World championship still in reach for Huntington Beach surf star Kanoa Igarashi
Kanoa Igarashi couldn’t have been much older than 5 years old when he was asked by a television news reporter what his goal in surfing was.
“World champion,” he said.
Now, nearly 20 years later, a world championship is within reach for the Huntington Beach local.
The Rip Curl World Surf League Finals will be held in the next week or so depending on conditions — most likely this Friday — at Lower Trestles in San Clemente. Igarashi is one of five men and five women who will compete for surfing’s ultimate prize.
While winning a surfing contest certainly is something Igarashi is capable of, he has an uphill battle to climb because of the format which was implemented by the WSL last year.
The top five ranked surfers in both the men’s and women’s divisions are determined by the 10 Championship Tour contests over the past year. The No. 1-ranked surfers — Filipe Toledo of Brazil and Carissa Moore of Hawaii — receive automatic bids into the finals in a best-of-three heats matchup.
As the No. 5 seed, Igarashi will first have to beat the No. 4 seed — Brazil’s Italo Ferreira, the 2019 world champion and the 2020 Olympic gold medalist.
If Igarashi wins that heat, he gets No. 3-seed Ethan Ewing of Australia. A win there puts him up against No. 2-seed Jack Robinson of Australia. And a win there puts him into the best-of-three matchup with Toledo, who will be rested and ready.
But instead of giving the “one wave at a time” cliché response, Igarashi, 24, is honest when asked about the task in front of him.
“It’s just overwhelming, there’s no running away from it,” he said. “You literally have the best surfers in the world right in front of you. It’s not just one time, not two, it’s three, four, five, I don’t even know how many heats it is.
“Right away, right off the bat I have to wake up and go up against a world champion [Ferreira]. That describes my day, and I just want to make sure I wake up and am ready to surf a lot of heats but at the same time, I really have to put everything I have into the first heat.”
Igarashi and Ferreira have a history, most notably in the Olympic gold medal heat last year in Japan when Ferreira came out on top and Igarashi went home with silver.
“If someone were to ask me who I’d want to compete against here at Trestles, I would say the first guy I want to surf against is Italo,” Igarashi said.
Against Ferreira, and if he makes it that far, against Toledo, Igarashi would be surfing against charter members of the “Brazilian Storm,” the Brazilian surfers who have dominated the men’s division in recent years and have made Lowers their home away from home.
Toledo and other Brazilians live in San Clemente now. But Igarashi isn’t buying any talk of a “home wave advantage.”
“To be honest, I think the person that surfs Lowers the least amount is the one who has the advantage,” he said. “It’s a really playful wave, and the more you surf it, the more jaded you get. Such an amazing wave.
“There’s nothing really to learn out there, it’s a simple wave. You just attack it the way you want; everyone surfs the wave different. You just let your personality shine and let your surfing do the work.”
Toledo has finished as high as No. 2 in the world, but still hasn’t won a world title like fellow Brazilians Gabriel Medina, Ferreira and Adriano de Souza in recent years.
It’s not for a lack of talent, but just a matter of being in the right frame of mind.
“Not with my surfing but with my life,” Toledo, 27, said. “Understanding the little things and controlling what I can control and understanding there are things I can’t control. That’s part of life. It made my life so much easier and happier and I feel like not really caring about people’s opinions made me feel more confident with myself and that’s what took me all the way up here.”
On the women’s side, there is no one who compares to Moore in recent years. She has won the last two world championships, has five world titles overall, and also won gold in the Olympics.
Moore, 30, is chasing Australian Stephanie Gilmore’s seven world crowns, but catching Gilmore isn’t necessarily Moore’s focus.
“I’m definitely very much in the present but I do spend some time reflecting and thinking about what’s next and what I want to leave behind,” Moore said. “I think ‘legacy’ is different for everybody. For me maybe it’s not the most world titles, it’s about how you make people feel and the impression you make and the inspiration you leave behind. So I’m more focused on that than the results.”
The top five women’s seeds, in order from one to five, are Moore, Johanne Defay (France), Tatiana Weston-Webb (Brazil), Brisa Hennessy (Costa Rica) and Gilmore.
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