Surfing 101 With Olympic Athlete Caroline Marks

The 2025 SI Swimsuit model walks viewers through what she executed during the 2024 summer games.

Professional surfer Caroline Marks posed for the 2025 SI Swimsuit Issue at The Boca Raton in Boca, Raton, Fla. While on set, and in between posing for snapshots captured by Ben Horton, the 2024 Olympic gold medalist walked viewers through the ins and outs of surfing.

TRANSCRIPT

 This is Surfing 101 with Caroline Marks. So I’m basically drawing what I was doing this year at the Olympics at Teahupoʻo, getting barreled. That’s what gets like the highest points. This is like the whitewash of the wave. This is like the offshore wind, which is like the best one you can have in surfing and to get barreled.

That’s your board and you can see how the wave’s going here, so it looks like you’re gonna make it outta the barrel, which is honestly the ultimate feeling as a surfer is getting barreled. Let’s just say you’re surfing over a reef, which is normally where the waves barrel the most, you’re kind of looking for the water to be drilling off of the reef, like kind of sucking up, if that makes sense.

You just have to like read the wave, and that’s where positioning comes, and the timing of the wave, how hard you paddle, and you basically wanna be really deep but still make sure you’re making it. Normally when the waves really hollow and sucks up a lot, you need to paddle a lot harder than you think. So taking those extra paddles, I think is the best advice I can give you.

In order to get really good at surfing, you know, it takes a lot of time in the water and there’s never the same wave, so don’t get discouraged. Go out there with a friend, you know, it makes a lot more fun. That was your Surfing 101 with Caroline Marks.