Overview:
Lakey Peterson put herself in contention for a World Championship Tour title by overcoming Brazil’s Luana Silva with her last wave at the Margaret River Pro event
Lakey Peterson’s return to the Land Down Under has brought her back to the top of the surfing world.
Santa Barbara’s most accomplished female wave shredder was only 5 when she stood up on her first board while on a family vacation in Australia.
Peterson, now 31, returned to the Southern Hemisphere to accelerate her comeback in the sport by winning the World Surf League’s Margaret River Pro last week.
“It’s cool to prove to myself that I can still do this,” she told reporters after her last-wave comeback in the final to beat 21-year-old Luana Silva of Brazil.
“There’s a lot of chitter-chatter about all the young girls, and they’re amazing, and they push me so much … But I’m still here.”
Peterson, the World Surf League Tour runner-up in 2018, was cresting in the sport when she won the Margaret River Pro for the first time in June 2019.
But she was dunked throughout much of the next seven years by a rash of injuries and a near-miss qualifying bid for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Last week’s win put her back on top, tied for the season’s tour lead with Hawai‘i’s Gabriela Bryan.
“To win twice out here is like a dream,” Peterson said. “If you would have told me that when I was 10 years old, there’s no way I would have believed you.
“If any young girls or boys out there have dreams, don’t ever give up on them, because things happen in life that you don’t expect if you keep working hard.”
A Boogie Board Biggie
Her first surfing experience came in 2000 when her parents, Sue and David Peterson, took the family on a year-long trip around the world.
They spent two of the months in Manly Beach, Australia.
“There’s a local surf school there, and I signed up,” Lakey said. “That’s where I really learned to surf and just fell in love with the water and the ocean, and the thing that surfing is.”
She impressed the locals by conquering wave after wave atop a boogie board.
“They would call her ‘Lakey Surf Legend,’” her mother said.
The blond tyke had tapped into some strong family genetics.
Her father was an accomplished tennis player. Her mother was an All-America swimmer for USC when she was known as Sue Hinderaker.
Mom held the U.S. record in the 50-yard freestyle from 1978 to 1980, a mark that got her listed in the 1980 Guinness Book of World Records. The publication crowned her as the world’s fastest female swimmer at 4.42 mph.
But America’s boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow denied Hinderaker a shot at a gold medal.
She’s shrugged it off by noting that she’d “had my chance” as a teenager when she finished seventh at the 1976 Olympic trials.
“In retrospect, missing out on the Olympics was probably why Lakey became a surfer,” Mom said.
“Because of the boycott, I got to spend time in Hawai‘i, where my love for the ocean and surfing began and was later shared with Lakey.”
Lakey’s brother, Parker, favored the pool like Mom and played water polo for Pepperdine.
Her sister, Whitney, followed Dad’s footsteps and played tennis at Cal Poly.
The youngest Peterson sampled every game imaginable before settling on surfing.
“I grew up just playing tons of different sports,” she said. “Soccer, tennis, flag football … like, that was me. I was all about sports.”
Fellow pro surfer Conner Coffin, her schoolmate at Montecito Union School, said Peterson “beat most of us at, like, flag football and every game that we would play at lunch.”
She wasn’t yet born when she took part in her first athletic event. Her mother was eight months pregnant when she competed in the 1994 Santa Barbara Triathlon.
Lakey learned to walk at about 8 to 10 months and was jumping off a diving board just a few months later, Mom recalled.
“She just loved to be leading the charge even though she was the youngest,” she said.
All on Board
Lakey decided at age 11 that surfing was her calling.
“I was like, ‘I don’t really want to drive to Bakersfield for tennis tournaments every day … I’d rather go to the beach’,” she said. “So I signed up for the Rincon Classic.”
Lakey finished second in the Menehune (Junior) Division of the Carpinteria event despite surfing in an otherwise all-boy competition.
A year later, at age 12, she won the 14-and-under division of the National Scholastic Surfing Association’s Western States Championships.
At 14, while winning the first of her consecutive junior national titles, she became the first female of any age to successfully complete an aerial maneuver.
Peterson won the 2011 U.S. Open Junior Championship at age 16 — and then returned to the Huntington Beach Pier in 2012 to shock the adult surfing world.
There, she beat Carissa Moore in the Open’s Pro Division to capture the first of her seven WCT titles.
“There’s just something so sweet about winning your first championship tour event,” Peterson said.
“It’s obviously the highest our sport gets in terms of competitive surfing and it felt very surreal to win that, especially in my rookie season.”
It made her the fresh new face of surfing. Her fame spread with Aaron Lieber’s 2013 surfing documentary, Lakey Peterson: Zero to 100.
She made the finals of three events from 2015 to 2017 before breaking through in 2018 with victories at both the Roxy Pro Gold Coast in Australia and the Corona Bali Protected.
She reached the finals in other events in Brazil and South Africa.
“Something clicked and I just went on a roll,” Peterson said. “Winning at Snapper Rocks in Australia was just this really huge breakthrough moment for me.
“It just felt that all the hard work from all the year’s previous of trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing paid off in that moment.
“I took that confidence into the rest of the season and found myself going for a world title at the end of the year.”
She finished second only to Australia’s Stephanie Gilmore, who claimed the seventh of her record eight season championships that year.
Where the Heart is
All the globetrotting couldn’t detach Peterson from her hometown roots.
She still gets outfitted by Channel Islands Surfboards, a Carpinteria company founded in 1969 by Surfing Hall of Famer Al Merrick and his wife, Terry. Their son, Britt, has kept the family tradition alive and strong.
“I’m in there all the time, talking to the shapers about what to do for the board,” Peterson said. “You build personal relationships with them.”
Britt Merrick rates Lakey among the greats who have come through the family’s world-renowned shop the last six decades.
“When you think about Santa Barbara, there’s a line of great surfers who have come from here going back to Tom Curren, Bobby Martinez and the Coffin brothers (Parker and Conner),” he said. “Lakey’s part of that heritage.
“She’s always giving back to the groms (young surfers), and she’s giving back to people who have poured into her over the years, and she’s always available.”
Merrick, who served for two decades with wife Kate as pastors of Santa Barbara’s Reality Church, learned that from personal experience after their young daughter, Daisy Love Merrick, was diagnosed with cancer.
Lakey began a prayer campaign through her video blog and even had a video about Daisy produced for the live webcast of the 2012 Nike U.S. Open.
She also got an artist friend, Hillary Dunks, to illustrate a few of her surfboards for the event with a slogan of “Pray for Daisy.”
“It spread like wildfire,” Peterson said. “That’s when I realized and decided that I wasn’t surfing for myself at the U.S. Open. I was surfing for Daisy.
“As I advanced through each heat, it felt like I was gaining momentum and surfing better.
“When I found myself in the finals, I felt no pressure.”
She defeated Moore 10.90 to 8.64 to claim her first pro championship.
Peterson was competing in Australia on Feb. 16, 2013, when she learned of Daisy’s death. Her young friend was just 8 years old.
“It was a pretty intense moment for me,” she said. “It really hit me hard.
“It put things into perspective at that moment. The Merrick family is so incredible, and her parents have handled it so well.
“But my heart just broke for them. I got pretty emotional.”
Peterson took a long walk to have a good cry. She stopped, however, when she noticed that her foot had brushed up against a daisy.
“It was her way of letting me know it’s OK,” Lakey said. “They don’t even grow daisies over in Australia.”
Olympian Task
Lakey’s family took on a new addition when she married Australian osteopath and surfer Thomas Allen in February 2019.
Her victory at the Margaret River Pro four months later buoyed her hopes of making the 2020 U.S. Olympic Team. The spots would go to the tour’s top two finishers.
“It was the first year surfing was going to be in the Olympics, and that was heavy on my mind going into the year,” Lakey said. “It was my biggest dream since I was a little girl.
“Once we came into the last few events, it came down to the wire between myself and Caroline Marks and Carissa Moore.”
It didn’t get sorted out until the final event: the Lululemon Maui Pro.
Moore took third in the competition to clinch the season’s world title. Marks tied for fifth to finish second in the standings and claim the final Olympic spot.
Peterson had to settle for Olympic alternate status when a close loss to Tyler Wright in the round of 16 dropped her to third for the season.
“It’s crazy how I watched my own daughter go through the exact same pain of missing the team by a breath, 40 years later,” Sue Peterson said.
The disappointment and a series of injuries, which included a broken ankle, took their toll on Lakey. She finished 18th in the final 2021 WSL standings when the tour resumed after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think the competitive heartbreak took me a really long time to get over,” she said. “I think I was pretty mad … I was really unmotivated after that.
“I just felt like it was, in a way, unfair getting third in the world and still not making the Olympic team.
“There were a few things I just held really tight that I shouldn’t have.”
A New Wave
Peterson overcame her funk and a recurring back ailment with a vigorous regimen of Pilates workouts.
Her comeback bore fruit when she won the 2023 Corona Open J-Bay.
She sensed a familiarity at South Africa’s Jeffreys Bay. It’s right-hand point break reminded her of the one she grew up surfing at Rincon Point.
“I just love going there,” she said. “I love the wave, I love the people, I love the place. I just clicked with it.
“To win there in 2023 after everything I’d gone through competitively, and some things I had gone through personally, it just felt like everything paid off in that moment.”
Her spiritual revival came through loud and clear in a Morgan Maassen film that was released last year by 805 Beer.
The documentary, Making Waves: The Lakey Peterson Story, highlights the lessons learned during her journey from preteen surfing prodigy to comeback veteran.
“If you hang your hat on only winning, it won’t get you anywhere,” Lakey said in the film. “That’ll drive you crazy.
“It’s about getting this incredible life that I honestly don’t know how I was so blessed to get.
“At the end of the day, life’s about the moments with people, and the moments with my husband, and getting to travel and experience the world.”
That journey brought her back to the West Coast of Australia the last few weeks for another date with destiny.
“I used to be so scared of this place when I was a rookie on tour,” Peterson said. “And then I won the event in 2019, and now I feel like I always can just surf solid out here and I can identify decent waves.
“I’ve done this a long time, so I just feel like I’ve got a lot of perspective when the waves are bad or like the waiting period goes until the end.”
Stormy conditions delayed the Margaret River Pro for nearly a week. The final between Peterson and Silva didn’t take place until April 25: the last chance to surf in an 11-day window.
It turned out to be a delay of providence for Peterson.
“I was actually stoked on all the lay days because I was real sick,” she said. “I’m fully better now and feeling great.
“The board feels good, body feels good, and it’s just kind of clicking, and I’m happy.”
She had to tap into her experience during the final after Silva took the lead with a 6.83 ride with less than five minutes on the clock.
Lakey needed a response of at least 6.01 to pull out the win.
“I knew it was close,” she said. “It was just hard out there.
“Like, it’s beautiful — there’s good ones — but it was hard to find anything with good wall.
“But that’s why you do it … Those are the moments.”
Peterson seized one with an aggressive, two-turn combo that scored a victory-sealing ride of 6.40.
She reacted to her victory by consoling Silva.
“We train together all the time,” Peterson said, “and she’s made three finals in like the last year, and I just told her that her wins are coming.
“She’s surfing so solid, and she’s just such a cool person.”
Competitive athletics have taught Lakey — as they did her mother — that falling short is a wipeout experienced by all athletes.
“What I do know is, it doesn’t make you any better or worse of a person,” Sue Peterson said. “What truly defines you is your character, not your clout.”
She knew her Lakey Surf Legend had championed that long ago.
