Sometimes, when an athlete is incredibly good at their sport when they’re young, they can struggle to live up to the expectations piled on them. That is not the case with John John Florence. When he was still just a child, he was touted as a future world champion. He was touted as the next best thing. He was touted as a legend in the making. And if there is one moment in time that crystalized the fact he was going to live up to those expectations, it was the 2012 Billabong Rio Pro.
It was the first time John John won a CT event, and he did it in typical JJF fashion. Coming up against Joel Parkinson in the final — intimidating, to say the least, since 2012 was basically the peak of Parko’s surfing — Florence needed to use more than just amazing surfing to win. World Titles require more than just great surfing, after all, and Florence hadn’t yet proven he had the competitive savvy to do it. Until Rio. Now, all these years later and with the benefit of hindsight, we can say with certainty, as the WSL did, that it was “the win that catapulted JJF To championship tour stardom.”
