🇵🇫 Kelia Mehani Gallina

Kelia Mehani Gallina was born on August 10, 2012, and grew up in the village of Teahupo'o at the end of the road on Tahiti's south coast, in French Polynesia. Her father, Ryan Gallina, is a surfer from Hawaii who doubles as her coach; her mother is Tahitian, from Papeete. The ocean was never optional in her childhood — her father had her on his surfboard before her first birthday, and the family home looks directly out at the reef pass that has made the village famous. As she told The Inertia after her record-setting week: 'I live and grew up directly in front of Teahupo'o – I can see it from my bed.'

She first surfed the wave itself at age four, on a one-foot glassy day she is too young to remember but which the family kept in photographs. From there her progression ran through the island's more forgiving beaches: she trained mostly at Taharuu Beach and surfed Papara for its consistency, alongside her father-coach and a small crew of best friends — Terevanui Thornton, Kiara Goold and Liam Sham Koua. When the wave at home is good and not too big, she surfs it; the rest of the time she logs hours on the beach breaks. Her early contest record was built on local events at Taharuu, then extended abroad — a third-place finish at the Occy Grom Comp at Snapper Rocks in Australia and a win at the Roxy Vahine Cup at home in 2024, all before she turned thirteen.

The breakthrough came in July 2025, when the World Surf League staged the first women's edition of the Tahiti Pro Trials, the local qualification event that awards a wildcard into the Championship Tour contest at Teahupo'o. Gallina entered as the youngest and smallest competitor in the draw. On July 20, in clean two-to-three-foot waves, she beat Aelan Vaast in the deciding heat and won the whole event. 'I knew it was possible to win but didn't expect to because I'm the youngest and smallest girl,' she said afterward. 'But everything went my way, and it was the best feeling in the world.'

The win put her into the main draw of the Tahiti Pro, the final regular-season stop of the 2025 Championship Tour — and the swell forecast immediately raised the stakes. By the time the contest ran, solid surf was detonating on the reef. Gallina was candid about her nerves, saying the pressure came not from facing the world's best but from the size of the waves at a break she knows can be 'really scary sometimes.' In her opening heat she faced Australia's Molly Picklum, the world number one that season, and American veteran Lakey Peterson.

She did not win a heat — Picklum, as she cheerfully admitted, 'left me in a combo' — and she finished the event in ninth place. But the result was almost beside the point. At 12 years and 363 days old on the first day of competition, she displaced every previous record for youth on the Championship Tour, and Guinness World Records certified her as the youngest person ever to compete in a WSL Championship Tour event. Two days into the waiting period, on August 10, she celebrated her 13th birthday in the middle of the contest she had made history in.

What set the week apart, in her telling, was where it happened. She surfed in front of her school friends, her training partners and the village that raised her, with the tour's top women — including her idol, world champion Caity Simmers — offering support in the channel. Her Instagram handle, @missteahupoo, comes from the nickname the local fisherman gave her at two years old, before she had ever stood on a board; by August 2025 the name read less like a joke and more like a fact.

Gallina's stated ambitions are modest in phrasing and enormous in implication: keep improving, get 'lots of tubes,' win the Trials again and take another shot at the Tahiti Pro — as she puts it, with a few more inches of height and a bigger board. Surfing has produced young phenoms before, from Caroline Marks to Tya Zebrowski, the 14-year-old who qualified for the 2026 Championship Tour season. But none of them competed at the sport's top level as young as the girl from the end of the road, at the heaviest wave on the schedule, in her own front yard.