. 

“It took me a good year just to be able to sleep with the lights off,” she said. “And in dark car parks, I was always on edge. But it also made me realize that life has so many twists and turns. It’s not all world titles and rainbows. It also made me realize that as much as you can be hurt by something, you can’t go back and change it. There are a lot of things that are going to happen to you in life that are out of your control. It’s how you react to them that will determine your character and how you’re going to move forward. So it was a definitive moment—a dark moment, but definitive because it helped me understand a lot about life and how shit happens.”

She paused, played a short riff, and continued: “Coming back to win the world title in 2012—that would be my most rewarding title for sure. Because I had to fight for something. I had to claw my way back. Whereas the other world titles were like, ‘Oh, this is so fun. And I knew I could do it, and here I am doing it, and life’s great.’”

She set her guitar down and sat up. “It was wrong place, wrong time, but at the same time, it was exactly where I was meant to be.” She told me how two weeks before the attack, she was Christmas shopping at a bookstore near her childhood home when a woman approached her. “So when are you going to write your book?” she asked. “Oh, my book would be boring,” replied Steph. “My life is too perfect. I would need some drama to make a good book.”

Steph flashed a knowing smile. “That was another lesson of, like, ‘Oh shit, got to be careful what you throw into the universe, because manifestation is a powerful tool.’”

There’s another scene in Stephanie in the Water that leapt out at me. Four world titles in, Steph’s at the wheel, driving slowly, morning surf check on the Goldie. “Why do we want to be the very best in the whole world when nothing really happens?” she muses. “You don’t gain a superpower when you win a world title. So why do some of us just dream it and make our whole lives consumed by what we can do to achieve it? It’s so fascinating to me. I always stop and go, ‘Why am I still competing? Why do I want to do this?’ But then, when I’m actually competing, it just switches on. It comes from inside, and I can’t help it. But you just don’t want to lose. It’s so weird. I hate losing.”

It reminded me of a quote in a surf mag from the 1980s. Cheyne Horan, then number two in the world, said, “Winning is a way of getting rid of problems.” I remembered Nick Carroll writing about Lisa Andersen and the world tour: “She was a runaway. We were all runaways.” I was reminded of Miki Dora’s famous quote: “There is no problem so big or complicated it cannot be run away from.”

I asked Steph where she got her competitive fire.

“My dad, for sure,” she said. “Dad was just this weird perfectionist.”

Steph recounted how her father, new to foiling, did not want to do it at his local break because he wasn’t yet good enough for his mates to see him. “It kind of clicked to me, like, ‘Oh, hang on a second. I totally know that feeling,’ because I get caught up myself, where I won’t try something because I don’t want to look bad doing it.”

Clad in an orange dress and black sandals, Steph seemed profoundly relaxed—despite also emitting a sense of the ferocity of the high standard she’s held herself to. We sat in the living room, having just devoured excellent fish burgers and chips from the café down the street. 

She bought this little surf shack a couple years ago, “to pay back all my friends around the world who’ve let me crash at their houses for weeks on end.” It’s sparsely furnished, with boards in the corner that reflect her new chapter: a Campbell Brothers bonzer; an 88 soft top; twin-fins shaped by Darren Handley, Ryan Burch, and Simon Jones.

The Byron Bay area was the epicenter of Australia’s country soul period of the 1960s and 1970s. Embracing a “back to the land” ethos, many surf luminaries relocated to these rolling green hills and winding right pointbreaks, among them Nat Young, Bob McTavish, Rusty Miller, and Alby Falzon. Much of the Arcadian dream captured in Falzon’s 1972 film Morning of the Earth was shot in this region. It got a reboot in 2001 when Rob Machado, Shane Dorian, Joel Tudor, and friends rented a farmhouse, brought in a variety of wave craft, and surfed and made music in the Taylor Steele/Chris Malloy film Shelter. 

Byron Bay has since become a parody of itself—and insanely expensive. But if you quiet the cynicism, it’s all still there: the pointbreaks, the shapers, the yogis. It seems a fitting locale for Steph to step into her new skin.

A kookaburra landed on the railing outside the window. We stopped to watch. It seemed to peer in at us curiously, then flew off. “When you ride a really good wave, it’s like someone’s directing you from somewhere else,” Steph said. “It’s sort of coming through you, telling you what to do. It’s out of body. And when you kick out, you’re like, ‘What just even happened?’” 

I asked about her interest in music.

“With guitar, it’s a similar thing,” she said. “You’ll find moments where you’re just sort of jamming, and it feels really good, and it sounds really good, but you don’t really know where it’s coming from or how you got to that point. It’s just coming through from, I don’t know…another dimension, another source of energy.

“Dad taught me to play when I was 10. He and Mum listened to a lot of Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt. The thing Dad taught me was the scales. He was like, ‘Okay, if you just learn the major scale…’ And he used to pay me a dollar if I did the major scale all the way up and down, every single fret—all the way up to the 12th fret and all the way back down, that was a dollar.”

Steph has played on stage with the late Jimmy Buffett and jammed with Chris Martin, the late Taylor Hawkins, and the Aussie band Spiderbait. “I find a lot of peace when I’m playing,” she said. “It’s such a good creative outlet. 

I always thought if I wasn’t a surfer, I’d just be a struggling musician busking on the street.”

“Could music play a larger role in your post-pro-tour life?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It always comes back to music and film. To create a surf film where 

I also do the soundtrack—I’ve talked about this a million times over, and I haven’t done it yet. 

I think there’s space for some cool, more directed-character, even acting-style surf films that could be done. So I’m asking myself all these questions, because I feel like I’ve had such blinkers on for so long, and I’m now coming to learn who I am and what I want to do for myself.”

Our conversation shifted to who she looks up to in the surf sphere. She mentioned Dave Rastovich, Chelsea Hedges (née Georgeson), Kelly Slater, Burch, and her father. She spoke about the inspiration she’s gotten from her partner, Harry Henderson, an ace regularfoot and the founder of 88, the advanced-soft-top label. “Harry’s obsessed with surf culture and surf history,” she said, “and he’s really encouraged me to explore board design.” 

She told me about watching McTavish handshape her a single-fin. “Seeing him run his hands over the blank with the saw, the planer, doing the asym tail and the concaves and everything, in real time, in his shaping bay, it was just like, ‘Whoa! That’s art.’ Then paddling out on it a week later—that was one of my highlights of the year.”

Throughout her career, Steph has maintained a predisposition to never lend her name or face to a brand she doesn’t align with. Credit must be given to Whitney. “She’s not this one-dimensional character,” her sister told me. “She’s well-rounded. There’s a lot of her. And she’s interested in things beyond the beach. We went to Abu Dhabi for the Laureus World Sports Awards. We went to the Met Gala. And that stuff just opens your mind and expands you.”

“It just baffles me every day that of all the places in the world I could have been born, I was born in an area that has an abundance of world-class waves and the perfect training grounds and support network,” Steph said as we discussed how her surf odyssey has changed her. “As I’m going through this stage in my career, I’m thinking about the fact that it’s still evolving into something else. And I can’t think of any other sport that allows you to do that. I mean, I guess in tennis, you can evolve into a pickleball player?”

•

One sunny afternoon, I watched Steph surf Tallows, a beachbreak in Byron Bay. Alongside me stood videographer Dan Scott, who’d started filming Steph during the pandemic. At Tallows, they were trying to get clips to help promote Steph’s new clothing line with Rip Curl.

The swell was strong, nearly double overhead, the lefts winding down the beach, the rights short and bowly. The crowd was thick, the standard of surfing high. Steph was by no means on every wave. In fact, she seemed to be struggling to get waves. I mentioned this to Dan.

“Steph’s best surfing happens in a heat,” he said, and went on to praise her more subtle rewards. “She also can do just a simple carve, but it’s more impactful than someone doing a 720. It gives you this feeling.”

As surfers zipped and zapped on every scrap of green face, I focused on Steph. When a wedge loomed, she slotted herself in precisely the sweet spot, stroked, popped to her feet, and—clocking the goofyfoot pumping wildly toward her on the connecting left—submissively kicked out. A few minutes later, she slid into another wedgy right, trimmed high, dropped with a steep section, swooped a signature bottom turn, and laid into a big, spacious cutback, arms iconic. 

It was beautiful, grunty, graceful. When another right sprung up, she bottom turned and lip banged all in one seamless movement, then fell with the lip, landed casually, and kicked out. Dan and I looked at each other. “Some of the other surfers I shoot, it feels like they’re holding their breath,” he said.

World tour surfer Connor O’Leary jogged past with a boxer’s gait. Photographer Andrew Shield emerged from the water toting camera and fins and waved to us as he made his way north to the paddle-out spot. “Lennox Head to the Goldie—it’s the epicenter of pro surfing,” said Dan.

Steph caught a few more, but her session felt passive. I’d seen this at Malibu breaks when she lived there. She’d be the chillest surfer in the lineup, chatty, giving waves. You’d have no idea she’s a multiple-time world champ. Then she’d pop to her feet, swoop rapturously off the bottom, and glide up and down with absurd ease, with a joyful smile.

“Steph deserves more waves,” I said to Dan.

“She just doesn’t want to be that person,” he replied. 

Later, I asked Steph why she’s so polite in the water. 

“I feel like I need more time to go and be in new places and surf new waves and just kind of see how I can evolve my surfing.”

“Maybe I should be more ruthless,” she said. “I’d probably get more waves. But if I’m a dick to everyone, they’re going to be like, ‘Lame, I don’t want to support her. I don’t want to support the companies she works with.’ I’m just heavily conscious of that.”

•

Back in Steph’s living room, we talked about surfboards, her relationship with Rip Curl (a homecoming of sorts—they were her sponsor when she turned pro), and doing trips and making films for The Search. 

“Life’s all about the continual renewal of inspiration, and finding new things to excite you,” she said. “Freesurfing around the world, surfing new waves. I still feel like I’m under the shackles of heat surfing, and I feel like I need more time to go and be in new places and surf new waves and just kind of see how I can evolve my surfing.” 

She added that she still feels the competitive tug. “Maybe 2026 will be my last year on tour. And by that stage I’ll be 38, so if I’m to have a child, I guess I’ve got to squeeze one in there at some point.”

Just then, Harry walked through the door. 

“There’s a fun-looking wave down the Pass,” he said—and off we went, Steph with her Ryan Burch Toe twin-fin, Harry his 10-foot 88 finless.

The sun was hot, bright, upbeat. Cars with boards on the roof drove past. Someone honked, flashed a thumbs-up.

“We used to have school holidays here at the Pass,” said Steph.

“The tide’s coming up,” said Harry. “Good for the ol’…” He made a fin-free drifting gesture with his hand.

Walking side by side, boards under arm, Steph and Harry were a striking couple. Tall, muscled, bronzed, miens chiseled by decades of surfing, they seemed almost amphibious. Passing green foliage so vibrant and fecund as to be its own kind of microdosing, Steph and I got onto how so many surfing greats had/have daddy issues. 

“I don’t have that,” she said. “My family is gold.”

At the corner, where Steph’s street meets the heavily trafficked road that leads to both the Pass and the enchanting Cape Byron Lighthouse, a car crept up next to us. The window rolled down, and the woman in the passenger seat called out, “Steph, love you!”

“Oh, thanks,” said Steph.

I asked what it’s like to be showered in compliments. 

“I don’t feel famous,” she said. “And it’s all really easy because I’m just being myself. And if people feel comfortable enough to come up and say hi, that means I’m doing a good job, that I’m being honest.”

•

That night, I went to the premiere of Lazer Breathing Dragons, the film Steph recently made with her new teammates, Tom Curren and Mason Ho. There appeared to be a perfection in this: Tom as tribal elder, decades down the path of post-world-title life and deep into free-jazz board experimentation; Mason at the other end of the spectrum, purveyor of fun and levity and we are but frolicking dolphins, and where our fellow surfers see impossibility, we see playgrounds; and Steph in the middle, deriving inspiration from both.

The Byron Bay Bowling Club was a fitting venue. Established in 1923, the packed bar smelled of a century of beer. You could almost catch a whiff of, say, Nat, Rusty, and Alby knocking back celebratory pints after an epic day of wave sliding in the ’70s. Horse racing, golf, and cricket played on screens. Amid a gaggle of sun-scorched faces stood former WCTer Matt “Wilko” Wilkinson, now a surf coach. In another group, I saw 1993 world champion Pauline Menczer, whose new memoir, Surf Like a Woman, was getting rave reviews in the Aussie press. Outside, a flock of screaming kids chased each other across the green.

Steph arrived. You could see the heads turn. Clad in sandals, camo pants, and a pink tank top, she was ushered to a table to sign posters. A long line formed, composed primarily of young girls, and it continued to be long as more and more people poured in for the screening. It went like this for over an hour. Steph was gracious, unhurried, genuinely stoked to share the stoke. 

Parents thanked her with their hands to heart.

When co-director Vaughan Deadly introduced the film, he talked about the joy and privilege of working with Steph. “She’s magic,” he said in his hacksaw voice. “It’s pixie dust.” He called her up to the mic. Cheers. Applause. “What was it like to be back on The Search?” he asked. 

“This is just the beginning,” Steph said, and the applause lit back up.

The lights went down. The film started. Lazer Breathing Dragons opens on Tom, Mason, and Steph aboard a boat, making their way up a river of the Apocalypse Now sort. A percussive beat builds tension. Closeup on swampy water, bubbles. Tom’s head pops up, eyes closed. When he opens them, sizzling lasers shoot forth. Ditto Mason—laser-beam eyes. Ditto Steph.

We hear her VO: “All my life, I’ve surfed with primarily one major purpose: to go fast, with fierceness and style.”

Then the Divinyls’ “Boys in Town” rocks the soundtrack as Steph, on a yellow board, tears across a series of playful, sometimes meaty, overhead right-handers—tubes, big carves, swooping cutbacks, and lip bangs with tail drift. We’re not quite sure where she is—and it doesn’t so much matter. This is where you land when you go way, way upriver.

All three surfers make big splashes in Lazer Breathing Dragons, but Steph’s clearly the star. Toward the end of the film, we hear her again: 

“I don’t know what is next for me. I don’t know what’s next for my surfing.”

The punchline comes in the final credits. 

Starring Mason Ho, Tom Curren. And introducing Stephanie Gilmore.

[Feature image by Be Ryder.]