John Florence, a mainstay of U.S. surfing for more than two decades, took a break from the tour after winning the 2024 World Surf League championship. He and his family have sailed the world in the two years since. Courtesy Parallel Sea/KnutsonAlyssa RoenigkNov 10, 2026, 08:00 AM ETCloseAlyssa Roenigk is a senior writer for ESPN whose assignments have taken her to six continents and caused her to commit countless acts of recklessness. (Follow @alyroe on Twitter).Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsTHREE-TIME WORLD surfing champion John Florence sits on the back deck of “Vela,” his Gunboat 60 catamaran sailboat docked in Papeete on the northwest coast of Tahiti. It’s an early morning in late September and his wife, Lauryn, is inside making breakfast for their 2-year-old son, Darwin, who has walked out onto the deck and sits directly in front of Florence, his white-blond hair wild from a solid night’s sleep. Darwin was crawling when the couple started this journey a year and a half ago, so they added mesh doors to the companionways to protect him from tumbling off the deck and into the hulls.
Now, the coverings are gone, and Mom and Dad keep a watchful eye.Florence’s history is palpable on this island. He can feel it in the rumble of the waves from shore. He can taste it in the salt drying on his lips. The memories come quickly: battling Kelly Slater at Teahuopo’o, the storied break just south of Papeete, in 2016; beating longtime rival Gabriel Medina in the semifinals in 2024, then losing to Medina’s Brazilian countryman, Italo Ferreira, but leaving in the yellow jersey; lingering too long at the post-contest awards celebration and racing to make his flight home.In this place, his heart is open.
“When I woke up this morning, I would have said yes,” says Florence, 34, during a video call from his laptop. “If you asked me two days ago, I probably would have said yes.”Darwin rubs his eyes with both fists, then casts his chin downward and stares at his dad over the tops of his eyes. He doesn’t have the vocabulary yet, but his expression is begging, Close the silver box, Dad, and pay attention to me.”Right now,” Florence says, “I don’t know if I would come back.”Nearly two years ago, Florence sailed away from the only life he’d known. Born in Honolulu and raised on Oahu’s North Shore, he started surfing the island’s famed Banzai Pipeline at 8.
By 13, he was heralded as the next great Hawaiian champion. He won his first world title at 24 and is known as one of the most versatile and complete surfers of his generation.But four months after securing the 2024 World Surf League championship, Florence announced he was taking a year off from the tour to sail around the world with Lauryn and their new baby. I’ll be back in 2026, he said publicly. I’ll be back in 2026, he told himself.After accepting the WSL’s wild card for the 2026 season, Florence began questioning his return.
The decision he made next shocked surf fans and came easier than Florence cares to acknowledge. In February 2026, two months before the first event of the season, he announced he was deferring his return to the tour for another year. He sold the family’s 48-foot sailboat, which he’d purchased from snowboarder Travis Rice, bought the 60-footer they’re on today and kept going, spending the better part of the past two years at sea.Darwin celebrated his second birthday on the boat. Lauryn baked a cake and found a few pieces of felt to fashion into a happy birthday sign.
This summer, Darwin rode longboard waves with his mom and dad at a beach break on the Pacific side of Panama. He learned to snorkel floating above a reef in the Galápagos, his arms wrapped around his dad’s neck.Florence was still finding his way as an ocean sailor two years ago. Today, he captains and navigates Vela — Spanish for “sail” — through multiweek offshore passages and surfs uncrowded world-class breaks he’d never even seen in photographs.Now, with the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics on the horizon and the WSL’s Nov. 1 deadline to apply for a 2027 wild card approaching, Florence faces a decision both singular and universal: return to the tour full time in January and chase a fourth world title and a third Olympics or sail away from the potential of the next two years and continue the life he has built with his family. To qualify for the U.S.
Olympic team, he must return to competition full time.”It’s not the winning I miss. It’s not the losing. It’s the process that goes into it,” Florence says. “Putting my head down and going all-in on something, that’s what I miss and that’s what I would go back for.”But I’ve started on this new path, and it’s hard to take a step back and go back to the other path.
I know what it takes to compete and win and give everything. It would take away a lot of little moments and I’m not sure I want to give up those moments. That’s time I’ll never get back.”BEFORE HE TALKS about a return, Florence wants people to understand why he left the tour.”I don’t want anyone to think that I took competing for granted,” he says. “It was a huge part of my life.
I loved it and I love it still. I have so much respect for the WSL and the competitors. But in this moment of my life, it felt like the right decision to be with my family doing what I love with a little more freedom.”It’s early June, and Florence and his family are off the coast of Panama, roughly 1,000 nautical miles from the Bahamas, where they began this leg of the journey. Florence had never been to Panama before sailing through the canal, an hourslong journey through the locks that he calls “incredible and medieval, but efficient.”As he reminisces about the experience, something on the horizon catches his eye.”Whoa,” he says, his gaze darting upward.
“That was a wave.”His eyes return to his laptop. “Sorry. We’re going over this bank. It’s a little shallower and there’s a full swell.
But …”He’s quiet for a moment.”It was not an easy decision,” he says of informing the league of his initial choice to not compete in 2025. “I agonized for days.”He thinks back to his conversations with friends and family, to late nights spent trying to imagine spending another season as he had the year before, flying Lauryn and their new baby from contest to contest for stretches of the season and then leaving them home in Hawaii for weeks or months at a time.Eventually, he realized he couldn’t get into the headspace he needed to win. And if he wasn’t showing up to contests to win, what was the point?”My entire life was building up to the goal of competing on the world tour and winning a world title, and then I had 13 years of that, back-to-back. Everything was in service of winning a world title,” he says.
“I’ve never had the guts to separate myself from it. That was the hardest part, mentally, internally, accepting that I was going to go do something that wasn’t this one thing I’ve been chasing my entire life.”Out at sea, he wouldn’t be John John Florence, this almost mythical figure within the sport of surfing. He would be Lauryn’s husband and Darwin’s dad. Ahead was the chance to be a beginner again, as a sailor and a father.
He wouldn’t be walking away from surfing, just from competition. And it was only for one year, a chance to leave behind the boy surf fans had watched compete for decades and step fully into John Florence, a man free to follow his curiosity and discover what else he could become.It was one thing to acknowledge all of that to himself. It was another to say it out loud, to inform his sponsors, the league and his fans that he needed a break. He felt as if he was letting down a lot of people.
But he’d found something he wanted more. “Competition is amazing,” Florence says. “But it’s probably one of the more selfish things you can do. You have these blinders up and there’s nothing else, just, ‘I am here to win.’ That didn’t match with having a family.
That didn’t match with raising my son.”Florence had been planning to take a year or t
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