Here’s part two of the chat we had with Jeremy about his love of barrels and how he plans for 2014 to roll out.

QS: You say you have nothing to prove, so now it also seems like you have nothing to hide.

Yeah, for sure, I have nothing to hide now. Coming from a small island in France, it took me a while to fit in the whole business side of the competitive world. But it’s like a big family now and that’s one good thing about this whole competitive tour. It’s really hard and really professional but backstage you have some good times.



QS: Tell us about your new coach, Fred Robin.

This year I started working with Fred Robin who is also from Réunion Island like me. He’s known me since I was about 4 or 5 years old and is one of the most mellow guys I know. He was my hero growing up because he was one of the guys with the best style in surfing. I think he’s a good balance for me so I decided to work with him this year.

Last year I was pretty much doing everything by myself and I thought I could do it, but nowadays it doesn’t really work like that. There’s a lot of things behind the scenes that Fred is doing for me now so he makes my life more easy. It’s always good to have another opinion from the beach telling you how your boards go, filming you on waves, making sure I eat healthy. This is my first event with Fred and I’ve known him forever. He’s a good balance for me – I can be a little crazy and he is so mellow – we get along good.

QS: It’s about the yin and the yang and the fire and the ice.

Ha! Yeah, that’s about it.

QS: What are your expectations for this year and the next few years?

After many years on tour and so many times in the top ten, in the last two years, I seriously didn’t even care whether I was number eight or number twenty. My goal is to make the top five so I’m doing the training and trying to improve my surfing.

This year is going to be a big change because my boards are changing. I was getting bored with the style of board I was riding and when you get bored nothing really comes together. So this year I’ve been having fun with new boards with a different speed and drawing different lines so that means different turns too. I don’t know what’s going to happen this year but I’m really excited because I feel my surfing is better and different. I love barrels and I love when the waves are firing like Pipe or Teahupo’o so now I just need to work on my combos. I want to make this top five really bad. I’m sure if I can make the top five I can work out a way to get further up. But for now I’ll try to do better than anything I’ve done so far which is number seven in the world.