Bikini Rockers

This is an article I wrote that is in the current issue of foam magazine….

Bikini-Rockers: A Look at Four Athletes Who Rock Their Bathing Suits and Their Sports
By: Kristie Griffith

Mother nature is about to drop-it-like-it’s-hot. Bathing suit season, that is. The passing of crisp fall nights and chilly winter days gives way to spring and the beginning of months of lazy, warm days at the beach. While spring means parties, school breaks and sunshine, it also means bathing suits and no big pea coats and comfy jeans to hide in. It’s time to get serious so you can rock a bikini like you know you can and kick butt in whatever it is that you kick butt in. In that spirit, we have found four of the hottest bikini-rockers we know: Model and former pro beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece, wakeskater Stef Tor, Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard and ASP World Champion surfer Stephanie Gilmore. These women not only rock their swimsuits, they do it on a worldwide stage with grace and athleticism. We have the inside scoop on their secrets for looking and feeling fabulous. From the shores of Australia to Maui to California to Florida, these chicks are rockin’ it…..

Super Mama
Gabrielle Reece is known for many different things: Her former pro beach volleyball career, her height (6’3”), modeling, various media appearances and editorial contributions, even her marriage to famous tow-in surfer Laird Hamilton. At the moment, Gabby is focused on something far removed from the media circus: The newest addition to the Hamilton/Reece clan. She just gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Brody Jo. It is the second daughter born to the famous duo.

With a happy home life, a thriving career and a dedication to keeping fit, Gabby is one busy chick. To make sure she looks her best and feels good, she eats healthy organic food-really taking care to avoid processed foods-anything “out of cans or boxes.” She consistently works out, enjoying Pilates, spinning, swimming, weights and volleyball. She also advocates the “Bell Express 15” fit and slim fitness kit. The kit comes with a DVD with Gabby demonstrating strength and cardio moves. “In my mind I see myself a certain way so I expect to be fit,”Gabby said. “I don’t think ‘I’ll never lose the weight.’ Some people hold themselves there. Instead of having a picture of yourself as healthy and fit. Even now, just having had the baby. It’s fine but in my mind I’m already planning what I will go back to, and I think that. Manifest it in your mind and heart. I find the joy in eating well and working out. There are great benefits.”

For Gabby, those benefits have ranged from a successful pro beach volleyball career to modeling to helping others get healthy. She even has a website dedicated to health and well being. Being involved in sports from a young age shaped Gabby’s sense of self. Being 6’3” as a young woman, she had to make a choice to either feel weird and awkward about being so tall or to see beauty in uniqueness and she chose the latter. Raised on St.Thomas in the Virgin Islands, she moved with her mother to St. Petersburg, Florida in 11th grade and took to the volleyball court, embracing her height advantage. She won a scholarship to Florida State University and after two seasons began making treks to New York to model. Her commitment to volleyball came before modeling and she turned down five-figure jobs to make games. She won All-Tournament honors several times at FSU and in 1997 was selected for induction into the Florida State University Athletic Hall of Fame. Gabby set two school volleyball records in solo blocks (240) and total blocks (747). Both records still stand.

Gabby is a successful media figure, athlete and model but the core of her message is to embrace whatever it is about yourself that is your true essence. “Advice is tricky because we are all so different,” Gabby said. “It’s about learning what your gifts and your magic is. We all are different but we all have a gift. It’s difficult to fit into a picture of what you think you should be rather than fully embracing all of who you really are. That’s a great start in having better self-esteem. Nobody can be you better than you.”

Gabby has a sweet lifestyle of bouncing back and forth between Maui and Malibu with family in tow, depending on swell and schedules, enjoying perfect weather year round. Gabby and Laird have been married for 10 years and together for 12. Eight days after they met, they moved in together and are still going strong: “I’m not an impulsive person but I was with him. I have always been drawn to him. It was instinctive. It was not mathematical: Nice, smart, and good-looking. It was just a feeling. I was drawn. Even after all these years, I look at Laird I can feel the love alive in myself. It’s never been a stagnant love. It’s always growing. Of course we’ve had bad times but we are inspired to do the work. You start to realize that you are fortunate to have found somebody. It’s not always about finding somebody to love you-It’s about finding somebody that you love.”
**Go to Gabby’s website for tips on how to get fit: gotogabby.com.
**Check out Gabby’s ‘Fit & Healthy Prenatal workouts’ in stores now (full kits pre/post arrive in fall 08’)

Cover Girl
Amanda Beard
Southern California-based Olympic swimmer and model Amanda Beard is deep in training for the 2008 Olympic swim trials being held in Omaha, Nebraska this summer but today she has tattoos on her mind: “I’m going in to get tattooed tomorrow,” Amanda said. “I’m actually getting snowflakes tattooed on me. I haven’t completely decided where. I’m thinking I want them on my rib cage, like down my side. I kind of have this thing for snowflakes. I think they’re fun and my boyfriend has bought me a lot of books on snowflakes. I’ve been going through them seeing what kind of snowflakes I want to get on me. I’m actually doing it on L.A. Ink tomorrow. Hannah is doing it.”

Amanda is the youngest of three girls born to a jock dad and an artist mom and they are all ladies of ink. Both sisters and her mom have tattoos and one of her sisters has a large back piece (which her mom designed) and is prepping for a full sleeve. Her dad’s the only one tat-free. Tattoos add a little personal flair in a sport where solid one-piece swimsuits are the norm. Not that Amanda is bland in any way.

Last summer she sent tongues wagging with a pictorial and cover debut in Playboy magazine. Although she had creative control and didn’t show frontal nudity, it was a controversial move in a conservative sport. She has also appeared in the holy grail of chicks-in-swimsuits publications: The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. She trains hard and her body reaps the rewards. Gearing up for the trials, she is training five to six hours per day boxing, spinning, lifting weights and logging plenty of miles in the pool. If she makes the team and competes in Beijing, it will be her fourth Olympics.

Amanda began swimming when she was four and at 10 saw Summer Sanders at the Olympics and decided she wanted to be an Olympic swimmer too. After a couple of years she began to kick butt in the breaststroke and qualified for the Olympics at 14. She took home a gold in the 4X100m team medley and silver medals in the 100m and 200m breaststroke events. “I was a very immature 14-year-old,” Amanda said. “I was a really young 14-year-old. I wasn’t into boys yet or anything like that. I was still this dorky little girl. I was 100 pounds and 5’2”, just tiny and very, like, a little mommy and daddy’s girl.” She carried a teddy bear around with her at the Games, even on the podium. Flash forward a couple of Olympics and four medals later and she’s 5’8”, graces the pages of men’s magazines, gets tats and appears on late night talk shows (The Late Show with Dave Letterman and on the night of this interview-Last Call with Carson Daly.)

Amanda is based in Venice Beach where she lives with her boyfriend and trains. She will be doing a lot of spinning and dry land workouts in the coming weeks because her new snowflake tats will keep her out of the water for a bit. Then it’s back to the pool, in her bathing suit, swimming for Omaha and, perhaps, Beijing.

**Sponsors: Speedo, Oakley, Go Daddy, Orowheat & Redbull

Fantasy Isle
Stef Tor is living every playful, athletic, x-games-loving girl’s dream life. The 28-year-old wakeskating superstar lives on a lake in Orlando, Florida with three other girls, also wakeskaters. They have a mini skate ramp in the backyard (painted purple, yellow, green, blue and pink), a trampoline to practice moves on, jet skis, a boat in the driveway and countless boards, life vests and toys scattered around the yard and plenty of room to throw parties. It’s like Disneyland’s Fantasyland for the X-set. Stef is on the water by seven in the morning, already logging water time before many of her peers are out of bed.

Stef grew up in Niagara Falls, Canada. She had two older brothers and lived in the country, skateboarding and snowboarding. She convinced the owner of A-1 skate shop to hire her and was drawn to wakeboarding after seeing pictures of it in the magazines the shop carried. Every image seemed to be from Florida and everyone was smiling and tan and wearing bathing suits. Stef was in Canada where everyone was white and bundled up and cold.

10 years ago, while working at the shop, she went to a camp at a nearby lake to learn how to wakeboard and ended up staying the whole summer after landing a job at the camp. After graduating high school she moved to Toronto to study fashion and then moved to the wakeboard/wakeskate Mecca of Florida with five years of wakeboarding under her feet.

Wakeskating is a fairly new sport that is a cross between skateboarding and wakeboarding. Riders wear skate shoes and their feet are free-there are no bindings. The idea is to pull skate tricks on the water, like ollies and riding rails. It’s the “poor man’s version of wakeboarding” which was convenient since she didn’t own a boat or have a ton of money and the sport ties in with her skating roots. She soon hung up her wakeboard. A wakeskater can be pulled behind anything, even a Sea-doo. During hurricanes, Stef and her crew have even used a Ford Explorer to wakeskate ditches filled with rain water. On a trip to Cabo a few years back, they got creative and wakeskated over shallow water being pulled by an ATV on the beach.

Stef has been breaking new ground in the world of wakeskating for years. In 2004, she took home the World Champion title competing against all men (Amateur Wakeskate division/Vans Triple Crown of Wakeboarding) a coveted cover (UK’s Alliance Wakeboard magazine) and was recently featured in Volume Video Wakeskate magazine. None of this would have been possible if she was not able to live in Florida. She considers getting her green card and social security number to live in the U.S. as one of the biggest accomplishments of her life. A company she was repping and riding for at the time sponsored her and she did the foot work to make it happen.

Stef has blown minds by landing a kickflip-a really difficult move in wakeskating. Not many riders can pull it and a lot of guys told her it would take at least a year for her to land it. “I learned it in four months,” Stef said. “I seriously must have done thousands of them. I went out there and did them until I couldn’t do them anymore. I would get someone to video tape me and then I would come in and watch it frame-by-frame and then I would compare on a video frame-by-frame and I would dissect it until I knew it. I would go to bed visualizing it, I’d wake up and visualize it and then do it on the trampoline then I’d go to the water.” Her boyfriend was driving the boat for her when she landed her first kickflip, the second girl to ever do it.

When Stef isn’t at the gym or busting new moves on the water, she stays true to her fashion roots. She is a clothing designer for Underground Products, who she also rides for. She alters her clothing with dye or a sewing machine and recently took up knitting.

Another way she expresses herself is with her tattoos. She has a Tahitian-inspired tat on her arm, a star on her ankle and her last name “Tor” on her wrist. She’d like to finish her arm but has yet to find the right person for the job: “I haven’t found one person in Florida that can do it and I’ve asked around and done some research over the years,” Stef said. “The best people who do it are in Tahiti. I’ve always joked about taking a trip to Tahiti and getting the rest of my arm done…. I think that would be cool if I did go to Tahiti to get it and that would be another chapter in my life. But the biggest thing is they always say ‘stay out of the water’. How do you do that when you are a professional wakeskater?”
**Sponsors: Liquid Force/Maven, Underground Products, L.A. Fitness, JetPilot, Miami Ski Nautique, Sea-doo and Rockstar.

Happy Gilmore
Surfer Stephanie “Happy” Gilmore just got a whole lot happier: The 2007 ASP rookie just became the ASP Women’s World Champion of surfing. The ripping regular foot based in Tweed Heads, Australia is the first person in ASP history to become world champ their rookie year on tour and she did it at 19 years of age. Winning a world title is a climactic moment after a year of competition: “(It was) a big mix of emotions,” Steph writes. “At first it was very surreal but then it changed to more of a relief and now I just think about it and get so stoked out.” Steph just celebrated her 20th birthday, leaving her teen years and a trail of victories behind her.

Soon after winning the world title with the world watching, she disappeared into the “middle of nowhere in the Caroline Islands” (according to Rip Curl’s Dylan Slater). According to Wikipedia, “the Caroline Islands form a large archipelago of widely scattered islands in the western Pacific Ocean, northeast of New Guinea. The group consists of about 500 small coral islands, east of the Phillipines, in the Pacific Ocean.” So basically the Caroline Islands are a bunch of islands in the middle of the Pacific and Steph Gilmore is somewhere out there in the middle of them. As foam was rushing to print, Steph sent an e-mail with some thoughts on her new title, bathing suits and the importance of wearing sunscreen.

As a pro surfer, Steph pretty much lives in a bathing suit. She keeps fit by surfing a couple of hours a day, core training two to three times per week, stretching daily, keeping hydrated and eating foods that are easily digestible (fruits and veggies with some chocolate thrown in for fun). The overall lifestyle of a surfer contributes to looking good as well: “I don’t look that great, hahaha,” Steph writes. “But surfing involves a lot of paddling and just spending time in the ocean swimming or running around on the beach, drinking lots of water and good sleep-it all usually helps.” What does she look for in a bathing suit? “One that compliments my boobs but is comfortable for when I surf,” Steph writes. “So usually racer back tops are great for function and look good too.”

A little over one year ago, she told foam that her goal for 2007 was: “To be in the running for the world title toward the last couple of events and just to improve my surfing overall.” She surpassed that goal, and it was a lofty one, though not entirely unexpected. The surfing world has had its eye on Steph for years. In 2005 she became the youngest surfer to win an elite tour event when she won the Roxy Pro Gold Coast as a wild card. The victories this year that helped her clinch the world title are: The Mancora Peru Classic, the NAB Beachley Classic and the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach. Steph has a few words of wisdom to pass on to other girls who would like to follow in her watery wake: “Make sure you’re having fun,” Steph writes. “Don’t get discouraged by the boys and conditioner and sunscreen is your new best friend…. and patience and confidence will get you anywhere you want to go!”
**Sponsors: Rip Curl wetsuits and clothing, DHD surfboards and Creatures of Leisure Accessories.