“No man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” The Heraclitus quote describes Eli pretty well these days. Photo: Heff//WSL
For Maui’s Eli Hanneman, getting back on the WSL’s Championship Tour isn’t just a requalification: it’s a reintroduction.
At 21, Hanneman, who surfed his rookie year on the 2024 CT, was juggling competition with the joyful peak of planning a future with his fiancée and recovering from the life-shaking pits of nearly dying at Pipeline in 2022 and seeing his beloved hometown, Lahaina, decimated by a wildfire in 2023. He ultimately fell to the now-eliminated mid-season cut after just five events, and had to spend much of the rest of the year battling painful eczema.
If our younger selves are always with us, then that young man would have been among the hundreds cheering loudly on Thursday as Hanneman — now 23, happily married, and in great health — secured his return to the CT by finishing first on the Challenger Series and not only advancing to, but winning, the first semifinal heat of the Pipe Challenger.
“I think I’ve just been shaped by a lot of the experiences in just those two years that I was off tour,” he told The Inertia after the men’s awards ceremony. “It was a short amount of time, but it felt like a long time just because I had a lot of ups and downs along the way, so I feel like that has really forced me to grow in many different ways outside of competing and surfing.”
Hanneman called the past three or four years “very dense…just a lot happened in my life,” including the Pipeline wipeout in January 2022 that left him with a concussion, head staples and stitches, and an injury to his pancreas. With his physical ailments in the rearview, the young barrel hunter and acclaimed aerialist from the Valley Isle says he’s been shaping his life with spirituality, good company, and active personal growth.
“At the end of the day, I just kind of really hone in on my faith, what matters to me, and just having good people around me and focusing on being a happy person, aside from being a successful competitor,” he said. “I think that has really just come full circle and it’s allowed me to tap into a new version of me in the contest and in surfing.”
He called his marriage to wife Paloma Banto “a big high amongst some lows that really fired me up to be stoked on life outside of surfing,” helping to solidify his current mindset that “even when surfing wasn’t going well, I still had so much to be grateful for.”
A grateful mindset focuses on abundance over lack, but Hanneman maintains his constant forward momentum by not celebrating abundance coming to him before it arrives. Thursday’s requalification was an example of that — Hanneman asked his mother not to plan a party to celebrate the achievement until it had been announced, and refused to soften his drive despite friends assuring him for months ahead of today’s victory that it was coming.
“I just really wanted to get that confirmation, because the first time around, I thought I was good, and then I ended up having to do a lot more than I thought to get there,” he said about previous requalification hopes dashed. “So, I like to just, you know, really be sure about it before I go and start getting ahead of myself.”
Hanneman said his way of systematically rising in the Challenger Series rankings and ultimately meeting his requalification goal entailed “focusing on one thing at a time…just worrying about what was right in front of me.”
As for what’s right in front of him now, Hanneman said he’s most excited for the 2026 tour “to get a full year this time around…last time I only had half a year.” The newest addition to the dream tour, New Zealand’s Raglan, will be a new experience for Hanneman, but as his new self has learned, he approaches it with gratitude.
“I’ve never actually even really seen much about Raglan, but it’s a left, and I feel like that’s going to be cool ‘cause there’s not too many lefts on tour,” he said.
“It’s all just exciting for me — all of it.”
