Surfing
Kanoa Igarashi: The Free One
For fast-rising pro surfer Kanoa Igarashi, home is where the waves are.
Kanoa means freedom.
It’s a Hawaiian name that literally translates to “the free one,” which is a fitting way to characterize the barefooted 22-year-old watching waves roll onto Oahu’s North Shore.
It’s the morning after a contest at Sunset Beach and Kanoa Igarashi is enjoying a rare rest day, lounging on the deck of an oceanfront rental house that’s got a panoramic view of the beach and the break. The ocean is an undulating patchwork of turquoise and white froth, and he’s sitting close enough to the water’s edge to hear the thrum of the surf, to smell and taste the salty mist.
I have this spiritual connection
Kanoa likes to talk about the physics and the metaphysics of the water. “I have a relationship with the ocean,” he says. “I spend four to six hours a day in the water. I feel like I get to go out there and play games with the ocean. I have this spiritual connection, which might sound like ridiculous craziness to an outsider, but I really do.”
This is not the usual blather of a professional athlete, but the lean surfer with the beach-blond highlights has a candid side that hasn’t been washed away by his considerable fame. Kanoa has been foreshadowing and showcasing elite talent for more than a decade. His story line—a lifelong march to the top of his sport—sounds like something out of the Tiger Woods or Serena Williams mold.
Igarashi has surfed Oahu's North Shore since the beginning
© Justin Jay
When you’re in the ocean, you’re surrounded by it—you feel it inside your fingers
He learned how to surf as a toddler; had sponsors by the time he was in second grade; won more scholastic surf contests than anyone in history; and captured his first pro contest when he was only 15. And now he’s a top-ranked competitor on the WSL’s Championship Tour, the top league in his sport, and a leading contender for an Olympic medal. When he attacks a wave, even the uninitiated can appreciate the extraordinary precision and improvisation of his movements.
Normally, successful athletes this brilliant are cagier about their feelings. “Like a pro tennis player is not going to talk about caressing the net, you know?” Igarashi says. “But when you’re in the ocean, you’re surrounded by it—you feel it inside your fingers. The waves are crashing at you and it’s like this force of nature. So it might sound pretty weird, but there are days where I get out of the water and just tell the ocean how grateful I am to have it in my life.”
Igarashi in action
© Leo Francis/Red Bull Content Pool
He spends big chunks of time feeling the love here on Oahu every year. Truth be told, he spends big chunks of time in lots of surf spots—in Portugal, in Bali, in Australia, in other beautiful places with big-ass waves. Here on the North Shore, Kanoa has a predictable routine: He surfs at Sunset Beach and legendary local breaks like Pipeline and Backdoor; he hits a local gym and goes on a long hike two or three times a week “up into the hills, where I can look over the whole North Shore and have some time for myself.”
And, of course, he centers his day on the ocean. “The first thing I do when I wake up every morning is to go for a swim right in front of the house here,” he says, talking about his morning rituals and also his life. “I always just jump in and let the water go over me—at that point, it’s just me and the ocean. No matter what’s going on, as soon as my feet touch the water, I know I’m good.”
Igarashi emerges from the ocean
© Justin Jay
Oahu Life
The island of Oahu, which sits in the Pacific amid the expanse between Los Angeles and Tokyo, is the perfect place to trace Kanoa’s journey to this point in his life. If traffic is light, Sunset Beach is only an hour or so from the gleaming resort community of Waikiki, where he got his first surfboard on his 3rd birthday. His family, on vacation from L.A., went into a surf shop and a neon-yellow board caught the youngster’s eye. “The board was $720—a lot of money for a family that was barely getting by on a Hawaiian vacation,” he recalls. “I had no idea how much it cost, but I loved yellow at the time.”
Kanoa’s parents said no at the shop but went back the next day and bought the board. It would hardly be the last time they’d take a leap on the kid and his interest in the sport. And that afternoon, Tsutomu Igarashi, a devoted surfer himself, took his 3-year-old son and that neon-yellow board out on the predictably placid surf on Waikiki Beach. “It was like a beautiful crystal-blue swimming pool with tiny waves, and I loved it,” Kanoa says. “It was like the best place to learn surfing ever.”
Ripping it at age 5
© Kanoa Igarashi
Igarashi's been on the up since he was 3
© Kinoa Igarashi
Growing up in Huntington, I always stood out, because I was Japanese
Growing Up
Kanoa feels at home here on Oahu. But as you talk with him, you see why asking him where he’s from is so complicated. Just before he was born in 1997, his parents immigrated to California from Japan, so not surprisingly he’s always had a strong Japanese identity and an intense connection to his family’s homeland. But he also has deep roots in Southern California. Kanoa was born in Santa Monica, and after a stint in Hollywood (where he says he attended preschool with the son of Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith), the Igarashi family settled in the Orange County surf mecca of Huntington Beach.
On paper, Huntington could have been a difficult place for a Japanese American kid in an immigrant family to grow up—after all, the community is roughly 80 percent white—but surfing gave the youngster a community and a pathway to success. “Growing up in Huntington, I always stood out, because I was Japanese—I was different,” he says. “But surfing was the thing that put that racism aside and brought my world together. And because I grew up in a surf city, where surfing was a really cool thing, me being successful meant that instead of being an outsider, people treated me like a cool kid who could surf. So it definitely helped me fit in.”
Committed to reach the top
© Justin Jay
Kanoa’s school in Huntington was extremely close to the beach—close enough that his mom could pick him up after class with his wetsuit and board in the trunk and he could be in the water with his friends in five minutes. “Surfing was like my playtime, my recess back then,” he says
But before long, his playtime seemed to have serious potential. He was featured on a local newscast when he was 6. Educated admirers began calling him “the next Kelly Slater,” referencing the legendary pro (who clinched his fifth world championship in the year Kanoa was born). Sponsors came. Wins at local youth tournaments came. Flights to faraway places came.
Suddenly I was on a roll, and it really hasn’t stopped since then
By the time Kanoa was in high school, surfing was a way of life. He was traveling nine months a year, and the pressure of balancing that with his schoolwork was getting rough. His mother, who had always prioritized his academic performance, wanted him to finish high school, but Kanoa felt he was ready to join the Qualifying Series Tour, a pro circuit that’s the pathway to the CT. When he was 17, he convinced his mother to let him take the high school equivalency exam. “That was crazy,” he says, recalling what happened after he passed. “I was 17. One minute I was traveling and surfing with friends, and bang, the next minute I’m on tour. My mom was just kind of dumbfounded. My dad was like, whoa. And I was like, this is sick. Suddenly I was on a roll, and it really hasn’t stopped since then.”
"I love that feeling of wanting to be better than my opponent"
© Getty Images
Igarashi says he’s come to the North Shore every year since he was 9, and you can trace his rise in competitive surfing over those years. “I’ve been coming here since I pretty much started surfing, and every year I come here I’m catching bigger waves,” he says. Fittingly, the iconic Pipeline break sits less than a mile away. He caught a wave at Pipeline when he was 9, caught a “proper barrel” when he was 13 and paddled out for “bigger days” when he was 16.
If anything, his progression just accelerated from there. In 2016, when he was just 19, Kanoa was back at Pipeline, now as a pro on the Championship Tour, and made the finals—beating his former idol Kelly Slater in the semifinals along the way.
Ascending
As Kanoa’s consistency and explosiveness in the water improved, so did his rankings on the Championship Tour. In 2017 he finished as the world’s 17th-ranked surfer, and the following year he concluded the season in 10th overall. Last year was yet another breakthrough, as he finished the season ranked sixth, along the way notching his first CT event win—a victory in Bali where he once again beat Slater in the semis and then outsurfed Jeremy Flores in the final.
Talk of his success on the circuit reveals a sharper edge beyond his Zen-like, love-the-water mindset—the instinct that many champions possess. “I love that feeling of wanting to rip that guy’s head off,” he says. “I love that feeling of wanting to just be better than my opponent that day. I love walking away knowing, like, yeah, I outsurfed him. And that’s that competitive side of me that just becomes this animal that shines on contest days.”
Igarashi surfs four hours a day
© Justin Jay
Nestled somewhere in between his mentality as a trained killer and his emotional connection to the ocean lies an increasingly methodical athlete realizing that it will take more than natural talent, tens of thousands of lifetime hours in the water and conspicuous stoke to reach the very top of his sport. “I feel like I’m maturing—I’m professionalizing myself,” he says. “Like I’m going to go all in. If I’m going to be completely honest, I probably put in 60 or 70 percent effort this year. And in the years prior, I was probably putting in about 20 or 30 percent. I think slowly I’m getting closer to sacrificing and giving it my all.”
Striving for Perfection
To that end, Kanoa is focusing on lots of the granular details that will bump his effort ever closer to perfection. For starters, he’s working on getting more regular sleep. (“I normally get around seven hours, but I think eight is closer to optimal. I just spent a week sleeping nine hours a night and I didn’t really like it.”) Kanoa says that he had eaten meat every day of his life until he recently underwent a two-week experiment with veganism. (“It felt amazing and I woke up feeling sharper, but I had to come out of the water earlier every day because I felt so hungry.”) Through nutrition and weight training, he’s worked hard to bulk up a little on his 5-foot-11 frame. (“I just got over 170 pounds for the first time in my life and think that something around 173 will be ideal.”
Kanoa now has the maturity to understand that he can’t just flip a switch to become the ultimate professional who tackles every detail perfectly. “It’s going to be a gradual pace up,” he says. “It’s not possible to instantly go to 100 percent. But I’m committed to all the little things that I think will make a huge difference.”
Igarashi has a "huge opportunity"
© Justin Jay
Towards Gold
In the future, Tokyo beckons. At some point in 2021 or maybe 2022—no one knows for sure—all eyes in the surf world, and a far larger audience that does not normally watch the sport, will be on Tsurigasaki Beach in Chiba, Japan.
“It’s a huge opportunity for surfers to showcase our sport on a different level,” Kanoa says. (This conversation took place three months before the Tokyo Games were postponed.) “It’s a whole new audience. It’s the Olympics! Obviously, surfers will be out there trying to represent their country and win a medal, but I really hope we all we go out there and represent as surfers. We have a chance to put on a show for everybody and show the world how unique our sport is.”
In October 2019, Igarashi was formally named to the Japanese Olympic team, but the die had been cast about 18 months earlier, when he announced that he would become the first surfer to represent Japan on the Championship Tour. These decisions attracted a lot of attention—sometimes for the wrong reasons. Some even speculated, incorrectly, that he was seeking a shortcut to the Games; in the end, with his year-ending CT ranking, Kanoa would have unquestionably qualified for the U.S. team.
Kanoa Igarashi
© Zak Noyle/Red Bull Content Pool
When asked about the decision and the ensuing controversy, Kanoa answers with calm, deeply felt certainty. “I love Huntington Beach—it’s always going to be home in my heart because I grew up there,” he says. “But if people ask me where I’m from it gets more complicated. I’ve grown up with a lifestyle and in a generation where things can seem a bit borderless. And so representing Japan felt like a solid, comfortable decision. My blood is 100 percent Japanese. That’s something that you don’t change.”
I feel like I’m maturing— I’m professionalizing myself. Like I’m going to go all in
Family
Family is important to Kanoa. And he understands how much this opportunity means to his extended family, especially his grandparents—who until the recent postponement of the Games had a calendar on which they counted the days until the first day of his Olympic competition. They are among many of his relatives in Japan who get up in the middle of the night to watch him compete online but who have never seen him surf in person.
Kanoa Igarashi lights up a French lip
© Trevor Moran
“I was just in Japan,” he continues. “And my grandma told me, ‘All I want to do is stay alive until the Olympics, and after that I don’t care if I die.’ And I was like, ‘What? Don’t say that.’ But she said, ‘I’ve gone through a lot in my life. I’ve done everything that I wanted to do. But once the Olympics were announced and you told me that you were going to be in it, that’s the last thing on my bucket list. Then my life will be complete.’"
Kanoa admits that such talk, even if intended with some humor, stirs a deep sense of Japanese pride within him. “I feel very privileged and honored to just have them be so proud of me,” he says. “It makes me want to do my best.”
Success in Japan
Americans and other foreigners might have trouble understanding just how popular Igarashi is in Japan. He’s the centerpiece of a reality show that’s been on TV for years. He’s got major sponsorships outside the surfing realm. He’s the first Japanese to surf in the Championship Tour, and he’s become a breakout star in a surf-crazy country where the sport is more popular per capita than it is in the U.S.
After one big tournament result in 2018, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, asked to meet with Igarashi, and the surfer still has trouble getting his head around that encounter—on a skyscraper rooftop with helicopter blades thwacking and bodyguards patting him down and the best wishes and expectations of a nation being delivered quite officially. “I still have sleepless nights about it,” Kanoa admits.
But beyond the sleepless nights, Kanoa is enjoying his newfound fame. Like other professional athletes at the very top of their game, he is realizing that he can enjoy two public-facing identities—one as a contest-winning competitor and another as an outsized individualist, a stylish celebrity who can live exactly as he wants. That’s a kind of freedom, too. “It’s crazy when you realize that your fans are so true that no matter what you do, they’re going to love you,” says Kanoa, who cites David Beckham and LeBron James as role models in that regard.
“It’s made me realize I can really be myself. All of sudden all of my insecurities just fly out the window. I feel like I can really wear whatever I want, be whoever I want, say whatever I want—just be myself on some profound level—and everyone’s going to be, like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, he’s being himself.’"
I love going out into heats with no plan. You know, I just let it flow
But as much as he loves the fame and the personal freedom, Kanoa knows how important it will be to make the most of his Olympic opportunity. There will never be another surf competition in his life quite like this one.
Kanoa is the kind of guy for whom every break and every contest and every stop on his fast-moving globetrotting life has meaning. But the break in Chiba is not like any other break: Kanoa’s father, Tsutomu, and his surf buddies were the ones who discovered that spot decades ago. “Yeah, it’s true,” Kanoa says. “He and his friends discovered that wave. They climbed through fences and hiked through the grass to find this wave, and they called it the Dojo, and it was their little secret spot. And it’s definitely a very emotional, special connection for him—a wave that he discovered is where his son will compete at the Olympics for the first time. It’s such a crazy, full circle.”
Only a week earlier, in fact, Kanoa and his dad were out in the water in Chiba, sharing a moment in different ways. “I could tell that he was getting emotional,” Kanoa recalls. “Meanwhile, in my head, I was just looking at the waves thinking this is where the Olympics are going to be.”
I feel most free when I surf, and I've felt this freedom since I was young
When asked to assess the Olympic break, Kanoa smiles. “It’s definitely a wave that suits my surfing,” he says. “It’s technical and precise. It’s just in my blood, being Japanese, to be precise and technically sound. Every little arm movement and movement will make a big difference and there will be little room for error. And the break is really close to the beach, close to the fans. I’ve always been kind of a show-off. I want people to be close. I want people to feel it. I want to see people’s faces and that’s when I shine.”
Kanoa means “freedom.” It’s not just the etymology of his name; it’s the story of how he lives his life.
When asked if he paddles out into competition visualizing what he wants to accomplish, he shakes his head. That’s not it at all. “I love going into the ocean and going into heats with no plan,” he admits. “I take my heats and competitions these days as if they’re just another day of surfing with my friends. I go out there and everything’s just on the fly. You know, I just let it flow.”
Identity
As our interview winds down, the conversation turns to questions of identity. Because of his choice to represent Japan in international competition, Kanoa has been asked far more than most to explain what or where home really is for him. He’s got Japanese blood; he was born and raised in SoCal; he spends months at a time immersed in cultures around the world.
Kanoa says he doesn’t have a conventional homeland like most people do. But he also says he has a real home: in the water. “People come up to me and tell me how they can just see that I naturally look like I’m really calm in the ocean,” he says. “And it’s true. I’m at home in the ocean—free and open. No doubt the truest form of myself is when I’m in the water.”
The ascendant surfer whose name literally means “the free one” stares out into the Pacific, where waves tumble toward the shore, and ponders the way he has inhabited the word “Kanoa.” “I feel most free when I surf, and I’ve felt this freedom since I was young,” he says. “Being in the ocean is where I feel free.”
