Laura Crane is waving goodbye to sexism in surfing

It was during a trip to Hawaii in her mid teens, while staying at her sponsor’s beachfront house on the North Shore of Oahu, that Laura Crane realised the surf industry valued her more for her looks than her athletic prowess. “Some of the women surfers on the team would get up early to go and surf Phantoms,” she says, referring to a gnarly big wave spot that breaks over a sharp lava reef.

“I wanted to do that. But we had to go and do a photo shoot in our bikinis. We’d surf three waves, come in and change, and then do the same thing again on repeat – it was pretty numbing.”

At the time Laura had won two back-to-back British surf titles – her first when she was just 14 – and was performing well on the European scene, and she believed she’d secured a big name global surf sponsor off the back of her talent. But finding out she was actually there because she looked good in a bikini triggered a shift in Laura, which would take her years to recover from.

“I was scared to get fat,” she says. “I’d always been so focused on progression and being the best surfer I could be but if my value was my appearance and I didn’t have that then I didn’t have a sponsor. I started my 10, almost 15-year, relationship with bulimia then.”

Laura, who is now 29, was born in Bristol, but when her dad fell for surfing, they began to head down to Croyde in North Devon, one of the UK’s prime surf spots, most weekends. She was sports-mad as a kid – she loved gymnastics, swimming, cross country, and skateboarding – and very competitive. “I was always trying to be the first to the top of the climbing frame or up the tree, anything where there was a winner,” she says.

She started surfing when she was seven and quickly became obsessed, begging her family to relocate to Croyde so she could surf more. She even walked herself to the local school one day to ask if they had a space for her. They did and her parents acquiesced.

Why does she think she loved surfing so much? “I really struggled with school,” she says. “I was dyslexic, and I hated all the academic stuff. When you had to stand up in front of the class reading a book, I would do anything I could to get kicked out before it was my go, as it was just too embarrassing.”

But, she says, doing sport always lifted her confidence. “It was my superpower, the thing I was good at.” And, with surfing, the added bonus was that it got her out of a lot of school.

Back then, you didn’t see a lot of girls or women in the line up – Laura says there were just three of them – but they didn’t give it much thought. “We didn’t know anything else,” she says. “And I was a proper tomboy – you couldn’t tell me anything when I was a kid. If you were a boy and told me I shouldn’t be in the water I would paddle up to you and tell you where to go.”

She concedes there would be times, especially on bigger days, when the boys might say negative stuff but by then she was pushing the limits for their local area amongst the boys as well as the girls, so she had more than enough street cred in the water to not be fazed by it.

Laura started to win UK contests but got sponsored at a time we can now safely categorise as the peak- objectification years of women’s surfing, when the sport seemed to exist in large parts to titillate men. A global surf contest in France was promoted with a film of the world’s best surfer taking a shower and lying on a bed in her underwear, with no surf sequences at all; brand home pages would advertise board shorts with pictures of men surfing, while the girls would stand next to surfboards looking pretty in bikinis.

Alana Blanchard from Hawaii had the world’s most lucrative brand contracts on account of her model looks and frequent bikini shots which she posted to her million plus Instagram followers. I remember those days well as I was editing Cooler, a surf and style magazine and website for young women, at the time and it was depressing to watch our web traffic numbers in real-time and realise that most of our readers were not girls or women who loved surfing but men who had typed ‘Alana Blanchard ass’ or ‘Alana Blanchard naked’ into Google and arrived at our website.

“Alana was about three years older than me,” says Laura. “I competed against her but also compared myself to her as she was making the most money. She was the most famous female pro surfer even though she’d never won a World Title. It was very confusing for somebody like me who had grown up wanting to be one of the boys and respected as one of the boys.”

Laura and her fellow surfers were urged by their team managers to download Instagram and begin posting regularly – she amassed around 10k followers in three weeks. “The blow up was fast. We were 15 in bikinis just doing our sport, but we were insanely over-sexualised,” she says, adding: “But you had to be quiet back then and be grateful for even being invited to stuff.”

Laura did more and more modelling and less competitive surfing, signing up with an agency in London and moving there for a stint. She even appeared on the TV series Love Island, but she never felt that world was entirely her, and after a serious brush with sepsis found her way back to the water, moving to Portugal for several years, where she surfed and trained a lot, and had therapy for her eating disorder.

In early 2023, shortly after she’d moved back to the UK, her younger brother said he was going to surf the Cribbar, a notorious big wave spot in Cornwall, that only breaks on rare occasions. Feeling both protective and up for the craic, she decided to join him.

“I wasn’t scared about how big it was,” she says. “As I’d surfed big stuff before when I was younger, and it was pretty small to be fair, maybe 10ft [10ft isn’t small for most surfers…]. I’d never heard of a woman surfing it before so that also spurred me on, and we had a sick day.”

Laura got some media attention off the back of it, with one of the pieces showing up in the feed of Eric Ribiere, a former World Tour surfer from Brazil, who now coaches big wave surfers at Nazare, the legendary surf spot in Portugal, including the current world record holder for the biggest wave surfed, Sebastien Steudtner. “Eric messaged me and said: ‘You’re always training, what are you training for!?’” she says.

Eric and Laura had both been sponsored by the same surf brand back in the day and when he told her he thought she was built for big waves, both in terms of her physical strength but also her mental resilience, given what she’d been through in the past decade and a half, she decided to give it a go.

“He said I had a strong mind and that when it comes down to it, that’s what big wave surfing is,” she says. “Being able to tell yourself in the most stressful situations: ‘We’re good!’”

She flew out to Spain and learnt how to tow surf, that is when you catch faster and bigger waves by being pulled on a jet ski instead of paddling into them. “Hanging off the back of that rope on a jet ski, while he's sending it at 60kmph – there is something so intense about it, I loved it and felt like 12-year-old Laura again, before I was corrupted.”

When they got to Nazaré in Portugal, Eric could see how committed Laura was by the intensity of her training and the fact she would sit in the channel for six hours waiting to be allowed to take off on a wave. She had no sponsors at the time and was funding herself through her savings from her modelling days.

She describes surfing her first wave at Nazaré as a feeling of adrenaline like no other. “Eric dropped me off and said: ‘Laura, this is going to be the biggest wave you’ve ever surfed – hold tight!’ You see it coming and it’s like: ‘Ok we’re really doing this,’ then there is a quick shift, and it’s you, the board and nothing else.”

She describes it as like snowboarding in deep powder, with all the weight on the back foot, but also like “the craziest drug ever”, which makes you want to surf bigger and bigger waves. Before last winter, the biggest wave she’d surfed was 15ft in Hawaii. On her first day at Nazare she surfed a 20ft wave, then two weeks later a 30ft wave, then a month in, she surfed a 60ft wave. “I don’t know where it stops, it’s insane,” she says.

Which isn’t to say she hasn’t had self-doubt along the way. “There were definitely moments when I cried in the shower,” she says. “Thinking I’m not meant to be here amongst these big names. Part of me had crazy imposter syndrome, but then it was also nice to see people shocked to see me there and to get them to change their view on me.”

Eric, who is around the same age as Laura’s dad (“we definitely have that surfer-dad/child relationship…”) told her he believed she could be one of the best big wave surfers ever.

“That was a lot for me as no male in surfing has ever given me kudos for my physical power,” she says. “He wants to see more women out there, especially on the 100ft days.”

No woman has surfed a 100ft-wave yet though the Brazilian Maya Gabeira has surfed a 73ft wave at Nazaré. Maya is a huge hero of Laura’s along with Justine Dupont, a big wave surfer from France. “Justine has always been my absolute idol,” she says. “She does big carves on 30ft faces and I love to see women combine their femininity and power and not feel like they have to look like one of the boys. The first time I arrived in Nazaré, she was so stoked to see me, and she’s been great and supportive ever since.”

Maya, who famously got scolded on live TV by the big wave surfer Laird Hamilton for not having “the skill” to be surfing Nazaré in 2013, had also messaged Laura and offered to take her jet ski training, which she describes as a pinch-me moment. “Maya was doing this when nobody else was out there,” she says. “She was one of the pioneers, who just wanted to surf the biggest waves and she still does to this day with a smile on her face.”

She sees Maya and Justine as the wise elders passing on the knowledge to her, which she hopes to one day share with the next generation. And she is stoked to see some of her contemporaries from the surf modelling days, including Laura Enever and Felicity Palmateer from Australia, getting into big wave surfing. “We had this conversation recently where we said: ‘Isn’t it sick that our 15-year-old selves have come back out and thought fuck modelling, we want to do what we love!’”

Laura’s not about to erase her Instagram history anytime soon, despite the fact her early posts definitely have something of the FHM photoshoot about them. “I don’t want to delete them as it’s a big empowerment thing for me on a personal level, from where I was to where I am now, and I want young girls to be able to see that evolution,” she says.

She’s aware that, as with Laird Hamilton and Maya, people might question what they’re doing out there but she doesn’t care and instead feels immense pride, and also more than a little motivated by the generation that’s coming up behind them, including young super chargers such as Caitlin Simmers from the USA and Sierra Kerr from Australia.

”They’ve grown up at a time when women have more options to be athletes,” she says. “I had Kelly Holmes and Paula Radcliffe inspiring me in running and some gymnasts but there wasn’t a lot of women’s sport on TV and you couldn’t watch women’s surfing for love nor money. Now, they get good prize money and the chance to consider surfing competitively as a career choice – I’m really excited to see where it can go.”

There is of course still work to do. On a recent surf trip to El Salvador, she had a guy tell her to be careful as “it was big out there”. But she says: “We don’t have to change the minds of men, it’s about changing the minds of women.”

A version of this story appeared in Huck 81. Get your copyhere.

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