By ON THE AFTERNOON of Jack Robinson’s Esquire shoot, the sand at Cabarita Beach is warm, the water clear and the waves gently undulating – the way it always seems to be on the NSW North Coast. Robinson moves easily between the shoreline and the crew gathered behind the cameras. He spends most of his time at Snapper Rocks, about a 30-minute drive north of here, and seems relaxed in these familiar surroundings. “I’ve surfed here [the North Coast] hundreds of times,” Robinson says, eyeing the sets. “Great waves around here.”
Today, he’s not here to surf. He’s here to be photographed. On Robinson’s wrist sits a Chanel J12, its polished surface catching the sunlight whenever he lifts his arm to shade his eyes. It’s an image that could feel incongruous – high luxury framed by salt air and sea spray – but Chanel takes the same approach to its watches as Robinson takes to his surfing. When it comes to precision, dedication and craftsmanship, they’re on the same wavelength.
A few days before the shoot, Robinson had been back in the water for just his fourth surf since undergoing surgery three months ago to repair a meniscus injury. He’s been surfing strictly on longboards. Sharp turns, airs and compression through his joints have been off limits. But he assures us he’s almost back to full fitness. “I reckon I’ll be good to go pretty soon,” he says. Nonetheless, he isn’t rushing it. The cost of rushing is something he’s learnt the hard way.
It’s been a long, grinding two years for Robinson and his troublesome left knee. It never fully stopped him from competing, but it did live in his head, introducing a hint of hesitation in a sport that requires total commitment.
“I don’t know if it was holding me back physically,” Robinson says, “but definitely mentally. Confidence-wise, I could only push it so far because I didn’t want to re-injure it. In the back of my mind, when I was really going for it, I was worried something could happen again.”
For a surfer whose greatest strength is his willingness to go where others won’t, that hesitation brought him slightly back to the field after a win at Pipeline in early 2023 placed him atop the world rankings. It doesn’t take much to turn a world-title campaign into a season of near-misses. Later that year, Robinson damaged the knee for the first time, at Bells, but eschewed surgery in favour of trying to manage the injury. He then re-injured the cartilage during last year’s finals in Fiji – and this time his course was clear. “It was kind of good that it happened at the last event of the year,” he says. “It made me think, All right, I’ve got this big break, I’ve got to get it [surgery] done now”.
He recently travelled to California to train at Red Bull’s high-performance centre and rehab his knee, submitting to endless testing, strength work and data analysis. “I was a full-on lab rat,” he says, laughing. The goal hasn’t been just to fix the knee; it’s been to remove the doubt that had crept into his psyche. “The goal is to be the best I’ve been in years,” he says.
He’s confident he’ll be back to 100 per cent by the time the 2026 WSL season starts in April. Not hopeful, not cautiously optimistic. Confident. When he says this, it’s in the same tone he’s always used when talking about his future.
When I first met Robinson in 2023, I asked him if he believed he’d become a world champion one day. “One hundred per cent,” he shot back. But while Robinson’s sense of certainty hasn’t faded, the pressure feels greater now. He’s made the WSL finals four years in a row, has been a permanent fixture inside the top five and has nine WSL titles to his name. In 2024, he stood on the Olympic podium with a silver medal around his neck. And yet, for all of that, he still hasn’t been a world champion. Consequently, there’s a sense he hasn’t yet fulfilled his potential, that the version of Jack Robinson the world has been waiting for is yet to arrive. Undoubtedly, injury was holding him back. The knee surgery removes that impediment, but it also raises the pressure to deliver.
In the back of my mind, when I was really going for it, I was worried something could happen again."
ROBINSON grew up in the Margaret River region of Western Australia. He learned to surf there, drawn instinctively to bigger swell. “Even when I was young, I was surfing the big waves,” he says. “I was tiny and probably wasn’t ready for it, but in my mind, I knew I wanted to do it.”
He spent his formative years paddling out at The Box, an infamous shallow right-hand reef break. “Maybe I was addicted to the adrenaline of it all,” he says. “I loved the idea of being close to something dangerous.” That appetite shaped his surfing from the start. Robinson’s style has always been defined by risk, and his bravery brought success – and attention – early. He won the WA state championship in the under-12 division when he was eight and signed a sponsorship deal with Quiksilver before he was a teenager. At 14, he topped Surfer magazine’s list of the best juniors on the planet.
But the attention that followed him from childhood wasn’t always easy to handle. Surf fans, sponsors and his own father, Trevor (who told The Australian in 2010 that he was “hand-rearing a racehorse”) expected Robinson to become one of the world’s best in short order. But his climb towards the elite ranks stalled when he toiled in the Qualifying Series for years but couldn’t break onto the Championship Tour. “You don’t know how to deal with all the attention,” he says. “A lot of times I just wanted to surf, but there were always other commitments. When I would lose contests, it would hit me harder because of all the expectations. But I don’t like to make excuses. Once I got my head in the right place, I moved past it.”
Learning to manage that pressure became as important as learning to read a wave. Over time, Robinson began setting his own expectations rather than absorbing everyone else’s. A breakthrough finally came in 2021, when he won the Mexico Open in Barra de la Cruz, Oaxaca, cementing his place on the Championship Tour. Then, in April 2022, he won the Margaret River Pro on the same stretch of coast where he’d learned to surf. “I felt super-connected to the place,” he says. “It was just meant to be.” That win gave Robinson momentum, and another victory came at G-Land on the southeastern tip of Java. He would finish 2022 ranked third in the world.
Robinson entered 2023 as a genuine title favourite and started the season with a win at Pipeline. Then came the injury. During the 2023 Bells Beach Pro, he suffered a meniscus tear and bone bruising in the surrounding area. Today, he admits he was pushing himself too hard at the time. “I was feeling pretty burnt out back then,” he says. “I didn’t realise it, but I was doing so much and working so hard, and everything came to a head.”
Despite initially being ruled out of action for at least three months, Robinson opted not to have surgery and returned to the water just six weeks after getting injured. “A lot of doctors were like, ‘No, you can’t do that so soon’, but others were saying, ‘Yeah, you probably could’. I trusted the ones that said I could.”
While Robinson’s swift return to the tour defied medical convention, it was clear he wasn’t at full strength. After beginning 2023 with three consecutive podium finishes, he was then eliminated in the round of 32 at his next four events. “I’ll be honest: I probably did come back too early,” he admits. “I had about four or five bad events where I wasn’t at my best.”
In the last event of the 2023 season, Robinson won the Tahiti Pro, catapulting him from eighth to fifth in the rankings and securing the last spot in the finals. Even half-fit, he was still one of the best surfers on the planet.
Injury would become one of Robinson’s most consistent teachers. Each setback forced him to reassess and, ultimately, mature. “The thing with setbacks is you don’t know when they’re going to happen,” he says. “They’re unpredictable. Whether it’s injuries or not getting the result you wanted, it’s those moments that make you stronger.”
A career highlight came at the 2024 Olympic Games, where Robinson made it all the way to the gold-medal heat, knocking out world champions John John Florence and Gabriel Medina en route. His heat against Florence stands out in his memory. “It was crazy because the waves were so gnarly and we were both getting flogged,” he recalls. “It was just two guys who would go anything, no matter how big.”
Despite Robinson’s best efforts, the ultimate prize eluded him. In the gold-medal matchup, he would catch only a single wave as the swell vanished at the worst time. “In the moment I was thinking I’d get the score I needed pretty easily because I knew what I could do,” he recalls. “But the waves didn’t go my way. That’s just part of surfing. Sometimes the waves don’t come.”
[Being injured] really brought me back to why I do it. Having surfing taken away from made me remember how much I love it."
Away from competition, Robinson has worked just as hard on his mind as he has on his body. Meditation is an almost-daily practice, a way of grounding himself during long waiting periods and high-pressure moments. He’s learned to detach from outcomes, to stay present and to stop burning himself out by trying to force results. “I used to beat myself up way more than I do now,” he says. “I think if you’re trying to force something to happen and it doesn’t, it comes down on you way harder. But if you go in thinking you’ll do everything you can, that will be enough.”
Robinson remains confident of becoming a world champion one day. “I think it’s all about timing. It’s divine timing, really,” he says. “I know I’m capable of beating pretty much anyone on the tour. It’s just about bringing everything together at the right moment. The last few years, I’ve had good years. I’ve been in the top five pretty much the whole time. I just haven’t put it together during the finals.”
For a long time, surfing defined itself by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t polished or refined, and the lifestyle certainly wasn’t luxurious, even for the top guys. Surf culture grew out of rebellion – “punk kids, skaters and hippie stoners,” as Robinson says. The style was loose. What mattered was what you did in the water, not how you looked doing it. “As surfers we do have our own distinct style,” Robinson says, “but I think it’s changing. Back in the day, it was a whole lot of rebellion, really.”
Today’s pro surfers are more comfortable occupying multiple worlds. They can chase barrels one day and step into high fashion the next without feeling like they’re betraying their sport. “It’s pretty cool that we can cross over now,” Robinson says. “I think, in some ways, surfing is an expression of yourself. Your style is just another way of expressing yourself.”
Robinson feels aligned with the Chanel watch he wears during the shoot. “It’s this balance between performance and aesthetics,” he says. “I feel like it’s a pretty good metaphor for surfing.”
For Robinson, surfing has changed in multiple ways since he first stood on a board at the age of two or three. What was once something he did for pleasure has become a profession. And while Robinson still loves it, it does occasionally feel unmistakably like a job, with rigid structures and requirements. “When you’re growing up, it’s just pure fun,” he says. “Then when you start getting sponsors and signing contracts, there’s this weight on your shoulders suddenly.”
The challenge, he’s learned, is not losing that original spark. “As a pro, you still have to bring it back to why you love surfing,” he says. “That’s the foundation. Sometimes you just need to find the little things. Like this year when I’m going back on tour, I’ve got some new boards that I’m excited to use. It’s the same feeling as when I was a kid and I’d be stoked to get a new board.”
His injury stripped things back even further, forcing a new perspective. “It really brought me back to why I do it,” he says. “Having surfing taken away made me remember how much I love it.”
Robinson is pleased that, starting this year, the WSL is reverting to its old structure, where the world champion is decided by a cumulative points system rather than a finals series. “Going back to the original format where the world champion is decided off of the whole year instead of one day is a lot better in my opinion,” he says. “I think everyone’s pretty stoked with that decision.”
There is also, of course, the bonus that Robinson will be surfing injury-free for the first time in three years. When the season arrives, his knee will be solid, the doubt that once hovered in the back of his mind will be gone, and whatever comes next will be met without restraint.
Credits:
Photography: Jamie Green
Styling: Grant Pearce
Grooming: Candice September
Digital operator: Georgia Tillman
