Connor
O'Leary
INTERVIEW 01
When I was a kid, I wasn’t overly focused on one thing: I played a lot of soccer, then the surfing came into my life, and I did a lot of karate. Part of the reason I’ve become so good at surfing is because I was able to adapt to a lot of different sports when I was a kid. Surfing won at the end of the day!
My mum and dad were huge surfing fans. Mum was an ex-professional surfer coming out of Japan and my dad loved surfing as a hobby. When I was a kid, we spent most weekends driving up and down the east coast of Australia trying to find waves and I just had to tag along.
The first time my dad pushed me on a wave was at Noosa up in Queensland on the east coast of Australia. When I was a kid, I was actually pretty scared of the ocean. Noosa’s known for its nice waves and is really good for beginners, so yeah, I jumped on my dad’s board, and he pushed me on a few waves, and that’s how it all began.
It was a super surreal moment the first couple of times I stood up. You do it for the first time and feel like an absolute superhero. It’s an indescribable feeling, but it’s so addictive. That’s the reason why I do it.
INTERVIEW 02
Surfing teaches you a lot of life lessons. The ocean’s very humbling and teaches you to be adaptive. You’re going to have good surfs and bad surfs; it’s a matter of how you mentally shift your focus onto the positives instead of the negatives. Surfing is great exercise, it’s meditative. In the salt water, you instantly feel calm and relaxed, all your worries go out the window.
I’m only human, there’s always times where it feels like work, but, yeah, I love it too much and constantly go back. Surfing is not just something that I do for work, it’s my whole lifestyle. For me it’s the best lifestyle to have. It’s healthy, we do exercise, we stay outside, it’s in nature. I’m super grateful to be a professional surfer.
Surfing competitively is very stressful and results based. In 2021, falling off the World Tour and getting back on within the space of a year was a huge challenge. That same year I lost my sponsor. I made a few decisions that probably weren’t the best decisions, but I also learned from them.
When you’re losing a lot in competitive sport, you forget why you do it. Good result, bad result, it doesn’t change the person I am, and I just want to have as much fun as I can while I can. That was my main focus and I ended up getting a few good results on the back of that. I do my best surfing when I’m relaxed and having fun.
INTERVIEW 03
I think I’ve got the perfect balance of both my parent’s personalities. Mum’s super-competitive, very focus-driven and precise; dad’s a bit more open-minded, creative, flowing in nature. Dad was into the technical side of surfing while mum was more about mental toughness, so I had a really good balance.
I’m fortunate to be able to surround myself with awesome friends and family and I’ve got great coaches and trainers. At the end of the day, professional surfer or not, I’m still just a human being and want to be treated like a normal person, and that’s what my friends and colleagues around me do. It keeps me level-headed and grounded; it switches me off.
I grew up in Cronulla about 30 minutes’ south of Sydney Airport. As a kid, I would never have thought that I would have moved away, but to be able to keep improving my surfing, the first thing was to move out of there. If I’d stayed in Cronulla, I don’t know if my career would be as good as it is now.
The waves up in Lennox Head—there’s a lot of locations that are very good practice and training for the World Tour. The heart of surfing is on the north coast of New South Wales, you’ve got the Gold Coast with Snapper Rocks and there’s a lot of media and sponsors, so you can stay very relevant up here compared to in Sydney.
INTERVIEW 04
Making the Top Five, winning World Tour events and representing Japan are huge goals of mine. It’s been in my thought process for a few years to change to representing Japan. There’s a lot of great surfers coming out of Japan that have the ability to crack the championship tour.
When I was a kid growing up, we had a number of amazing Australian surfers we could look at and go, ‘That’s the level I need to be at in order to be a World Tour surfer.’ You think these guys are like perfect athletes and can never do anything wrong. Yeah, they’re unbelievably talented and everything they do is right. Actually it’s the total opposite. We all have our bad days, we all make mistakes. The reason they’re on the World Tour is because they’re able to look at their mistakes and fix them.
I want to share my experiences with the younger generation of Japanese surfers and say, 'Look, we’re normal people, we make the same mistakes and have made the same mistakes that you will when you’ve started your competitive career.' I’d love to be that role model to the up-and-coming youth of Japanese surfing, to inspire them and share that anyone can do it.
At the level we’re at, 0.1 of a percent of improvement is a massive gain. I got Rookie of the Year in 2017. After that career goal, I was like ‘Okay, that was great, what can we do better?’ For me, ‘Go Beyond’ means always trying to find ways to get better no matter what level you’re at.
On a personal level, what 'Go Beyond' means to me is always going out of your comfort zone and trying to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations. That might be me moving from my family home to Lennox Head, a new part of Australia, meeting new trainers and coaches, or being very vulnerable.
CONNOR O'LEARY
PROFILE
Connor
O'Leary
GO BEYOND
Beyond your imagination.
