Olympics debut-
John John Florence-who is probably the best surfer alive- is still learning to accept chaos.
A bum knee couldn’t stop the 27-year old surfer from qualifying for the Tokyo Games, where the sport will make its Olympic debut.
THE FOLLOWING WRITTEN CONTENT BY BY ZACH BARON / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZAC BAYLY
This summer, surfing will make its first-ever appearance in the Olympics, and John John Florence, who is probably the best surfer alive, will compete for America. “I haven’t really wrapped my head around it,” Florence says—particularly the part where he goes and tries to represent a fractious country of three-hundred-plus million people who often don’t get along. “Surfing is a very singular sport,” he says. “You don’t get that feeling of, like, ‘Go, Brazil!’ or ‘Go, America!’ ” It’s just a few guys in the water, usually.
When Florence competes in the World Surf League, it’s with the flag of his actual home, Hawaii, on his arm. America? Something across hundreds of miles of ocean and then hundreds of miles of land. An abstraction.
Florence and I first met in 2017, when I came to Oahu’s North Shore to write a profile on him. At the time, he was openly ambivalent about the professional part of his job: not the surfing itself, but the part where he had to go compete. “The best version of surfing is not competing,” Florence told me then. He found the idea of favoring one style over another, or one wave over another, for the sake of winning something, to be almost burdensome. What he liked about surfing, he said then, was the freedom of it.
“It’s funny,” Florence says now. “I’d probably say the same thing today, but my mind was definitely at the end of that year, just deep down, like: ‘I don’t want to compete right now.’ ”
At the moment, he is on day 12 of a 14-day quarantine in Australia, where he is about to begin a new WSL season. He’s wearing a black hoodie from the clothing label he’s just launched, Florence Marine X, and black headphones that make his abundance of pale blond hair appear white. His wife, Lauryn, is eating breakfast in the background as we talk. He says he’s been spending his time in the hotel room doing what he calls mental work, getting ready to surf again—“meditating and visualizing and things like that.”
Back when we last spoke, he says, “I was just really getting down this road of mental things, and how I’d have random heats where I would just feel so great but not know exactly why, you know? And so part of it was learning to accept losing, and then the next step was more a deeper kind of sense of accepting deeper feelings.” Read more from GQ.
