The jet-setting demands of Championship Tour life are wildly underestimated. Sure, there are a lot of professions that have insane travel schedules. Being a professional surfer is not the only career that fills up a passport, but there aren’t many options that do so while a person has to constantly stay at the top of their game physically. Most of us go on one surf trip and then getting back into the routine of life at home takes days, sometimes weeks to feel normal again — a normal diet, a normal sleep schedule, and the list goes on. But there isn’t much of a normal for these athletes.
The CT is currently just a couple weeks into its longest break of the season, and if I were in the shoes of a guy like Jack Robinson or Leo Fioravanti, I admit I might be anxious for some downtime. I’d be tempted to soak up this full six week stretch with nothing but home cooking, but I guess there’s some logic to staying on your toes. If you never slow down, you don’t have to work back up to speed when things move to Tahiti, right? Either way, Kanoa Igarashi convinced two of his oldest friends to come to Japan with him to surf and partake in some good old fashioned surf ambassadorship. The trip was highlighted by a Red Bull-organized event at Surf StadiumShizunami, where the three CTers put on a show while meeting some of the local young talent. And that’s where Igarashi explained the importance of their jobs (and the trip) outside of traveling around the world to surf in heats.
“It’s not like a meet and greet where it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m Jack Robinson, I’m Leo Fioravanti. No, it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s go surf,’” he says. “And it’s cool that I come here, but they’ve seen me before. One CT guy, that’s cool. But having multiple, they see how a CT person acts around another.” At the end of the day, Igarashi says he wants those kids to walk away not being star struck by an athlete like Fioravanti or Robinson, but to feel like those guys are their friends — people they know.
“My goal is to close the gap between the Japanese surfers, the Japanese junior kids, and the CT. We’re all the same. In our lifetime there’s never been an event here where the junior kids could actually see CT surfers in person.”
