Surfing is usually an individual sport. Sophia Medina and Laura Raupp made it a team endeavour as they strategised to move out of their repechage heat at the 2025 ISA World Surfing Games together.
When the schedule for Friday, 12 September came out the night before, the two surfers who are also roommates, saw their names next to each other on the start list, alongside Spanish Olympian Nadia Erostarbe and feisty Argentine Lucia Indurain.
“We saw that we were in the same heat and I was just, ‘OK, Sophia, now we need to go through this one together’,” Raupp told Olympics.com.
Raupp was coming off a three-heat marathon on Thursday, which had significantly depleted her energy. She put up a 5.50-scoring wave to start but was struggling to fend off Erostarbe as the heat progressed. An average-scoring wave would be enough for the Spanish surfer to go through while Raupp would be eliminated.
Which is where Medina paddled in to help her teammate.
“At the end of the heat, the girl that was in fourth was needing a four-point ride, and Sophia was the higher priority than her and I said, ‘Sophia, please help me!’,” Raupp said. “And we helped each other and made it through this round.”
Medina won the heat with a total score of 10.63, which marked the first time she has placed first at the 2025 World Surfing Games. The Brazilian surfer fell to the repechage after the fourth round, but quickly bounced back from the setback by finishing in the top two of her repechage heat later the same day and winning the following one.
“I got really disappointed because it was a hard heat and when you can’t make a hard heat, you’re like, ‘OK, when it gets hard, am I able to make it? Am I good enough?’,” Medina told Olympics.com about her exit from the main round. “We all question ourselves, I think, but it’s a mind battle that we have and the good side got to win always and if I think, ‘Am I good enough?’, I’m like, ‘No, I am good enough’.”
Like Medina and Raupp, Peru’s Sol Aguirre and USA’s Eden Walla also progressed to the next repechage round, while their heat rivals, Costa Rica’s Leilani McGonagle and Spain’s Annette Etxabarri, were eliminated from the competition.