Interview with Laird Hamilton

***Cover story of Stand Up Magazine issue #25 (the last of its kind)* *(Summer 2024)***

The story about the interview with Laird Hamilton actually started years ago. After 14 years in the SUP business, Laird was like the missing piece in my big SUP puzzle. It’s a great pleasure to have met and interviewed so many people in the SUP sport. But somehow I couldn’t get close to Laird Hamilton. Laird has become a celebrity over the years and lives mostly in Malibu, California. I tried to contact Laird via social media back in 2020 and got a response, but unfortunately a negative one. I was told that Laird doesn’t do interviews and is very busy. I tried a few more times,
but then gave up.

Last year I was working on a story with Jimmy Lewis and when we were in his shaping room he showed me a board he was making for Laird Hamilton. I said to Jimmy that Laird is one of the very few people I’ve never had an interview with. Jimmy then said, “Hey, that’s no problem, I’ll just give you his number and you can call him.” I said to Jimmy that of course that’s very nice, but Laird is not the kind of person you just call on the spur of the moment and ask for an interview. Jimmy didn’t quite understand the situation and I explained that we needed a professional introduction. Jimmy understood and he emailed Laird and his wife Gabby Reece (a very well known US volleyball player) with me in the CC. Gabby got back to me and said we could set up a date or do a Zoom call. But for me, it’s important to do these interviews in person, so I asked for a personal interview. We like authentic encounters and this was going to be one.

Unfortunately, the whole thing didn’t work out due to various deadlines and I missed my printing deadline. So there was no interview in 2023. We decided that I would try again in six months’ time. After the said six months, i.e. last December (2023), I sent Gabby a text message and asked again for an interview date. I explained to her why it was so important for me to interview Laird. She totally understood and tried to be as accommodating as possible. This spring (2024) the whole thing came together spontaneously, as Laird was on Kauai with the whole family for personal reasons. Gabby spontaneously invited me to their house and two days later I was on a plane.

I was given a very warm welcome at the Hamilton house and Laird was already there. He offered me one of his new coffees and we drank it in the kitchen, with Laird mainly telling me about nutrition and healthy living. Laird had just founded a new company called “Laird Superfoods” and so we had a lively conversation, or rather, he explained to me how to eat well. He then took me to his shed, where he keeps all his stuff, and we had a very nice chat, which ended up feeling less like an interview. It was more of a conversation between two enthusiasts. I think it also had to do with the coffee we had in his kitchen ten minutes ago. Laird sat down in his hammock and we got started.

Thank you, Laird, for the warm welcome. I’d like to start at the very beginning and hear the story of how you got started with SUP.

I came to Maui in 2002 and shortly after we heard stories of Laird Hamilton surfing
waves at Ho’okipa with a huge board and a long paddle in his hand.

The main figures in the history of the modern SUP origin were always you and Dave Kalama. There were also other people like Loch Eggers who was a pioneer in the sport along with you. We’ve heard the story of how it all started in Maalaea a few times before, but let’s start here and hear your personal narrative.

Well, the absolute beginning was actually the birth of my first daughter. I wanted to take her into the sea with me and so I started riding bigger boards. They were about 12-foot boards and my goal was to learn to control them so I would be comfortable when she was old enough. My relationship with those big boards is really the foundation for stand up. Then there was this one day where it was really windy. After I rode the wave, I just stayed on the board and the wind blew me back to the peak. I did that quite a few times that
I did this quite a lot that day, but at the peak I had to lie down to catch the wave, only to get up again and so on. I thought it would be really nice not to have to lie down to catch the wave.

The spark jumps, this is the moment and the reason why we have a SUP sport. Frenchman Sylvain Cazenave was there.

At the time I was out in the waves with Dave Kalama at a nearby spot and he had an outrigger canoe paddle in the back of his truck. I asked him if I could use it. He said yes, sure, use it. I had to hunker down quite a bit when I went out to the peak as the paddle was really short. I turned around and caught the wave with the paddle and at that moment a light went on! I’ve been lucky enough to have similar aha moments with other things too. We surfed like that all day and the next day I immediately went in search of longer paddles. The board I had was quite small to stand on, but it still worked. I went to Gerry Lopez and said that I needed a board for standing, something bigger and wider. At first I also used kayak paddles and cut off the top end, but eventually
I went to MALAMA Paddles and had a long paddle made.

Can you date this moment?

You know, I’m not so sure. We’d have to ask my wife, she remembers things like that well. I would say sometime around2003/2004. There are still pictures from that day

That wasn’t from Erik Aeder, a Frenchman, was it?

No, that was Sylvain Cazenave, he documented a lot of my early stuff. He was also there for my first tow-in session. This Ma’alaea session was the starting signal for everything.

What was it like later at Ho’okipa? You started surfing big waves on those massive boards pretty quickly?

2007 Laird surfs Jaws with a SUP just 3 after the aha moment. 📸 © Erik Aeder

Yes, but back then I was often in California and used the board to train in flat water, because paddling standing up is a really good workout to be fit for surfing overall. At first we mainly surfed
smaller waves, but we got better and better at maneuvering through the white water. We started doing downwinders, paddling from island to island, and it just went in all sorts of directions.

Thank you for giving me such a great segue. The keyword is downwinder. A big step in the evolution of SUP has been downwind racing and participation has exploded.

2007 Downwind Maliko Run with the Big Wave Board. 📸 Erik Aeder

One thing I’ve always wondered: why have we never seen you at these early races?

Well… I think it’s because when I was most interested in stand up paddling, I was doing downwinders and paddling from island to island when there were no races. When the races finally came, I was on to the next thing. It was just timing, there was no particular reason. It’s like when tow-in came to Nazaré, I was already foiling and had no interest in tow-in surfing anymore.

I mean, I love racing and I’ve done some prone racing. Part of the reason we started doing this downwind thing is because of prone paddle racing. You really have to learn to read the waves in that, and that gave us a head start because we already knew how to read the waves. But… yeah, it was timing and I generally don’t like being told what to do. Standing in line and waiting for a whistle… I like racing because the outcome is fixed and not like surfing where it’s a score. I used to do paddleboard racing when I was young, but with this one it was just the timing. It was so early for us.

I paddled with my friend Loch Eggers, who was an early enthusiast, and another friend of mine, Jeff Sweet. In the early days of these things there’s always a lot of tension because you’re a ‘disrupter’ and some people don’t like that. People said that’s stupid or that’s bad, and that’s because it makes them question their own actions. It takes a certain mentality to do things even if you meet resistance.

That’s great, you’ve just given us another fantastic segue. As we all know, surfers pretty much hated SUP, and sometimes it got really ugly. That’s where the “BLAME LAIRD” slogan came from: there were rumors that it was started by haters, but also that you initiated it all yourself. Please tell us the story.

It was these guys in California. They didn’t like what I was doing and for some reason they started doing it. Plus, people who are early on in something or early adopters are a little more eccentric than others because they’re not influenced by the masses and are a little more clueless. They
weren’t as good as others, often falling in the water or getting in the way. So these guys just said it was Laird’s fault that these new people were now trying stand-up. But if a lot of the new guys had better skills and if there hadn’t been so many beginners, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten this far.
come this far. I took it as a compliment and just turned all the negativity around. I made a t-shirt and said, “Yeah, blame me for all the fun you guys are having.” So that was a smear campaign,
but I ended up having fun making shirts and filing a copyright.

It really is like that: Early followers are often hated. Now another transition to another of your sports
: foiling.

Ca. 2002 Laird and his colleague invent tow foiling with snowboard boots. | 📸 Erik Aeder

You got a lot of attention in 2002 with the movie “Step into Liquid” and everyone thought: “What the hell are they doing now?”. There was still no widespread enthusiasm, foiling disappeared and only came back much later
after stand up paddling was established. My theory – and maybe you can confirm or refute this – is that SUP was the midwife for foiling. There had to be a surfable device that you could attach a
foil to, to allow people to take off on a foil without a boat or jet ski. What do you think about that?

The truth is actually that kiting initiated the first production of foils. We all used prototypes and our whole motivation in foiling was to be able to ride huge waves. That all happened with prototypes. Then kiting came along. We were the first foilers and we were already kiting, so we combined tow-in with kiting, kitefoiling is really great. There are so many disciplines to choose from. If I lived in a place where there were no waves, I would be a kitefoiler.

But we had waves, so we didn’t pursue it any further. But in kitefoiling, we started producing foils that could actually be sold.

If you have a business, you can develop and refine the products. This ultimately led to GoFoil because Alex and these guys were kitefoilers. The ironic thing about foiling is that you normally
start with small waves and work your way up to bigger waves. That’s the normal progression, but we were already in big waves with foils and flying over these huge waves. After that came foiling in small waves, but kiting was the incentive for that. Then came stand up and prone, which is harder, but if you’re a good surfer it’s not a problem. But yes, using it in small waves was the midwife for modern foiling.

That makes sense. Then with this better technology came downwind foiling very quickly, and perhaps we can also blame Kai Lenny a little for this.

Yes, absolutely.

Then again, it’s pretty crazy to think that it’s been 8 years since we saw the first video of Kai pumping back to the second wave of a set. I think that was in Fiji in 2016. It took us a while to see wider acceptance. Now you should see the lakes in Europe, everyone is foiling. That’s 22 years after first showing up with Step into Liquid.

You have to be clear: We are big wave surfers, and the only reason foiling survived back then was because everyone wanted to do it for a while, but then everyone soon lost interest. There was a period of about 6-8 years where it was almost exclusively a few buddies and me who I persuaded to come along. The reason why – and it always seems to come back to big wave surfing – is that you have all these different groups: some are downwinders, some are windsurfers… like Kai for example, he was a windsurfer first who evolved into a big wave surfer. I was a surfer first and then went into windsurfing, but I started with surfing. Everything I’ve ever done has been driven by that. The reason,
why I exclusively foiled big waves was that I was experiencing some limitations with equipment and conventional boards. There was a limit and we thought: What if the waves get really 30 meters high? Tow boards won’t work. I know they don’t work because we’ve tried them and we know they don’t work. That was the moment when I was done with it and
just foiling because I wanted to be ready in case something rare happened.

It again depends on what your interest is at the time. When we were still windsurfing we wondered how we could get rid of the sail and we came to the tow-in.

Now maybe a more philosophical question: you have crossed so many boundaries, for example the moment you showed the world that Teahupoo can be surfed on a big day. In 2002 it was said that Jaws couldn’t be paddled into and now we have a) the Olympics at this wave in Tahiti and b) Jaws is now overrun with prone surfers as if it was a normal wave. What do you think of this development?

Paddling exists because it creates order. If there were only jet skis on the water, it would be pure chaos. The truth is that the waves are no longer as huge as they were back then and when the wind is blowing at 35 knots, nobody paddles anyway. There were some nice days with good conditions that also made paddling possible.
There are guys like Billy Kemper who are constantly pushing the limits to see how big a wave you can paddle into. Then there will be the next generation of extreme athletes who seek their limits
and find their identity in having pushed the boundaries. I mean, when I was young there was no such thing as a backflip on a motorcycle, and now you don’t even need to compete if you can’t do a double backflip. But now the bikes are better, they end up in foampitts. It’s like prone paddling in Jaws, you have flotation devices, you have oxygen and jet skis that go 70 miles and pick you right up. It’s not like you’re out there naked, just in your surf shorts. So yes, we push it, but there are also technologies that allow us to push SUP.
push. The same goes for foiling. Look at what we started with: Foils weren’t meant to do downwinders, they were meant to be pulled behind a boat at 56 km/h or faster. That’s why a lot of it came from kiting, because they developed foils for lower wind speeds that also made it possible to ride a small wave. My point is that technology doesn’t take away the talent and courage. I mean, if you look at Zane getting swallowed up in a big wave, it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing and where your jet ski is.

I know what it’s like to be out there all alone on a 14-foot SUP board surfing those waves, with a friend on the cliff who I tell if I don’t come back….
My point is, we’re always looking for ways to push the boundaries, and there are technologies that allow us to push harder.

That’s a very good point, like when I show my kids old pictures and tell them, look, they rode this wave in nothing but board shorts. Compared to today, it’s just crazy.

Exactly, and with a jet ski that’s too slow to even pick you up, but that’s what we had and that was the challenge.

Classic Jaws: Larid Hamilton owes his career and great rise to Jaws. | 📸 Erik Aeder

Yes, exactly… so now we’re wondering, what’s next? I’ve seen things coming in the past but could never predict them, and you seem to have a very intuitive mind for such things. So what could be the next big thing?

Well, I’m a lot calmer now, but I also do some things that I don’t talk about. I’ve been doing it for a while, but I don’t talk about it because I’ve learned what happens when you talk about what you do. I want to enjoy it longer. I told everyone back then, “Hey, come and see what we’re doing at Peahi,” and then the whole world shows up and you get expelled.

But obviously foiling is still in its infancy. I mean, let me put it this way: I don’t ride anything that doesn’t have a foil. Unless it has wheels. If it’s a board, it has a foil. I’m fixated on the foil when it comes to the water.

One last thing that comes to mind from the past, being from Switzerland and being a snowboarder. At the very beginning of the SUP to sport you had something going on with Nideckerboards. A traditional snowboard and boot company. We never heard any more about it. What happened there, what was going on?

Yes, that was a while ago. We wanted to mass produce SUPs and the owner of Nidecker had a good thing going. I had some prototypes made in a factory in Santa Barbara at the time, but I didn’t realize they were
that they were also working for Burton, and they were obviously competing in snowboarding.
I had trouble getting my prototypes made because they had something against Nidecker and
I didn’t know that. They did things to delay production and kept changing prices for us and stuff like that. I had a great relationship with Nidecker, they were supposed to make all my surfboards and downwind boards. We couldn’t get very far because my production was kind of sabotaged. Things often happen the way they’re supposed to, but Henry Nidecker and I are friends.

It was great to dig into the past and hear how you came into contact with the snowboarding world. Finally, and to wrap up, something very topical. You gave me one of your coffees earlier, and it turns out you’ve become quite the nutritionist.

Yes, we have started “Laird Superfoods” and this business is doing very well right now. My attitude to the business is that if it’s authentic and you do good things, you can be successful. If you can help people and do something that has a positive effect on them, then that’s great. We also have the Laird apparel and our XPT fitness program.

I see that you train a lot with the young big wave surfers. Does that only happen in California or do you also go on tour with them?

We only have a small group of people, about four or five, who are certified trainers. For example, Billy Kemper is one of them. The trainers are trained in the methods we use. Our philosophy is: breathe, move and recover.

So yes, I’m still searching, have my business, my daughters, my wife….

… and the new thing you didn’t want to talk about.