Kanoa Igarashi is pretty open about looking to wipe the slate clean after 2023 and get back to form this year. He wasn’t far from the cut line at the halfway point of the Championship Tour and a 14th-place finish in the rankings was a considerable drop from his top-five finish in 2022 — the second time he’d cracked that tier in a career that had seen a climb up the rankings every successive year since he was a rookie in 2016.
“I’d decided to try a load of new approaches with my surfing, as a way to get better, so it was a big experimental year for me,” he told The Inertia’s Ben Mondy after the season. “I discovered some things that worked, and a lot that didn’t. The results weren’t where I wanted them to be, but it was easily the biggest growth year of my career.”
Well, the 2024 season didn’t get off to a red-hot start in Hawaii. Igarashi racked up a throwaway score at Pipe and went out in the Round of 32. But then he more than made up for it with a run to the semifinals at Sunset Beach. From the outside looking in, he looked like the same guy who took a silver medal at the 2020 Summer Games in Japan and was competing for a world title on Finals Day in 2022.
“We’re back,” he told his coach, Jake Patterson, in the middle of his Finals Day at Sunset.
“You get to keep your coach,” Patterson told him, laughing.
The result shot Igarashi 11 spots up the rankings after a loss to Jack Robinson in the Final — something he made a point to look up on his phone before he’d even taken off his jersey.
“I’m really proud of this result that I had and where my head is at. I had a really hard 2023, you know? I barely made the cut, I barely made any heats,” he admits. “I’m just really proud of myself. There was a lot of times last year where I kinda lost hope and started doubting myself a little bit. And working with Jake Patterson and creating a good game plan and getting that confidence back, I’m just really happy to be back in my mojo and get back to my rhythm.”
