Tatiana Weston-Webb on her way to the Olympic finals. Photo: Beatriz Ryder // ISA
Tatiana Weston-Webb took to Instagram last week to announce that she needed a break. She cited her mental health as the driving factor behind her decision to take the rest of the season off from the WSL Championship Tour (CT). But her move, which would have once been viewed as extreme, was hardly a surprise in the current climate. She’s just the latest in a string of her peers – John John Florence, Carissa Moore, Gabriel Medina, Stephanie Gilmore, Filipe Toledo, and Julian Wilson – who also took sabbaticals from pro surfing in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 2021 introduction of the Final 5 format was supposed to make the schedule more manageable for the tour surfers. The previous two-and-a-half month offseason had an additional 10 to 12 weeks tacked on to it, depending on whether the surfer cracked the top five. In theory, surfers have more time to rest and recover, both physically and mentally, which should lead to less burnout. But we are seeing an inverse relationship for the tour’s most elite surfers, who are increasingly looking for a hiatus from competition.
Why?
You could point to an overall societal shift in the post-pandemic years that has emphasized mental health. You could look at athletes’ increasing reliance on their social media personas and the negative effects that entails. Or you can look at the common denominator between the surfers who have stepped away from the tour since 2021: All are Olympians.
Of all these sabbatical announcements, Weston-Webb was the first to suggest that the Olympics played a role. “After two Olympic cycles and 10 years of competing on the WSL Championship Tour without missing one event…I just started feeling a lot of emotional and physical burnout,” she said.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics took place in July 2021. Julian Wilson was the first to announce his break, even before the Olympics took place. Then there was Medina in 2022, Toledo, Moore, and Gilmore in 2024, and Florence and Weston-Webb in 2025.
I reached out to all these surfers to ask how much the Olympics factored into their decisions, and only Toledo’s manager opted to respond. He spoke with Toledo and reported back that the Olympics were not a key factor in his break and that his decision was purely based on spending more time with family. That doesn’t fully align with the explanation Toledo gave when he announced his hiatus, saying, “Competing at the highest level for the past decade has taken a toll on me, and I need a break to recover for the next chapter of my career.” One could make a strong argument that missing out on the 2020 Olympics and the media frenzy surrounding his historically poor performances at the 2024 Olympic venue played a factor in that “toll.”
After all, for those lucky enough to qualify for the Olympics, it’s not just another event on the schedule. It’s a four-year cycle of increased mental and physical exertion. It’s having to attend the Olympic qualifiers and represent your nation at the World Surfing Games. It’s exponentially more attention from international media outlets. It’s learning the anti-doping requirements that tediously obligate you to report your location at all times in case you are selected for a random test. And then there’s the cocktail of emotions after the Games that is so widespread it’s been coined the “post-Olympic blues.”
Filipe Toledo’s passion for the Olympic competition was evident. Photo: ISA
Of course, the increased fame of participating in the biggest sporting event brings lucrative brand partnerships, but it seems to be wearing out surfers, too.
The current generation of surfers did not invent the pro tour sabbatical. Kelly Slater, Andy Irons, and Mark Occhilupo all famously took tour breaks. But those instances, spaced out over decades, hardly amount to a trend. The current influx in sabbaticals is more curious. While each of the athletes that took post-pandemic breaks had already given at least 10 years of service to the CT and provided their unique reasonings, the relatively short time frame in which the breaks occurred among the sport’s Olympians begs for an explanation. It suggests a structural shift and not a series of coincidental events.
It would be interesting to see if these sabbaticals would have happened had the WSL not guaranteed wildcards upon return. Wilson took that risk (and technically Moore did too, but she’d get any wildcard she wanted); however, none of the others did so without the assurance of a slot.
It’s also worth noting that, of those with ambitions to return to competition, all have prioritized the Olympics. No one skipped the tour in 2023 when the ranking determined the Olympic qualification. No one skipped the ISA Olympic qualifying events. The sabbaticals were strategically taken to not harm Olympic qualification or eligibility. Toledo and Moore, for example, still competed during their 2024 sabbaticals at the World Surfing Games in Puerto Rico to remain eligible.
The top surfers value the Olympics – debatably more so than the CT. That’s logical. The Olympics are held once every four years, revered as a prestigious honor for athletes, and can lead to financial gains via partnerships and boosts in social media followings that dwarf the equivalent of a year on the CT.
But maybe that focus and determination, new to the sport of surfing since the 2016 decision to include the sport in the Olympics, have tradeoffs as well. It’s not a black and white answer, and it’s even possible that some of these surfers don’t consciously blame their Olympic participation despite the role it played. But it’s hard to ignore the early indications of this (admittedly small) sample of elite surfers. The bottom line is: Olympic surfers are experiencing challenges that push them away from the CT. It’d be hard to dismiss the Olympics as at least part of the cause.
