For Caitlin Simmers, Surfing Is a Dance Born on the Waves

For his ballet “Ondine” (1958), the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton spent hours studying the surge and swell of ocean waves. “I wanted the movement to be fluid like the rhythm of the sea rather than the ballet steps,” he once said.

The role of Ondine, a water nymph, was created for Margot Fonteyn, a rare ballerina whose effortless dancing and floor-skimming pointe work could create the illusion she was gliding on water.

Now there is the surfer Caitlin Simmers, another kind of water nymph who actually does dance on waves. Or that’s how it feels. With little hesitation, her small, agile frame zips through water like a mercurial ballerina whipping across the stage in tight, rapid-fire turns.

Her light feet, her undulating torso, her sensitivity to the fluctuations of an unsteady surface and her speed are all part of the delicacy of her power. She is also fearless. Her clarity comes from her deep center of gravity, which allows her to slice up and down waves like a silken ribbon or skitter past a rough patch of water in order to live out the highlight of surfing: getting barreled.

“It’s where you’re covered by the wave, and everything is in slow motion,” she said in a video interview from her hometown, Oceanside, Calif. “You feel extreme peace even though you’re in the most scary situation you’ve ever been in, navigating your way through this little door of ocean.”

Now 20, Simmers was just 18 when she became the youngest women’s world surfing champion, in 2024. What’s most striking about her style is its seamless flow. When she rides through water, it’s as if she’s filling every note of a musical phrase.

Ephemeral, visceral and daring, surfing can be an art, motion turned into magic. Simmers takes that a step further by matching her personal rhythm to that of the sea. Just as George Balanchine ballets allow you to see the music, Simmers, through her crisp fluidity, shows you that waves have different tones, different sounds. No two are alike.

“You can’t take off on a wave and be like, This is how it’s going to look,” Simmers said. “Sometimes you stumble, and your stumble can be the reason the rest of the wave was the most beautiful, unpredictable thing you’ve ever done. You had to improvise to do something new.”

She continued: “That’s the most beautiful part. Any move you make, that’s the first time it’s ever going to happen and the last.”

Simmers, on a break from the Women’s Championship Tour, visited Rockaway Beach in Queens this summer for the first time. She was recognized on the street, even on a quiet Monday when the waves were woefully weak. Simmers is, of course, an athlete. But in women’s surfing, which is undergoing a generational shift, she is also an artist, an Ondine for our time.

She approaches surfing much in the way that Alysa Liu approaches figure skating. There are competitions, including the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, where Simmers is a strong contender to make the team and win a medal. But winning isn’t everything. Surfing is a dance, and waves are music. She loses herself in them.

“When I am dancing with my friends or I’m dancing alone in my room, the best moments are when I’m not thinking about it, and it’s just happening and my body is moving,” she said. “And that’s like the same exact thing with surfing. I feel the same emotions. There’s no conscious thought. When I get off a wave that was really good, I can’t really remember what happened, but I know that that’s what I was meant to do.”

Simmers grew up in the water, surfing with her parents and her brother (the siblings were deeply into Boogie Boarding). As a young child, she took hip-hop cl***es. “I did one ballet cl*** actually, and I absolutely despised it,” she said. “I think a girl kicked me in the shins with a tap shoe, and then I was done.”

But she still loves to dance and sees similarities in the relationship between dance and music and between waves and motion. And the waves she surfs are big. In 2023, she won the Pipe Pro at the Banzai Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, where waves are notoriously treacherous.

Afterward, she gave a memorable interview: “Pipeline is for the [expletive] girls. That’s all I have to say.”

It was a real-life “Blue Crush” moment. That 2002 movie, inspired by a Susan Orlean article about a group of surfing girls, ends with the lead character competing at the Pipeline. The idea behind “Blue Crush,” that surfing serious waves is not just a male pursuit, is truer than ever.

Simmers is featured in “Now Days,” a 2026 doblockentary by Red Bull highlighting a vibrant contingent of young female surfers. She stands out for how she links maneuvers, or what surfers call technical elements. It is akin to the way a dancer tackles accents and phrasing — steps aren’t choppy or disjointed, but coordinated like long sentences with choreographed twists and turns. Waves are a force of energy, and for Simmers, a wave is a way to express herself.

“You could just go top to bottom the whole time and do turns like boom, boom, boom — repetitively and just abuse the wave like you’re the alpha of it, you’re dominating it,” she said. “Or you can try to react to the wave in a way that’s with you.”

She started making connections between surfing and dance a couple of years ago while staying with a friend in a cabin in Northern California. One evening, she flipped through a book with illustrations of surfers. In one picture, a surfer is perched on a board with a leg bent forward in a dancer’s attitude position. A quote by the spiritual teacher Ram D*** accompanies it: “Either you do it like it’s a big weight on you, or you do it as part of the dance.”

At that time, she was heading into the last stages of a competition for the world title in 2024. She was in first place and feeling that she had everything to lose and nothing to gain. “A lot of people were getting in my head, like You’ve got to win this, you got to win this,” Simmers said.

She lost her first heat and was inconsolable. Then she remembered the quote. It became her mantra that day. “The waves were perfect,” she said. “So I was like, You get to go out on these clean, beautiful waves. You get to go whirl around on the ocean.”

She told herself that even if she lost, she would “get second in the world,” she said. “You’re 18 years old, and that’s incredible. So just be proud of yourself, and carry yourself like there’s no one on the beach watching.”

She won. But she learned something important that day. “I realized that surfing is dancing,” she said. “I was trying not to feel the weight of all these other expectations. I was just doing it, dancing on the waves.”