Sea CHANGE
With her Olympic dreams on hold, surf star Sally Fitzgibbons is revelling in spending rare downtime in Australia cooking, playing chess and making a home
IN March, professional surfer Sally Fitzgibbons had her car packed full of equipment ready for the annual drive up to the Gold Coast from Gerroa, her hometown south of Sydney, to kick off the World Surf League’s 2020 Championship tour at Snapper Rocks. She just had one more training session before the trip. Coming in from the water that day, she remembers feeling energised and excited about competing in the event and for the Tokyo Olympic Games later in the year, proud to be part of history as surfing entered the arena for the first time.
In the No. 1 spot on the World Surf League’s rankings during 2019 and with a confirmed place on the Australian Olympic surfing team, 2020 was shaping up to be a great year. But it would be historic for reasons Fitzgibbons was not expecting.
“After that surf, I picked up my phone and started reading the sentences about the championship event being cancelled and didn’t know what to feel, other than very different,” Fitzgibbons says. “Suddenly, I had no events for the foreseeable future; nothing at all. It was bizarre.”
Since bursting onto the surfing scene as the youngest athlete to qualify for the World Surf League Championship Tour at just 17, Fitzgibbons has been travelling around the world for up to 11 months of each year, with the adrenaline of competitions to spur on her intensive training sessions.
“I realised quickly I had to have a framework, otherwise it was quite easy to get lost and fall into an anxious puddle without something to aim for,” the 29-year-old says. “As adults, we want the training to lead to something. I had to remember what it was like as a 14-year-old grom training just because it was really fun and didn’t have a livelihood attached to it.”
Victoria’s stage three restrictions were imposed just prior to this year’s Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach, the second event on the 2020 World Surf League World Tour.
“For fans of surfing it has become a pilgrimage that’s part and parcel of our Australian Easter break on a level only a few other events rival,” Fitzgibbons says. “Bells has that special feeling to it, and for me it’s the Wimbledon of the surfing tour with the cliffs creating an amphitheatre-like atmosphere.”
She says when you win at Bells you are lifting a trophy that’s been lifted by people who have left a mark on surfing, and the most memorable Bells for her was the 2011 event, the 50th anniversary of Bells, which became her first tour win and one she will always savour.
Despite missing the chance to ring the bell this year, she says an upside of events being postponed is the ability to work on new manoeuvres and weak spots she couldn’t before, due to the limitations on how much you can “bash and crash your body” in the short time frames between events.
“It also gave my body and mind the time to be still, which was more challenging than I thought it would be,” Fitzgibbons says. “As surfers, though, the definition of our sport is the unknown.”
Dealing with Mother Nature and spending time during competitions on hold waiting for others to decide if it’s time to compete, means surfers are uniquely prepared for this uncertainty. “It’s just a different kind of unknown,” Fitzgibbons says.
She’s also accepting of the Olympic Games upheaval, happy her invite to the “greatest sports party in the world” still stands as she recalls the impact being in the top row at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney had on her sporting aspirations as a 10-year-old.
“Our whole generation was fuelled off moments like Cathy Freeman winning gold,” Fitzgibbons says. “To be in that stadium and feel it almost lifting off in excitement was pretty influential. From that moment, in my head, I was always going to compete in an Olympic Games.”
Seven years later, she won gold at the Youth Olympic Games as a middle-distance runner (800m and 1500m). But, despite being talented in many sports that could lead her to the adult Olympics, she chose the only one that wouldn’t.
“I followed my instinct in the direction of surfing to open up a sense of adventure and community for life, but now I still get to realise that dream and go to an Olympics, it’s wild,” Fitzgibbons says.
“I remember being on a beach in France when I was the first of the Aussies to be announced as
qualifying — when I’m old in a rocking chair, I’ll look back and realise how cool that was.”
Fitzgibbons will also remember the pain it took to get there, and the hurt she felt being the habitual runner-up, including twice to Australian Olympic surfing teammate Stephanie Gilmore.
“It can be a big let-down when things don’t go your way and you wonder if you are good enough or if you have what it takes inside you,” Fitzgibbons says. “It would be easier to fade back, not wanting to expose yourself to that hurt when you give it all you’ve got. But being able to go to an Olympics makes me feel rewarded for continuing to show up.”
She says nothing in her career has been predictable, whether it’s the milestone inclusion of her sport into the Olympics, then its postponement due to an unforeseen pandemic; the evolution of the women’s world tour with equal prizemoney and event conditions, to now learning to compete on and ride wave pool technology.
“People always ask me,
‘What’s your next move?’ but it’s the surfing environment that has always been changing — all I need to do is keep applying myself and keeping up,” she says. “I feel like a rookie every year when I turn up.”
Although competing in the Olympics as individuals, she’s thankful to have Gilmore as both a rival and teammate to push her to greater heights. Neither like to lose to each other.
“Our relationship is perfect and I respect Steph’s surfing so much — we love competing against each other,” Fitzgibbons says. “To be in a team of just the four of us (it also includes Owen Wright and Julian Wilson) is a special feeling, because we started at the grassroots together.”
She says the surfing culture in Japan has so much energy and the wave at Tsurigasaki beach (also known as Shidashita) where the events will be held, could be small, or should it coincide with a typhoon, a much bigger wave.
“We’re so blessed in Australia — we have every kind of wave here to practise on,” Fitzgibbons says. “It’s another unknown, but we’ll be prepared for it either way.”
There’s a special surfing hub at the beach, but the team will also spend time at the main Olympic village and Fitzgibbons is curious as to who she’ll bump into from the sporting world’s elite athletes.
“I just hope the world can restore its strength and connectiveness by then,” Fitzgibbons says. “If all goes well, it will be a massive celebration and a sporting platform for global unity.”
No matter what twists and turns 2020 still has in store, one thing’s for certain, it will culminate in Fitzgibbons turning 30 in December, which she says half the time makes her feel like she’s lived a very full life and at other times, like life’s passed too quickly.
“I’m much calmer now than when I started my 20s,” Fitzgibbons says. “I see my life more holistically and have picked up lessons along the way — some years you pick up one thing and that’s all you can handle, but I will keep challenging myself and will be surfing for as long as I can.”
If she could talk to her younger self, she’d say: “Easy, easy — it’s all right, it’s all going to happen. I’d pull on my reigns a bit. There’s a lot of haste when the outcome is unknown, you want reassurance you’re on the right track.”
FOR now, though, Fitzgibbons is OK with slowing down. She’s enjoying connecting to her local community after 15 years of full-time travelling, which can be as isolating a feeling as lockdown has been.
“It’s been special for me to go for a run with someone and see them three days later, rather than in six months,” Fitzgibbons says. “Or dropping something you’ve cooked at a friend’s doorstep and waving to the oldies down the street — it’s been great to feel the power of community and appreciate how special our Aussie home is.”
Spending time in the kitchen and eating meals with family creates a sense of home and is Fitzgibbons’ favourite time of the day, reminding her of cooking “instinctual” recipes with her mother.
“We’d work with what we had and without recipes — someone might drop off a bunch of lemons they had too many of, so we’d make lemon drizzle cake,” she says. “It was a great way to learn to cook and in isolation life, I got out
Summer Fit, a book I published a few years ago, and cooked some of my favourite recipes again.”
It got her wondering what the legends of her sport ate, so she rounded them up during lockdown and posted “Taste of a Legend” snippets to her 568,000 Instagram followers, where they talk about their favourite recipe.
“I never know what the recipe will be — one of the legends said he ate naughty things like ice cream before competing,” Fitzgibbons says. “For me, food is the common thread between us all.”
She recently interviewed surfing legend Mark Richards about his oatmeal pancakes and got together a selection of boards he’d shaped for her to add to the clip. Previously, she shot a clip with women’s surfing legend Pam Burridge, who was world champion the year Fitzgibbons was born. “I get to meet the next generation who want everything better, bigger, faster — just like I did,” Fitzgibbons says. “But there was a spiritual element to surfing through the 1960s to early 2000s, the soul of surfing. This needs to be appreciated and I gain so much by packing up the car and heading out to talk with the older surfing legends.”
On her days off, you’ll find Fitzgibbons spending time outdoors hiking or running, working on the many life skills and crafts she’s keen to learn. And if you catch her in a rare still moment, you’ll find her in front of a chess board.
She says her dad — and manager — Martin Fitzgibbons is the ultimate chess player and it took her 15 years to finally beat him.
“You can imagine the sense of relief,” Fitzgibbons says. “In chess, you create a slow, spatial bubble and I try to do that with big life decisions and even surfing heats.
“I move the pieces, or the players I’m surfing against, strategise what waves I catch or where I’m positioned on the reef. For me, I can see it all like a giant chess board, which is probably why dad taught me how to play.”
The downtime has also given her a chance to work on developing a Surf Coach app with her dad, who writes software while they are on the road travelling to events.
She says it takes a lifetime to learn the craft of surfing, so she wants to join the dots for people even though she can’t work with them in person.
FITZGIBBONS is rarely seen without a big smile on her face, and there’s a good reason why. “Smiling lightens your load, I’d recommend forcing a smile for a second to feel lighter if you’re feeling down in isolation.
“For me, once I’ve connected to the values of my life and general blueprint of the day to either challenge or connect me, I feel good — you have to connect to the things you love and choose where you put yourself and who you have in your life and then the smile comes out naturally.”
To help find that joy inside, her main inspiration has always been nature and she says she selfishly takes so much out of it, whether running, surfing or hiking, and always comes back feeling “really full”. “It never asks anything from me, it’s just always there,” she says. “Find things you can get lost in, whether it’s nature or just hours in the kitchen cooking where you’re not thinking of a million things — having space in your life to get lost is time well spent.”
Having learnt to live with uncertainty, she’s ready to re-pack the car when the time is right, patiently preparing for the unknown event timelines to come. This time, though, she’ll carry with her what she found by accident in isolation: “The feeling of what it is to have a home.”