Nobody saw Carissa Moore finishing the 2022 World Tour as the first runner-up. As writer Ben Mondy pointed out in July of last year, she’s been on an unprecedented hot streak that goes as far back as 2018.
“Since that 2018 J-Bay Open, she has surfed in 30 CT events,” he wrote. “In all but six she made the semis or better (that means she’s made semis in 80 percent of her starts). Of those 24 semis, she progressed to the final 13 times, winning seven. That form led to two world titles, and it could be argued she had one denied her due to the pandemic in 2020. The last title was her fifth, captured at the inaugural WSL Finals. Lest we forget, during that run she also claimed surfing’s first Olympic gold medal in the delayed Tokyo games in 2021.”
So with all that in mind, it was tough to imagine her not adding a sixth world title to her resume at the WSL Finals come September — an event she entered as the number-one overall seed. Safe to say the surf world was shocked when Steph Gilmore completed a swift run through the finals field to lock up her own record-setting championship. Moore now admits the disappointment took a lot of work and a lot of time to navigate. In an interview released this week by the WSL, she talked candidly about a grieving process following her Finals upset.
“I lost the world title after being in the lead all year, and pretty much tying it up in a normal season after my first heat in Tahiti,” she said, acknowledging that before the WSL Finals were introduced as a winner-take-all event in 2021, she would have added her sixth world title….and then I got the rug swept from underneath me. It took me, I would say, a solid month to get over that one.”
Moore says she ran the gamut of emotions getting over the loss, from “crying hysterically” at moments to being angry. It was a grieving process, she calls it now.
“It takes some time to get to a place to process it and be satisfied and be at peace and be happy with that result. But if I am able to put my ego aside and really look at myself, I think you lose the joy when you start comparing yourself.”
And after winning one WSL Finals and now having lost another — starting both as the top seed with the yellow jersey — she says she’s still trying to figure out the new format.
“What do you do when you’re sitting there waiting for everybody to come to you? Who’s it gonna be?” She admits to thinking Gilmore’s hot streak that day would turn into a disadvantage for the Australian by the time their best-of-three matchup came, having exhausted all her energy taking down Brisa Hennessy, Tatiana Weston-Webb, and then Johanne Defay in consecutive heats. Instead, she ran into a competitor with a lot of momentum.
“It felt like I was swimming upstream that day. When you have someone as talented as Stephanie Gilmore —seven-time, now eight-time world champ — and she has this incredible flow, it’s pretty unstoppable”
