Carissa Moore’s decision to step away from the Championship Tour back in January created a lot of speculation around the surfing world. Is this a sabbatical? Is she retiring? We still don’t know for sure.
Personally, I think that’s perfectly fine. But the decision has a ripple effect through the rest of women’s ranks and it’s just as understandable that fans (and fellow competitors) are curious to know.
A profile published in the New York Times created major headlines when it revealed Moore’s plan to step away from full-time competition on the CT while securing wildcards at Pipe, Teahupo’o, and joining Team USA in Tahiti for this year’s Olympic games. The piece addressed her desire to start a family with her husband, finding herself outside of professional surfing, and left the door open for a return to the CT after having children. But if you watched the Lexus Pipe Pro just days later you couldn’t miss that Riss’s short-lived run was treated like a possible final farewell.
“I would have loved to have won a world title and then dropped the mic and walked away,” she told the Times, acknowledging the possibility of retiring at the top. “I would have loved the fairy tale ending.”
Now, in a recent Team USA media summit, Moore was asked about something totally unrelated to the R-word but her response may have unintentionally created more questions. For context, when Moore competed in the 2021 Olympic Games, she was about two hours from the site of the opening ceremonies. With the Olympic surfing competition being held in Tahiti this year, several thousand miles away from the opening ceremonies in Paris, she was asked about missing the big kick off once more.
“I’m a little disappointed that we’re so far away,” she said at Team USA‘s media summit. “I’m excited, obviously, to be in Tahiti and compete there. But to be so far away from everything – I haven’t had the actual, like Olympic experience quite yet. And not that I’m getting old. But I don’t know how many Olympics I’ll be a part of. But hopefully we’ll get to get a plane over there and check out the closing ceremony.”
With the ISA’s Olympic qualification process running through the CT first, Moore knows getting onto Team USA means coming back to the tour. If she had already decided this time away was a true farewell from the CT then the possibility of competing in the Olympics again, even to question if she’ll ever be a part of them in the future, wouldn’t show up in a Freudian slip.
This isn’t some wild projection that Carissa Moore is plotting a CT comeback. But if she’s saying “I don’t know,” about her Olympic future then she’s at least hinting at the same sentiment regarding her CT plans.