When she was 13 and surfing at Devil’s Rock on southern Morocco’s sun-baked Atlantic coast, Maryam El Gardoum felt a pull on her board’s leash. She turned around to see a local man, who she often saw in the water teaching his own kids to surf, with a stony face. “You’re catching a lot of waves,” he said. “Your place isn’t here – go home and help your mum.”
It wouldn’t be the only time that Maryam, now 27, experienced misogyny during her career as one of Morocco’s most successful women surfers – she won her first national title at 14 – but it was one of the most memorable. “It didn’t make sense as I was almost the same age as his kids,” she says. “I stayed chirpy, but I felt the pain inside. Though it also gave me a strong push, I didn’t take it as a negative – I was like: ‘I’m going to show you!’”
She had always loved playing in the ocean. Her dad was a fisherman, and from the age of three he’d take Maryam and her brothers to the beach, where they’d teach her to swim by jumping off rocks. At 11, while her brothers were surfing, she borrowed a bodyboard from one of their friends and decided to stand up on it – no mean feat, given that they’re designed to be ridden on your belly and are notoriously unstable – but she managed it on the first try.
Her brother gave her a go on his shortboard: “a tiny and slippery thing”. “It was one of the worst experiences I’d ever had,” she says, laughing. But soon after, her cousin lent her a mini mal, a far easier board to learn on. “I felt like everything was moving around me, then I realised it was me that was moving,” she says. “My feelings about surfing completely changed, I wanted to catch another wave, and then another and another.”
Equipment was scarce when she was learning in the mid-to-late 2010s, and unlike today where surf schools are scattered up and down this popular stretch of coastline, there were just a handful of surf camps, providing surf instruction and accommodation for British and European guests. So, she taught herself on boards begged and borrowed from her brothers and cousins, and their friends.
