U.S. Open of Surfing will return in September
Ready or not, the U.S. Open of Surfing is back.
The event is scheduled to hit the sand and surf on the south side of the Huntington Beach Pier in September, organizers announced Wednesday. But it’s unclear whether the event will have its big festival footprint as it has had in previous years.
“I’m beyond excited. It feels kind of like Huntington’s baby,” said Surf City resident and surf photographer Michael Latham, who has been going to the event for the past two decades. “We have the air show and all the other events, but the U.S. Open — to me, that’s Huntington Beach.”
The new dates are Sept. 2026.
The festival and surf contest, like other mega-events that draw big crowds, were canceled last year.
Vans, the Costa Mesa brand that has sponsored the event since 2013, has pulled out of this year’s event.
“After careful consideration, we have decided to forgo our support & sponsorship of this year’s U.S.
Open as we continue to ensure the health and safety of our employees, athletes, consumers and local community remains our top priority,” George Pedrick, brand communications for Vans, said in an email. “As we look towards a brighter future beyond the global pandemic, we look forward to bringing the evolution of the Vans U.S. Open of Surfing to life in 2022 alongside IMG and WSL.”
There’s no word yet from organizer IMG, which has put on the event for years, on a new sponsor or the festival footprint, which typically includes BMX and skate competitions and demonstrations and booths for promotions and merchandise.
The event will be held later in the year than usual, with the U.S. Open of Surfing typically held from late July into the first week of August.
According to the World Surf League, the event will be focused on the surf competition.
The footprint for the surf contest will include an athlete area, judging and broadcast areas. There are 16 event partners and more details about their involvement are expected in coming weeks, according to WSL.
The surf contest will be part of a new Challenger Series, one of four events that bring together the world’s best on the World Championship Tour and surfers on the Qualifying Series, the sport’s minor leagues.
The series, which starts in Huntington Beach before heading to Portugal, France and Hawaii, is “the ultimate battleground for surfers to showcase their talents for the chance to qualify for the following season of the elite-level Championship Tour (CT),” the World Surf League said in its announcement.
All of the events, including Huntington Beach, are subject to change due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“The health and safety of our athletes, staff, and the local community are of the utmost importance and the WSL has a robust set of procedures in place to keep everyone safe,” the announcement read. “These plans are unique to each event and include measures like testing for athletes and essential staff, masks and strict physical distancing measures, temperature checks, and minimal personnel onsite.”
Latham, a nurse who has seen coronavirus hospital admissions decline dramatically in recent months, said he feels comfortable with crowds coming back to Huntington Beach because the outdoors, in the sun, is the best place to hang out.
“That’s the one place everyone has been safe,” he said. “I know it looks like a lot of people are on the sand, but when it’s 90 degrees on the beach, no one is that close to anyone else, despite what it looks like.”
One of his favorite sights is the umbrellas stacked on the sand and he loves talking to visitors from around the world. But the best part, he said, is seeing top-notch surfing during competition and in practice for the big event.
“I love you can get up in the morning and see the best surfers in the world practicing,” he said, comparing it to watching your favorite football team practice in the exhibition season. “You don’t get to get that close to the athletes in any other sport. … Everybody is out there, the whole industry is out there surfing. Especially as a photographer, I don’t even know where to point my camera.”
By the end of the week, Latham typically feels burnt out, picking up trash from his lawn and ready for the tourists to go home. But he’s got a new appreciation for the event after it was canceled in 2020.
“I will never complain about it again — just bring it back,” he said with a chuckle.
The event will come on the heels of the new World Surf League Finals held just south of San Clemente at Lower Trestles, with the top five male and female competitors fighting for a world championship in a one-day event, which will have a waiting period of Sept. 9-17 to ensure good waves.
The Challenger Series events allow up-and-coming surfers a chance to earn points to make it onto the next year’s World Tour and also giving top World Tour surfers a safety net if they are in danger of falling out of the top rankings.
“I’m ecstatic to hear that the world’s best surfers will be back in town for the U.S. Open, at a time that should provide the best waves HB has to offer,” local surfer Louis Rice said. “I love everything about the U.S. Open — the excitement, the many social events, hosting surfers from around the world. I’m looking forward to another great event.”
The competition field will include 96 men and 64 women — including 34 men and 17 women from the Championship Tour, 58 men and 44 women allocated by the WSL regions, two men’s and women’s World Junior wild cards and two men’s and one women’s wild cards. Any unused CT spots will become wild cards.
Prize money for winners will be $20,000 for both divisions.
There will be plenty of local surfers to cheer on, such as World Tour standouts Kolohe Andino and Caroline Marks, who live in San Clemente, or Huntington Beach favorite and two-time U.S. Open champion Kanoa Igarashi. They all are preparing to compete at surfing’s debut in the Tokyo Olympics, which starts this month.
Two-time U.S. Open of Surfing champ Courtney Conlogue said she was looking forward to having the event back.
“I know a lot of local crew missed having it,” the Santa Ana surfer said. “I’m just really looking forward to being at home and competing in a jersey.”
Conlogue, 28, has competed in the event since she was 11. It’s one of the few events of the year that family and friends can come watch her in action and cheer on the sand and from the pier.
“It’s just my roots, it’s where I come from and where I found my inspiration,” she said.
Major surf contests at the pier have always been a part of the summertime schedule in Surf City, dating back to 1959 when the West Coast Surfing Championships were held at the pier.
The U.S. Open of Surfing launched in 1994, following the OP Pro surf contest that had financial troubles in the early 1990s and never rebounded from a tarnished past charred by images of a beach riot in the mid-1980s that began during a bikini contest.
The U.S. Open has had its wilder years, at one time hosting a freestyle motocross contest on the sand, poker in the festival area and even 100 steer and 25 horses on the sand in 2007 to promote the OC Fair.
In 2013, the event took a blow after a riot broke out in Huntington Beach’s downtown after the surfing finals, causing police and officials to clamp down in years to follow, nixing music concerts on the sand, prompting bag checks as beachgoers entered the venue and adding security and video cameras watching over attendees.
In recent years, after Vans took over sponsorship in 2013, the event has been more family-focused, offering movie nights and games for youngsters on the sand.
With Vans not at the helm this year, it’s hard to know what the U.S. Open of Surfing event will look like or how many people will attend.
Prior to the pandemic, the event was one of the area’s major moneymakers.
In 2018, Visit Huntington Beach teamed up with Destination Analysis to study the local impact of the U.S. Open, finding direct visitor spending jumped from $21.5 million in 2010, the last time a study was done, to $55.8 million in 2018, more than doubling in less than a decade.
Typically, hundreds of thousands of people show up for the event, the same study showing 375,000 people attended over the course of nine days in 2018.
The Surfing Walk of Fame in front of Jack’s Surfboards is planned for Sept. 23 with inductees to be announced Aug. 1. The Surfers’ Hall of Fame, put on by Huntington Surf and Sport, was held in June and honored local surfer Casey Wheat, who died last year.
“Due to all the COVID crisis and with the uncertainty of the U.S. Open happening, we made the decision to have the ceremony then,” HSS owner Aaron Pai said.
With many of the events originally slotted for early in the year pushed back, it’s going to be a busy few months for Huntington Beach with the Surf City Marathon scheduled for Sept. 11 just before the U.S. Open of Surfing, which is then followed by the Pacific Airshow in early October.
Pai is looking forward to the new time slot of the U.S. Open of Surfing, knowing September typically offers up better waves at the famed surf spot, with the chance for combination swell and offshore winds that could make for an exciting event.
“We hope this year’s U.S. Open scores some great swell, great conditions along with the greatest men and women surfers in the world,” he said.