“There haven’t been many 10’s this year,” I thought to myself last week when Caio Ibelli notched just the second one of the entire 2022 Men’s Championship Tour. We’re eight stops into a 10-stop campaign now — a full season almost done — and Caio Ibelli, Filipe Toledo, and Griffin Colapinto are the only surfers to have packed the highest possible single-wave score. That feels like a low number. That felt like a lower number than we’ve seen in recent seasons, I thought.
It turns out recency bias is thick. Because I went looking for all the 10’s I could have sworn I’d seen in the past couple of seasons. And I was surprised when I could only find one on the WSL’s 2021 scoreboard (John John at Margaret River) and four in all of 2019, the last time the CT completed its full schedule.
Did I really think 10’s were just handed out like candy in the good ol’ days? Was I getting caught up in the idea that waves were only ever firing and the surfing was better pre-2022? Because truth be told, “The Cut” has been the most dramatic point of 2022, G-Land felt like the most anticipated yet underwhelming event I can ever think of, and as a matter of fact, outside of one incredible day at Pipe, it doesn’t feel like the CT has been running in conditions worthy of a Dream Tour moniker this year. I remember a couple of solid days at Bells. I remember feeling like Jack is starting to get a curious number of generous bounces that fall his way and Italo hasn’t been able to buy a critical score in a make-or-break moment of late. I remember the world wanting to see Margs run at The Box — a wish that never came true. Supertubos was all-time a week before the CT came to town, but nothing nearly as dream-worthy showed up during the event window. What’s going on this season?
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The more and more I dug through heat scores to confirm this year has been some kind of boring disaster with terrible waves and low scores left and right, I actually realized something interesting: the judges sure seem to think the performances on Tour are getting better. At least that’s what their scorecards say. There are a noticeably higher amount of excellent heats being scored this year (a total two-wave score of 16 or more). To be exact, there have been 59 total excellent heats in 2022, compared to just 33 through almost the exact same number of total heats surfed in all of the 2021 campaign. And if you average out how many we can expect to see in a given event, 2022 is producing more excellent heat scores than the past two seasons at a healthy rate.
Before the cut, each event was seeing an average of 8.8 excellent heats this year. When you add the three post-cut events that number drops to 7.4. And that’s with 40 fewer heats surfed now after the cut (to be clear, a surfed heat = each surfer in a heat. So, three surfers x 12 heats in the opening round and elimination round, two surfers x ___ in the remaining heats, etc.)
Even with 48 surfers suiting up for the 10-stop 2019 and the six traditional events of 2021, plus the what-the-hell-is-going-on format of the Surf Ranch Pro in both years, the Tour is producing higher scores this year. What’s more, if history repeats itself when the WSL goes to Tahiti in August, 2022 is going to have an all-time compilation of high-scoring heats because Teahupo’o is the Tour’s consistent major outlier when it comes to perfect 10’s and massive two-wave totals. On average, there were 15 excellent heats each time the CT ran at Chopes between 2015 and 2019. To put things into perspective, if it weren’t for the 16 excellent heat scores at Teahupo’o in 2019, this season would have already seen more two-wave totals of 16+ than each of the past three individual seasons. All this while rolling out a smaller roster and fewer heats per event.
And who’s most likely to notch those big scores? John John, Gabriel Medina, and Filipe Toledo. Florence has sat out the past two events and Medina missed the first five of this year, meaning the Tour is posting higher scores without two of its three most dynamic athletes.
Did I totally geek out looking at stats and numbers when I slid into this rabbit hole? Absolutely. Are the waves actually all that bad this year, or was I just romanticizing nonstop conditions worthy of 10’s — a golden era of competitive surfing that never existed? Who the heck knows? What do all these high scores say about this year’s Championship Tour? Well, either the surfing is getting better or the judges are getting more generous.
At least we can all agree G-Land was kind of a bummer though, right?
