Caroline Marks V1

Caroline Marks, the newly crowned world champion, loves surfing almost as much as she loves to win.

Caroline Marks floats with her family, belly laughing as she scans the eastern horizon for waves. As the sun dips low in Ponce Inlet, Florida, the sky behind the local lighthouse goes pastel, and shadows dance on the water. Marks is out there with her dad and two of her brothers, just screwing around on mushy 2-foot waves, but also talking a little shit and keeping score. In every way, she’s in her element. In such moments, Marks resembles a character out of central casting—the archetypal all-American sports star with otherworldly talent and effortless charm. She exudes pure joy in the ocean. And the affection and loyalty within the family is a defining foundation of her success, a constant source of power and playfulness.

But don’t be fooled by that charisma. Marks is an unapologetic assassin. Pro surfing is full of hypercompetitive athletes who emerged as amazing prodigies and then validated their vast talents, but on all counts, Marks is an outlier. It is easy to forget she is only 21 because she has been in the public eye for so long—she’s the youngest athlete, male or female, to reach the World Surf League’s Championship Tour, the pinnacle of the sport. And despite all the success she’s seen at a young age, she’s had her share of struggles. Marks has faced immense pressures since childhood, and the physical and mental strain grew acute enough to convince her to step away from competition. Fortunately, this reboot appears to be a success, but she still has to battle toward her ultimate goals. “I’m here to win,” Marks says. This is back in May, in the living room of her parents’ Florida home.

Those are my goals and I'm not scared to say it.

Those are my goals and I’m not scared to say it.

Back in May, Marks could sense that everything was coming together. That feeling was confirmed in June at Punta Roca, a point break in El Salvador where the seventh stop of the 2023 Championship Tour transpired. That event ended with Marks showcasing her virtuoso backhand moves before getting hoisted on her brothers’ shoulders to celebrate her first CT win in two years. She couldn’t have planned the timing of her return to the top step any better. And in August, at the Shiseido Tahiti Pro—held at Teahupo’o, the break that will host the 2024 Olympics—she notched a decisive win in rough conditions. Those results underscored the makings of a comeback, but they did not completely foretell the commanding performance that Marks would make on September 9 at the Rip Curl WSL Finals, held at Lower Trestles, a point break in San Clemente, California. There, Marks, who now calls San Clemente home, swept the competition with power and confidence and a wide smile. She began the day with momentum and undeniable promise and ended it with a world championship and an emphatic validation of her greatness.

“I’m aware of how good everyone is, but that’s what makes it fun,” Marks said back in May.“We’re at the highest level, and it’s reallyjust 1 percent that is the difference.

This is the story of how she got to be so good—a drama defined by familial love and personal obsession and the redemptive power of joy. The best part is that Caroline Marks found that 1 percent after realizing it was inside her all along.

The story begins in Melbourne Beach, Florida. Caroline and her siblings were lucky enough to grow up across the street from the ocean. Her parents, Darren and Sarah, encouraged the kids to spend their free time outside. (Caroline was the third of six children.) Darren built a skate ramp in the yard and constructed a dirt-bike track down the street. It was a one-minute walk to surf or fish. “My parents wanted us to hang out at the house, so they were like, ‘Well, if we make it fun for them here, they’re not going to want to leave,’ ” says Caroline’s brother Zach, two years her senior. “And on any given day, there were 10 neighborhood kids over with us.”

Caroline’s oldest brother, Luke, 24, jokes that most kids their age had a life centered on screens. “We were always outside playing around,” he recalls. “And when we got in trouble, we were grounded from going outside. Then we would be like, ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do?’ ”

“It felt wholesome and grounding,” she says. Most people who become pro surfing prodigies have two things in common—a parent who pushed them toward greatness and an early start in competition. Caroline had neither. Although she showed an unusually competitive mindset from a young age—she often turned a simple game of Go or the walk to the school-bus stop into a battle with emotional consequences—her first love was rodeo. As a kid, she competed in the discipline of barrel racing, where horseback riders race around obstacles. “I was competitive at horseback riding,” says Caroline, stating the obvious. “Any time I got second, I was so pissed.”

This is the world that Caroline inhabited—always outside, surrounded by older brothers, bouncing from one active pursuit to another.

For her older brothers, who were mostly into surfing, watching their sister compete at rodeos was foreign but impressive. “I just remember her being this tiny little girl and this horse just hauling ass,” Zach laughs. “I was terrified to even go near the horses. But she’s holding on and manhandling this thing.” The rodeo phase ended abruptly when Caroline was 10. The truth is that she loved riding horses but that she really wanted to hang out with her brothers. Caroline was the proverbial tomboy and sought the approval of her brothers. Zach had a pair of red and black basketball shorts that she was obsessed with, and eventually he started charging her 25 cents a day to wear them. “They were down to her shins,” Luke laughs. “She would just rock them, no shirt.”

Whenever she’s back in Florida, Marks loves to hit the beach for a casual surf session with family and friends.

“Surfing’s a lot of fun because no one could tell you what to do on a wave, and you’re free out there.

Luke and Zach and their friends’ free time revolved around surfing, so Caroline threw herself at that sport with gusto. “It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment but suddenly she was always there,” says Luke, who recalls that his sister surfed “as hard as she could, all the time” in that first year. Her rate of progress was astounding. “It was like she leveled up every month,” Luke recalls. The boys rode Caroline pretty hard. There was tough love and blunt criticism and a lot of irrelevant but heated battling. There were a lot of tears and good intentions. Luckily, Caroline had an obsessively gritty nature and absorbed the hazing as pure fuel to improve. Darren remembers afternoons out on the water with the kids, staging mock heats where each grom was scored based on their age and experience. If things didn’t go Caroline’s way she would argue with the scoring and possibly storm off in anger—and return with a battle plan to prevail the next time. “She was constantly trying to figure out how to be better than them,” Darren says.

In it to win it

This is a moment in time in which women’s surfing was progressing in a radical way, with elites like Carissa Moore and Stephanie Gilmore redefining how dynamic women could be in the water.

Tough brotherly love

Luke recalls telling Caroline, who was still in grade school at the time, that if she was serious about surfing, she needed to be powerful like Gilmore and Moore. “We would tell Caroline, ‘Doing them little flick-y turns can only get you so far,’ ” says Luke, who was good enough to travel to California and beyond to compete in elite junior contests. “She was just trying to surf like we surfed,” he adds. “And obviously, she surfs better than both of us now. We’re trying to surf like her now.” It’s unbelievable how quickly Caroline improved. The summer after she gave up rodeo she began winning local competitions. When she was just 11, she went out to California for the first time to compete in elite junior events against the best talent from California and Hawaii. And most of those juniors had been pushed and coached since they were little and come up through a system that Caroline had never participated in.

But the kid from Florida who no one had heard of beat them all. At the 2014 USA Championships at Lower Trestles, Caroline won the Under-12 girls title. Then she went back out and won the Under-14 girls title. And then did the same in the Under-16 competition. A week later she went up to Huntington Beach and captured the open women’s National Scholastic Surfing Association title. This was not normal for an unknown 11-year-old from Florida. Among those who saw the spectacle at Lower Trestles was Mike Parsons, a former pro who was coaching current pros Kolohe Andino and Lakey Peterson and managing future pro Kanoa Igarashi. He says his first thought was Oh my god, who is this girl? He talked with Caroline and was struck by her talent and enthusiasm. “What stood out to me the most about Caroline was her pure joy for surfing,” recalls Parsons, who soon would be managing and coaching her, too.

"She would surf a heat, then go surf down the beach in between heats and then run back in, put sunscreen on and go surf again. I was like, wow, that girl’s going places.

He was right. Before long, Caroline had amassed a staggering total of national titles. In 2014, she earned her first wildcard bid to compete in the WSL’s Qualifying Series—surfing’s equivalent to playing AAA minor league baseball. And within two years, she had performed well enough on the QS to be invited to join the Championship Tour. In short, she went from being a fifth-grade rodeo kid to an elite pro surfer in less than six years. Who does that?

It’s a bittersweet memory now, but it wasn’t easy back then. “I actually used to come in crying pretty often, and in the moment, I hated them for it,” Caroline recalls. “I was like, ‘You guys are so mean to me!’ Now, looking back, I’m grateful that they were really brutal to me, because it made me have thick skin. Hands down, it made me a better surfer.” Luke and Zach would tease Caroline to stop surfing like a girl, but what they really meant was for her to surf like the very best girls.

“Surfing is therapeutic for me,” says Marks. “My family used to joke that they could just spray me with a bottle of salt water if I was in a bad mood.”

Family Crest

A new Red Bulletin podcast explores how family influences shaped the careers of top Red Bull surfers.

It’s exceedingly tough in surfing to reach the top without lots of family participation. It could involve mentorship or pressure or unconditional love—or some mix of the three. A new podcast called Family Crest takes a deep dive on the topic, talking to pros like Caroline Marks and her parents and siblings to understand how the journey played out for them. Here’s a quick look at three other surfers whose family stories are explored in the podcast.

She exudes pure joy to be in the ocean.

Words Photography by

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Suddenly, Caroline was flying around the globe and paddling out with pros who had graced posters on her bedroom wall. Imagine what it would be like to be so young, battling a six-time world champion with infinitely more experience in every aspect of the professional game. Imagine that pressure. That’s not how it was for Caroline. “I was so oblivious,” she laughs. “But ignorance is bliss, right? I had nothing to lose. I had this YOLO mentality.” In that first season, she was simply too young to understand the gravity of the situation and was able to just go out and have fun. She ended 2018 with three podiums and eight top-10 finishes—good enough to wind up ranked seventh in the world and earn WSL Rookie of the Year honors.

That year, Caroline competed in Maui, South Africa, France, Australia and Rio de Janeiro. Everywhere she went, her family came along. In some ways, this was hardly something new for the Marks clan. Back in 2014, as Caroline’s talents and potential came into focus, Darren and Sarah decided to move the family from Florida to San Clemente. That way, Caroline could have daily access to better coaching and surfing. (It’s worth noting that Zach had launched a successful social media platform for kids called Grom Social, so the move to California helped his aspirations, too.) “Darren and I have always had an attitude of we do everything for whoever it is in our family—so let’s just go for it,” Sarah says. “I think with all the kids, the approach was, let’s just have fun. If you have fun at doing it, you’ll succeed.” Still, Sarah and Darren had to wrestle with some big questions when Caroline was invited to join the CT. It was a huge opportunity, of course—but was it really the best move for their daughter? “This was never about trying to help create a famous athlete,” Sarah says. “It’s just about supporting our children with whatever they want to do.”

“Now I’m at a place where I feel rejuvenated. It made me appreciate surfing and my lifestyle a lot more.

For most families, that doesn’t involve towing six kids around the world. But when Caroline got her bid, the mother of another pro on the CT gave Sarah some mom-to-mom advice that she took to heart: “Don’t let her go anywhere alone.” So they hit the road. It wasn’t always easy. “In the beginning it was hard on the little ones,” says Darren, recounting 20-hour flying days and meltdowns over airplane food and long transfers. “But I feel like once we got to the place we were going, everybody was perfect. Flip-flops went on, boards went under the arm, and everybody found a place to surf.” These family adventures were grounding for Caroline—being surrounded by her inner circle, keeping things light and honest. She says she loves having her mother around. “We talk about stuff that makes my life feel a little more real, and that helps me have more of a healthy balance,” she says. “Otherwise I’d just think about surfing all day long.”

Caroline also appreciates her brothers’ presence, even if they still torture her a little. “On the road, you see other people and a lot of times, they tell you how awesome you are,” she says. “But my brothers—they mainly tell me what I need to work on.

They humble the shit out of me, and I’m grateful for that.”

If her rookie season had been a pleasant surprise, Caroline’s 2019 season was all about high performance and quietly building pressures. With the possible exception of her breakout 2023 season, it surely was her best year as a pro. She finished in the top 10 at every CT event, winning twice and landing on six podiums. It was good enough for her to finish second overall on the CT. People started asking aloud when she’d win a world title. “During that season, I started to feel the pressure,” Caroline admits.

Everyone in the Marks family has funny stories about how Caroline is unceasingly competitive. Here she spars with her younger brother, Dawson, throwing punches and possibly a few taunts.

"I started the season with a win, so I suddenly felt like a target was on my back. I was only 17, but all of a sudden I was in the yellow jersey, I was number one in the world. And once you get to the highest level and become number one and win events, you feel like anything less than that is almost a failure.

From rookie to

Her outstanding performance that season carried extra weight because it also meant that Caroline had earned a coveted spot for the sport’s Olympic debut in Tokyo. On paper everything was perfect. She had momentum. But sometimes the biggest, most interesting tests a person faces come out of nowhere. Caroline had no idea a pandemic was coming. And she hadn’t yet realized that she might have raced to the top so fast that she’d have a price to pay.

A special talent

But before we reach that looming impasse, it’s worth exploring what makes Caroline so special. What differentiates her in a sport that’s full of amazing athletes? The most obvious thing about Caroline is the strength of her backhand—meaning her surfing when her back is facing a wave. “I don’t know why my backhand’s good,” Caroline says. “I’ve had comparisons to [Australian legend] Mark Occhilupo, which is very flattering.” Indeed, this is the surfing equivalent of getting compliments that your jump shot reminds people of Stephen Curry’s.

“I’m aware of how good everyone is, but that’s what makes this so fun.

The second differentiator, Parsons says, is her power and flow. “She’s really incredible at putting together a complete ride,” he says. “Caroline can put together multiple turns without a mistake at full throttle and make it look easy. And that’s probably the biggest compliment you can give a surfer—doing really hard things and making them look easy.” For her part, Caroline gets a little tongue-tied trying to articulate her strengths. She knows she has a world-class backhand and good instincts, but she’d rather do it than talk about it. “I think surfing’s like painting a picture,” she says. “Every canvas is so different. Like, there’s never the same wave. And no one’s telling you what you can do. I think that’s so cool. I think the best way to surf is, you don’t even think, you just do. That’s the ultimate feeling as a surfer.”

But Parsons says her talents go deeper than that. Consider, for instance, her instincts in the water. “Surf contests are really fickle,” he says. “Even when you’re surfing your best, you still have to have Mother Nature go your way. That’s what the real special surfers have—like Carissa, Stephanie, John John [Florence], Kelly Slater—they read the ocean better than anyone. They understand when they need to hurry up and take a quick wave and when they need to wait for a really good one; when the conditions are going to change; and how to move around and wind up on the best wave. And that’s something Caroline’s really good at. Her instincts competitively are as good as anybody’s.”

The year 2020 was a weird one for so many elite athletes (and, no doubt, everyone else). The pandemic put big life goals on hold and forced everyone to hunker down. In Caroline’s case, this turmoil came at an inopportune time, disrupting her momentum just as long-simmering pressures reached a slow boil. As everyone knows, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics didn’t happen until July 2021. And even then, things weren’t exactly normal. While normally multiple members of the Marks family travel with Caroline to big events, pandemic-related rules dictated that athletes would have to be on their own and follow strict social distancing protocols. For Caroline, the Games didn’t quite have a storybook ending. She surfed great in her early rounds, and her score of 15.33 in her third-round heat wound up being higher than any other surfer during the entire competition. But despite such flashes of brilliance, she wound up fourth, surely at least a little short of what she had hoped. (On the bright side, she doesn’t have long to wait for redemption at the 2024 Olympics—the surfing competition will take place 10,000 miles from Paris at Teahupo’o in Tahiti. And as a bonus reward from her strong performance at the WSL Finals, Caroline formally earned a bid to join the U.S. squad next summer.)

After Tokyo, things got harder. Though she kept it close to the vest, Caroline was battling multiple issues. Things came to a head after the opening WSL event of 2022. At the Billabong Pro Pipeline that February, Caroline placed 17th after two lackluster rounds. That spurred what she calls the toughest decision of her life—to skip the entire rest of the season. For understandable reasons, Caroline is wary to discuss the specifics of what she was going through—some of it involved a medical diagnosis, some of it was mental, and some of it was world weariness from going full gas since middle school—but she is frank about her need to reset. “I was dealing with some health issues—and I was dealing with a lot of stuff mentally,” she says, offering context on her reboot.

Caroline’s family, her innermost circle when it comes to existential matters, experienced an emotional gamut themselves—absorbing her predicament, worrying about her well-being, supporting her decision to step away, hoping and even praying that everything would turn out right. “I think it was really hard for all of us,” says Darren. “Everybody kind of went through it because we have a family where if one person is hurt or wounded, we all feel it.” Sarah agrees. “As an athlete, taking a break—what does that tell the world? ‘I’m weak; I can’t handle it’?’ That was something we had to work through,” she says. “I’m grateful for all the Olympians who have spoken out on mental health and taking breaks. The pressure of the world is tremendous on an athlete.” But as always, the Marks family was 100 percent behind Caroline. “We all realized she needed to step back and take a break,” Darren says. “And I think she knew it, but she wasn’t ready to let go. It was really hard because you could see her mentally struggling with it. She never had that period where a lot of promising surfers go amateur. She just went from surfing in the NSSA to the world tour. It was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute—there’s a big amount of stuff in between that she skipped right over.’ ”

“And so mentally and physically I wasn’t there at all, and I tried to pretend I was. I found myself in a place where I wasn’t having fun anymore, and that was really weird for me because I’ve always had so much fun. It was really scary to take time off, but I needed to.

But as Darren says now, the family felt convinced that a reboot would make Caroline better. Caroline says that she came to share this belief and put all her energy toward that end. “I didn’t even surf for a while—I just needed to completely disconnect,” Caroline says. “And that was terrifying, because my whole life, all I’ve ever known is being competitive at the highest level. In moments I wondered, ‘Am I ever going to get out of this?’ But now,

Of course, for an elite athlete it is easier to have fun when you’re competing at your best. And in the end, the 2023 season was undoubtedly the best of her career. In the final seven events of the season, she finished no worse than fifth. The triumphant denouement came at the World Finals. There, after coming in as the third seed, she won preliminary matches against Caitlin Simmers and Tyler Wright, getting more confident and commanding with her lethal backhand as the morning progressed. And then in the finals, she decisively swept Carissa Moore, a champion that Marks has idolized since she was a kid. When the horn sounded to seal her victory, Caroline cupped her hands around her mouth as if she was too stunned to speak. That feel passed before she got to the beach. “There’s definitely going to be a massive party after this,” said the newly crowned champion with an easy smile. “And everyone is invited.”

Now, 18 months after Caroline hit the wall and made that tough decision to step away from pro sports and address her physical and mental isues, it’s looking like the smartest move she ever made. When she returned to the Championship Tour earlier this year, everything fell into place. “Now we’re all good,” she roclaims. “I’m having fun again—that’s the most important thing.”

I’m just grateful, and it made me appreciate surfing and my lifestyle a lot more.”

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He’s one of the best big-wave surfers in the world and an extraordinarily versatile waterman who excels at nearly every subdiscipline and implement involving the ocean. There’s no doubt that Kai Lenny has long been intensely motivated to develop his skill set and tackle new challenges, but he’s emphatic that he wouldn’t have reached the top without ceaseless support. Here we talk with Kai, his brother, Ridge, and his parents, Martin and Paula, to learn how it all came together—and how his mom, dad and little brother still drive his career forward. Episode highlights include classic anecdotes from Kai’s childhood, where his innate talents and hyperkinetic personality first came into focus; a short history of the family’s participation in the earliest days of social media; and an intimate conversation about the special bonds Kai and Ridge share through surfing. The episode also offers some very personal insight from Kai about his remaining career goals and what it’s like to drop into some of the world’s biggest waves.

KAI LENNY

She’s undoubtedly one of the all-time greats in women’s professional surfing—and her career is hardly over. With five world championships to date and a gold medal in the sport’s Olympic debut, Carissa Moore has helped redefine pro surfing with her dynamic style and strong voice. In this episode, we traveled to Honolulu to talk with Carissa and then chatted with her father, Chris, and her sister, Cayla, to take a much closer look at the family dynamics that helped create a champion. Chris was intensely involved in training, motivating, coaching and pushing Carissa toward greatness—a process that yielded more than a little bit of family drama. The episode features intimate stories of Carissa’s earliest days in the waters of Oahu and her earliest dreams of a world championship, the ups and downs of her rise to greatness and the tight bonds of sisterhood that Carissa and Cayla share.

CARISSA MOORE

He’s an intense and massively talented pro surfer—and the son of an intense and massively motivated pro surfer. Kolohe Andino has been thrilling fans and wearing his heart on his sleeve in the public eye for a long time, and here he doesn’t hold back on discussing how family dynamics fueled and complicated the journey. In the episode, we also talk with his father, Dino; his sister, Niah; and his longtime coach, Mike Parsons. Typically blunt and honest, Dino is in classic form in the conversation, recounting the intense endeavor to push and support his son’s extraordinary talent. Ultimately, the episode illuminates how family dynamics can often be complicated but ultimately driven by the most beautiful kind of love.

KOLOHE ANDINO

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Caroline Marks of the United States after winning the 2023 World Title at the Rip Curl WSL Finals on September 9, 2023 at Lower Trestles, California, United States.

PETER FLAX

STEVEN LIPPMAN

Newly crowned world champion, Caroline Marks got her start in surfing by chasing her brothers. Sometimes a sibling rivalry is the catalyst. That’s the case for Caroline Marks at least. Caroline preferred riding horses before becoming the youngest surfer to qualify in the WSL at age 15. What inspired the shift? Caroline realized that to impress her two older brothers, Luke and Zach, she’d have to beat them at their own game. Seven years in, and no longer a rookie, Caroline is considered somewhat of a veteran of pro surfing, but she’s only 21 years old. What’s next? Featured voices include Caroline’s parents, Darren and Sara; and brothers, Luke and Zach.

Caroline Marks

CARISSA MOORE

KAI LENNY

KOLOHE ANDINO

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