Surfing playoff a ‘game changer’
SURFING’S answer to the Superbowl has been touted as one of the biggest evolutions in the sport by Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew.
Under a radical revamp the World Surf League is expected to open its World Championship Tour in Hawaii instead of the Gold Coast from 2019.
The changes would also see the top ranked surfers at the end of the season progress to a playoff event held in Indonesia to crown a world champion.
“This is a groundbreaking, mind-blowing shift,” Bartholomew said of the expected changes detailed yesterday.
Bartholomew is fresh from surfing the first competition in the Kelly Slater Wave Company’s state-of-the-art wavepool last month which included the likes of Mick Fanning and Steph Gilmore and was watched over by WSL owner Dirk Ziff.
The WSL has purchased a majority stake in the company and considered the event a “milestone in professional surfing”.
The 1978 world champion and former world tour president said the restructure would be the biggest change to surfing since the establishment of a world tour and Peter Drouyn’s invention of man-on-man heats for the 1977 Stubbies event at Burleigh Heads.
Bartholomew was responsible for creating the “Dream Tour” in the 1990s which aimed to put the “world’s best surfers in world’s best waves”.
“They’re going from a grand prix scenario to a playoff situation, it’s a huge play,” Bartholomew said.
“This is the biggest change in the history of the sport, the event would have the same pressure as a rugby league grand final or the NFL Superbowl.”
The Quiksilver and Roxy pros are expected to be held as usual at Snapper Rocks in March, with a Hawaiian leg introduced to open the tour in February.
The tour would also be shortened from 10 months to eight, which Bartholomew said could benefit Gold Coast surfers who fight it out in the WSL’s Qualifying Series.
He said qualifying events could be reorganised so they ran back to back so that surfers didn’t have race to opposite ends of the globe accumulating points in the hope of graduating to the WSL’s World Championship Tour.
“This could be a big help for (the Qualifying Series) because it’s harder now than when I was doing it because the sponsorship money isn’t there,” Bartholomew said.