Our Boardie of the Year 2021 travels to Pipeline, Hawaii!

Our Annual Global Boardie Awards are a celebration of our team who live and breathe our values every day. We invite the whole organisation to nominate their peers and vote for the winners. We have individual and brand/team awards for each of our values:

And the grand prize, as announced at our awards ceremony, is for the Global Boardie of the Year - the person who exemplifies each of our values. The award for 2021 went to Rose Kauffmann, Trade Marketing Coordinator in France. As well as the impressive trophy, Rose's prize was a trip to one of our sponsored events on the WSL tour - the choice of Pipeline, Hawaii, G-Land, Indonesia or France - with exclusive behind the scenes access!

Rose chose to head to Hawaii and experience the magic of the Billabong Pipeline Pro. Here's her account of a once-in-a-lifetime trip!

"Before talking to you about my stay in Hawaii, I wanted to give you a bit of a background to my story… 

I am from Paris but I used to come to Hossegor for every vacation with my parents. And after years & years of only body surfing in the beach breaks, I fell deeply in love with surfing at the age of 13. That summer where my surfer took me surfing changed my life forever. At the end of August, I had to go back to Paris & felt super depressed to be far from the ocean, far from surfing… I was a young teenager with a new passion and my bedroom was for sure expressing it: posters from the Rip Curl Pro, the Roxy Fiji Pro, a decorative broken surfboard on my ceiling, flowers necklaces, surf magazines everywhere, stickers from Billabong & …. My Blue Crush DVD. 

If you were a girl around my age in 2002, in love with surfing, you must have been watching this movie a thousand times. 

Will Anne-Marie make it to the Pipe? Will she overcome her fear of falling? Will she beat Keala Kennelly? So many important questions, right?!

For whatever reason, I am sure this movie had an impact on my dreams and on my will to make them come true. 

And then, 17 years later, here I was, on the 2nd of February 2022, standing in front of Pipeline, Hawaii, watching the Billabong Pro Pipeline, on an epic day of surfing. I am not going to lie, and I don’t care if I sound ridiculous, but it was a very emotional moment for me. I just took a moment to look back at myself when I was 13, looking at all the steps, the sacrifices, the dilemmas, the great moments, and the not-so-great moments I had faced since 13 year old me arrived here. What a journey!

I am humbly super proud of myself, and I am not ashamed to say it. I also thought of all my colleagues at Boardriders: the ones I know, the ones I don’t know, the ones that have been key on my career path: thank you. I am super thankful that my journey in the surf industry took me to Hawaii.

A special thanks to my Billabong Womens team both in Europe and in the US for making my Hawaiian stay so special."