How pro surfing won the internet (and why it’s good news for surf fans)
Purely in terms of growing its audience, the sport of surfing has done spectacularly well out of the world wide web. In the pre-internet age, TV coverage ranged from patchy to non-existent, depending on where in the world you happened to live, so on the whole even the biggest contests could only be experienced live by the lucky few who happened to be standing on the beach at the time. For everyone else, results and reports had to be consumed long after the fact in surf magazines, most published on a monthly basis. This certainly lent the competitors a certain air of mystique (only the best images of their best waves made it into print, after all) but for the consumer there was always a sense of arriving late to the party.
Then, in 2012, there was a seismic shift. A company called Zosea Media Holdings acquired the Association of Surfing Professionals and, at the start of the 2015 season, rebranded it as the World Surf League. Rather than screening events via conventional TV stations – never an ideal fit, given the strictures of TV scheduling and the vagaries of swell and tide – they developed a web-first broadcast strategy. The result? A few years later, Sports Business Journal reported that 28 million hours of WSL digital video content had been consumed during the 2017 surf season, making surfing the third most watched sport online in the United States behind American Football and Basketball.
Inevitably, there are various question marks swirling around this relatively new business model, not least of which is: long-term, can all those digital eyeballs and the ad revenues that flow from them really be relied upon to keep professional surfers in the manner to which they became accustomed, back when the big surf brands used to bankroll the world tour in their Nineties and Noughties heyday? Regardless of how it all pans out in the future, though, looking at things purely from the point of view of the consumer experience right-now-this-minute, there has surely never been a better time to be a surf fan.
Case in point: the Boost Mobile Gold Coast Pro, which runs until this weekend. Sure, it’s happening in the wrong time zone for Europeans, but if you want to stay up late and watch it live, you can. Alternatively, you can catch up with what you missed via a Match of the Day-style highlights show (living legend Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew is one of the pundits), or you can select an individual heat and watch it from start to finish. As long as you have an internet connection, none of this will cost you a penny.
And there’s more, because in addition to all of the above, the WSL has also taken to posting choice, behind-the-scenes titbits on social media – stuff even fans attending the contests in person don’t get to see. Some of these little snippets simply show competitors waxing their boards ahead of heats or warming up in the locker room; others, though, offer short, on-the-hoof interviews, and these can be surprisingly revealing, particularly when the athletes can be persuaded to spill the beans on the boards they’re riding.
Eleven-time world champ Kelly
Slater gave one such interview a few days ago, ahead of his second-round heat, in which he explained that the board he was about to take into battle had been around the block a few times before. “Old Faithful,” he said, of the blue-and-white board cradled under his arm. “I hadn’t ridden it in about eight years, but it felt good yesterday.” And then he gave a little half-shrug, as if to say “what the hell, let’s give it another go, shall we?”
Pro surfers typically go through surfboards at a rate of about one every ten minutes, and are constantly working closely with shapers to finetune designs in order to squeeze every last drop of performance out of them. The idea that the Greatest Surfer of All Time (TM) could simply grab an old board from the best part of a decade ago tells us that either a) he was intensely relaxed about the Gold Coast event or b) there’s something very special about that board.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Slater during all his years of competitive dominance, it’s that he always wants to win, even when he’s acting like he doesn’t. That being the case, a little analysis of Old Faithful would appear to be in order. Happily, the WSL interview concluded with footage of Slater jogging over to the contest site, carrying said board under his arm, making it possible to examine the Dan Mann-designed swallow-tail shape in all its glory, right down to the fin set-up: four regular-sized fins arrayed around a tiny, stubby little fin in the centre. This is the kind of granular detail that surf fans of the magazine era could only ever dream of.
Anyway, spoiler alert: Slater was knocked out of the contest shortly after that interview took place, so perhaps we shouldn’t spend too much time analysing his magic board. Still, the beauty of the WSL’S online offering is that surf fans 10,000 miles away from the action can now get better look at what he’s riding than the people standing on the beach at Snapper Rocks, cheering him on.
Pro surfers typically go through surfboards at a rate of about one every ten minutes