Erin Brooks, flying high. Photo: Courtesy of Neon Wave
There’s no doubt we are watching an exciting era of women’s surfing. Flash back a little more than 20 years and Keala Kennelly and Rochelle Ballard’s presence in the lineup at Pipeline were groundbreaking. It took a full two decades for the women’s Dream Tour to take its rightful place competing in that same lineup.
Progression on the women’s side seems like it’s moving in leaps and bounds today compared to that slow march of putting them on the same stage as the men. Just watch the way Caity Simmers and Molly Picklum took on Pipe a little over a month ago as an example. According to Erin Brooks, the men are still setting the bar at a height worth targeting.
“I would love to see the women surf like the men,” she told Olympics.com. “That’s what we’re pushing for with airs and bigger barrels.”
The phenom says world champions Carissa Moore and Steph Gilmore have inspired her and the generation of young women she’s come up with but what she’s really gunning for is “to surf like Gabriel Medina and Filipe Toledo.” Brooks even credits Medina and another men’s former world champion, Italo Ferreira, for reaching out to encourage her and offer advice she can apply in the water.
To build to their level of aerial surfing, Brooks says she trains on the trampoline and skates half pipes for her rotations. She’s leaned on wave pools to bring consistency to her airs, even working with straps to get in the habit of going big, a-la Kai Lenny. “The haters,” she acknowledges, like to say this is the only arena she can surf above the lip but it’s worth pointing out snowboarding performance took off like a rocket ship when athletes took a similar approach to their training.
“I don’t want to be mean to those people but I feel like they’re a little jealous,” she admits, adding that those doubts only push her harder. She says wave pools have helped her time as well as identifying air sections in the ocean where she used to only see space for another turn.
Brooks is on a track most expect to see leading to the Championship Tour as well as a future Olympic berth. That pursuit was a roller coaster ride for the Brooks family after her Canadian citizenship came into question in June of 2023. The ISA had granted the Texas-born, Hawaiian-based athlete an exemption to compete for Team Canada because family ties granted her an opportunity to apply for dual citizenship. Her exemption was suspended at that point and all hope seemed lost when her application for citizenship was officially denied in October. Two months later, Canada’s Supreme Court overturned the ruling and she was sworn in as a citizen in January of this year before going on to compete in the ISA World Surfing Games the following month. The saga finally came to an end when Brooks was eliminated from the Games and therefore wouldn’t qualify for the Paris Games, but at just 16-years old she’ll have plenty more time to see her Olympic dream come true. Safe bet she’ll also have made some ground on her other goal by then: closing the gap between men’s and women’s performance in bigger barrels and airs.
Watch the full video interview here.
