Hawaii’s Carissa Moore is praised by friends for her champion’s heart

On the eve of the first-ever Olympic surfing event at Japan’s Tsurigasaki Beach, “it’s been pretty solid,” Carissa Moore said in an email, “and there’s definitely energy in the water.”

By finals day, big, disorganized, dangerous storm surf had derailed many competitors’ dreams, but Moore merged the ocean’s energy with her own and emerged triumphant over South Africa’s Bianca Buitendag, with whom she exchanged a cordial hug in the shorebreak before heading up the beach.

Receiving her gold medal, a teary but beaming Moore said, “I still feel like I’m going to wake up and I’m going to be like, OK, wait, it’s finals day.”

While Tsurigasaki, she said, resembled no surf break she’d known in Hawaii, Moore has been exploring new waves and embracing new experiences all her life.

In a home video clip from 22 years ago, a 6-year-old Moore looks into the camera with a serious gaze. “What I wanna be when I grow up is a pro surfer,” she says, “and take those kind of surf trips where you go, like, to Fiji and Australia — and that’s really what I want to do, just enjoy surfing and go surfing around the world with some of the girls.”

To the global audience the four-time world surfing champion is an outstanding, elite athlete and poised, gracious presence, whether standing in the barrel of an overhead wave or on a winner’s dais.

But back home in Honolulu, where she lives with her husband, Punahou 2010 classmate Luke Untermann, Moore is known to friends first as a warm, caring, thoughtful human being.

“Carissa is just the most gracious, kind person I’ve ever met, and it’s all genuine and from the heart,” said Nick White, a Punahou classmate.

“Recently, I surfed with her at Cliffs, and she was her usual self, asking about everyone in my family,” White said, “and it wasn’t until I asked what’s up that she said, ‘Oh, I’m going to Tokyo,’ which she probably wouldn’t have mentioned otherwise. She’s so humble, and, of course, the whole time she was absolutely ripping up the surf,” he said.

Fellow pro championship tour surfer Coco Ho, Moore’s childhood friend and niece of the late Derek Ho, the first Native Hawaiian to win the world surfing championship title, admitted she’d been a little nervous.

“Carissa wrote me a text before finals day, just acknowledging how beautiful Uncle Derek’s ceremony was,” said Ho, whose uncle’s paddle-out memorial took place Friday at Pipeline on Oahu’s North Shore, “and I just had to remind her how good she looked compared to everyone else (in the Olympics), but then I worried about jinxing her!”

Going into the Games, “Carissa was definitely the strongest surfer, I thought personally, but that never really guarantees you the results because there are so many good surfers and sometimes the ocean decides,” Ho said.

In Tsurigasaki’s monsoon-­swollen waves, where Hawaii’s John John Florence, two-time world champion, lost without advancing to the quarterfinals, what really impressed about Moore’s performance, Ho said, “was how bad the waves were and how tricky, but she stayed above and ahead of the curve.”

Not for nothing was Moore known as The Closer, said retired Punahou President Jim Scott, who in 2010 gave Moore a President’s Award, the highest honor for the high school senior class.

The nickname came from the Punahou admissions office, he said, because they’d call upon Moore to lead school tours for admittees they knew were being courted by other schools.

“By the end of the tour, you could see the parents beaming, thinking, ‘This is the kind of person I want my child to become, the kind of friends I want my child to have!’” Scott said with a laugh.

He noted he had given Moore two awards, in fifth and 12th grade, “and what’s cool about both is you’re nominated by classmates and teachers as someone whose had an impact on their classmates.”

These people knew her “as a serious and earnest student with an engaged intellect, and also as a kind and gracious person to be around, a person with that great smile that tells you that’s a big heart.”

Scott cited a photo from the Olympics in which Moore is “really cheering for and congratulating her Japanese counterpart. She’s obviously a fierce competitor but always notices the people around her with genuine affection and concern.”

Ho said that as a fellow Native Hawaiian, she felt Moore’s victory provided community uplift, as well.

“There’s a tremendous sense of island pride for all the Hawaiians to see Carissa take the first Olympic gold,” she said.

“To me Carissa embodies the aloha spirit in everything she does, the way she carries herself and treats people,” said White, “and the way she is aligned in the water.”

Although she missed not having her friends and family present at the Olympics due to COVID restrictions, “it’s also given me an opportunity to bond with the members of the U.S. surf team in ways we don’t normally get on tour — it’s been extra special,” Moore said of her time traveling and living with Florence, Kolohe Andino and Caroline Marks.

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The New York Times contributed to this story.