For Surfer Caroline Marks, Winning Olympic Gold at Teahupoʻo Feels Like Just the Beginning

There were less than 10 minutes left in the semifinal round of the women’s Olympic surfing event in August 2024, and US surfer Caroline Marks was two points behind French athlete Johanne Defay when she saw the good wave coming and took it. Marks got barreled in the Teahupoʻo tube, then switched to turns, earning a 7.00 — the exact score she needed to advance. She matched Defay’s 12.17 points and won with the heat’s highest-scoring wave.

Marks had scored higher with other waves that week, like her first-round ride with a late start, which had her air dropping, extending, and compressing as she landed, earning her a 9.43. Though earlier rides had delivered shots of competitive momentum, the semifinal win felt big: it took her somewhere she had never been. Marks’s first Olympic run at Tsurigasaki Beach in 2021 ended with a fourth-place finish during the bronze medal match. After defeating Defay, she knew she’d be going home with at least a silver medal. “In Tokyo, I came up one short, so that felt so good,” Marks tells PS. “I actually got really emotional when I won. It was a really close heat.”

Later that day, Marks came out of the finals against Brazil’s Tatiana Weston-Webb with Olympic gold. A week out, it’s still sinking in. “There’s been a lot of emotion,” Marks says. “A lot of good emotion, a lot of happy tears, a lot of adrenaline. A very proud feeling, a very surreal feeling.”

For Marks, that pride swells when she remembers where she won, as well: She took gold at Teahupoʻo, a village on Tahiti’s coast. “Teahupoʻo” roughly translates to “wall of skulls,” and it’s home to one of the heaviest waves in the world. The high-volume, left-breaking Tahitian wave bends into beautiful and harrowing barrels. To take a clean line out of that wave is one of the ultimate skills in surfing, and it’s a rush that’s difficult to describe, Marks says.

“Winning in a wave of really big consequence and a wave like that, it just felt that much better,” Marks says. “That’s an area of my surfing that I put a lot of work into, that I want to get better at. The fact that I was able to win a gold medal under all that pressure, in proper waves — it makes it feel that much better, for sure. Real proud moment.”

It’s a historic moment, too, for Marks’s field. Until 2022, women had been strangers to the sensation of winning at Teahupoʻo for the better part of two decades. Though Teahupoʻo tube riding is a rush, it comes with risks: the wave pummels a shallow reef with sudden and singular ferocity. Due to that danger, the World Surf League pulled Teahupoʻo as one of the venues for its World Championship Tour in 2006 — but only for the women. Then, in 2020 — the same year the International Olympic Committee approved Teahupoʻo as the next Olympic surfing site — the World Surf League announced plans to bring the women’s event back to the Tahitian reef break.

In 2022, the WSL hosted women at the Outerknown Tahiti Pro (now known as the Shiseido Tahiti Pro, presented by Outerknown) for the first time in 16 years. It wasn’t the league’s only move to put women in the world’s heaviest waves that year. The WSL also hosted the first women’s Billabong Pro Pipeline and launched a fully-integrated world tour, which enabled the women to surf at all the same spots as the men throughout the annual series.

“Growing up, we didn’t have Teahupoʻo and Pipeline and all these waves on the schedule,” Marks says. “This is a very new thing. We’ve only been going to Teahupoʻo for three years on the tour. For some girls, it was maybe their first time ever being there, this year at the Olympics.”

Though the Olympics at Teahupoʻo are over, the surf spot is here to stay as a stop for women on the World Championship Tour, which means Marks’s generation of competitive surfing will have the chance — and the career-advancing incentive — to push themselves and the progression of their sport there. For Marks, what’s to come will be just as exciting as the events of this summer.

Marks surfed Teahupoʻo for the first time in February 2020, her 18th birthday month and a month before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In a video Marks shared on Instagram, she emerges from the tube in slow motion with a grin and a dazzled shrug, and hops off her board with added pop. Here, Marks is getting to know the unique wave. “It’s a place that takes a lot of experience, a lot of time,” she says. “You’re always going to be learning.”

Layne Beachley, a seven-time world champion surfer from Australia, agrees. You have to learn how to position yourself and pick up Teahupoʻo’s turbo-charged tubes just right — to get deep in the barrel and outpace the whitewash that can swallow you whole, throw you over the falls, and pin you back onto the reef, Beachley says. Learning to do so on a big day, with a cool head, takes time. “The profile of the wave as it breaks — it changes directionally,” she says. “It wraps a bit. It’s like the wave faces you as you take off, as if to say, ‘How fucking committed are you?'”

When the women lost Teahupoʻo as a venue, they lost time on tour with the wave. Any more hours and resources they’d put into surfing in Tahiti and learning Teahupoʻo would be their own. It was “complete and utter bullshit” to pull the event, Beachley says, given what her generation had done with it. Beachley, Rochelle Ballard, Keala Kennelly, and other pro surfers charged waves competitively at Teahupoʻo for nearly a decade before the WSL took it off the world tour.

“Women’s surfing was just starting to thrive in conditions of consequence,” Beachley says. “All of a sudden, those waves were being taken away from us, which was bitterly disappointing.”

Since the women’s return to Teahupoʻo in 2022, Marks’s generation has brought vindication. In 2022, Hawaiian surfer Moana Jones Wong won the first women’s Pipe Pro as a wildcard, displaying her mastery of the North Shore wave she grew up surfing. Tahitian surfer Vahiné Fierro did the same at Teahupoʻo in May 2024, winning the Tahiti Pro in massive swell and proving what women can do with enough time with a heavy wave. At the same event, Brazilian-American surfer Tatiana Weston-Webb scored the first 10 of the venue’s new era.

Marks won the Tahiti Pro in 2023. To psych herself up to surf waves at spots like Teahupoʻo and Pipeline, she relies on her support crew and summons self belief, which grows the more Marks gets out there. “Sometimes, there are certain days where it looks really scary, and it looks really intimidating, and you kind of just need to be thrown out there and show yourself, ‘Whoa, I can do it,'” Marks says. “I think that’s what we’ve all learned, all of us girls: you have Teahupoʻo on the schedule. ‘Wow, this is so gnarly. This is gonna be crazy.’ But then, all of a sudden, you go out there and you do it, you show yourself you can do it, and it just keeps ratcheting up. It’s gonna be really cool to see where it goes in a couple of years.”

For now, Marks is soaking up what feels like the biggest moment in her career so far. She’ll have more chances to get barreled, and to achieve other goals: making a cool surf film, competing in LA in 2028, and winning another world title after claiming her first in 2023. “And putting a positive light on surfing, showing the next generation how awesome it is,” Marks says.

Suzie Hodges is a freelance writer drawn to stories in science, environmental conservation, and outdoor sports. In addition to POPSUGAR, her work has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, Blue Ridge Outdoors, and The Daily Beast. Previously, she was a writer at an environmental conservation organization called Rare and at the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.