The Margaret River Pro is now the most crucial event of the entire CT season. It’s mid-year cut time. Major chunks of the men’s and women’s rosters will be relegated to the Challenger Series where some will re-qualify for the 2024 CT and others might just kind of fade away. Love it or hate it — and a lot of people love to hate it — that dynamic is shaping an entirely new class of competitiveness within professional surfing.
It was just over a decade ago that the then-ASP flirted with this idea of dumping half of its roster at the midway point in the season. It didn’t last long, with ASP officials and top-34 athletes agreeing that the whole idea of reshuffling was “difficult to manage.”
“Where would we schedule the rotation? How do we ensure there are fair and balanced opportunities in every rotation for surfers to qualify?” Dave Prodan, who was the ASP International Media Director at the time, said.
The WSL sorted that out by creating the Challenger Series though, which lays out a more distinct path to qualification for first-timers and for athletes looking to re-qualify.
“Getting rid of that hurts so bad at first,” Zeke Lau told me recently when I asked about the roller coaster the cut creates for athletes. Lau qualified through the old QS route, he’s re-qualified through the old QS route, as well. And he’s now come up through the Challenger Series to fight his way back on Tour. “You’re like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m one of those guys bouncing on and off tour.’ But for me, I look at it now in hindsight and I’m like, if I just keep showing up, and I keep re-qualifying, that’s gonna break some spirits. You know what I mean? Like, ‘Holy sh**, this guy’s not going away.'”
Doubling down on that competition angle, it’s also funneling the remaining CT field into an even more competitive draw for the back half of the season. No longer will the top of the rankings face lower seeds in the Opening Round through the Round of 32. They’ll all be jumping straight from opening or elimination rounds to the Round of 16, allowing the next five events to maximize swell windows. Theoretically. Conditions didn’t always pan out that way last year. That said, the top-tier surfers will be pitted against each other more often.
Anyway, all we really care about at the midway point of the season is who will stay on tour and there’s no bigger headliner right now than Kelly Slater. Slater was safe this time a year ago after winning the Billabong Pipe Pro. Since then he’s been sent home after the Round of 32 or Round of 16 event after event, advancing into at least the quarterfinal just once (Outerknown Tahiti Pro, 2022). Missing the cut would be surreal but it’s fair to assume most surf fans will be rooting for him to pull off a big run in West Oz.
And that brings us to what will make Margs exciting: anything is possible. Mathematically, nobody has been eliminated on either the men’s or women’s side. An event win and a little 10,000-point kick to any athlete’s total should save anybody’s season. While that sounds ridiculous, it was already proven possible last year when Isabella Nichols won the Margaret River Pro. Nichols would have gone to the Challenger Series with any other result in 2022 but pulled off what seemed impossible in West Oz. She’s in better position this year but still sitting on the bubble with a field that will be fighting for just seven remaining spots.
