Sometimes, like the sea, the world just doesn’t line up and make sense. This weekend, in a tragedy felt across the West Coast surfing community, Sophia Tiaré Bartlow, daughter of World Champion Jericho Poppler and a gifted ocean athlete in her own right, passed away in a car accident on Oahu’s North Shore.
The crash apparently happened around 10:15 p.m. Saturday night when the car Bartlow was a passenger in lost control on Waialua Beach Road in Waialua and struck a tree. The driver was arrested and is under investigation for drunken driving, among other charges.
Bartlow, like her mother, was a competitive longboarder, but she also competed on the Stand Up World Tour and won the U.S. SUP Tour national title in 2014. Poppler, who raised her daughter in Long Beach, founded the International Professional Surfers’ (IPS) female surfing tour in 1976, in which she was the inaugural year’s World Champion, according to Seasistersophia.com, Bartlow’s website.
Photo: JohnJksn via Seasistersophia.com
Bartlow graduated from the University of Hawaii in 2013, won countless longboard contests and was a colorful personality, in and out of the water. She often expressed gratitude in media interviews during her career, obviously proud of who she was and her roots, describing herself as a “third-generation water woman.”
“Life is a gift,” she said in a 2015 interview. “We are immensely blessed to be surfers.”
Bartlow was 25.
