Julian Wilson Gold Coast Pro trials. Photo: Beatriz Ryder//World Surf League
Kelly Slater’s non-retirement retirement stole just about every headline in professional surfing this time a year ago. It was a long time coming, considering it was the second consecutive year Slater had failed to qualify for the Championship Tour and well, conversations of his retirement had been floated since before surfing’s first appearance in the Olympics.
This year is different. In 2025, we have a 37-year-old, 18-year Championship Tour vet wearing the yellow jersey after seven stops at the top tier of the sport. Meanwhile, there are several athletes with CT resumés (and some with CT wins on those resumés) who are taking a swing at re-qualification. This year, dare I say it, could feel like a year of big comebacks.
This isn’t every surfer on the Challenger Series who’s previously competed on the CT, but here are a handful of them that are notable.
Everybody Who Just Missed the Cut (Obviously)
This one is mostly obvious. The mid-season cut exists for relegation, with surfers ranked 23 and lower on the CT given automatic spots on the Challenger Series and a chance to re-qualify. Those 12 athletes who fell short and are faced with re-qualification are Ryan Callinan, Edgard Groggia, Ramzi Boukhiam, Ian Gentil, Deivid Silva, Imaikalani deVault, Samuel Pupo, Ian Gouveia, George Pittar, Jackson Bunch, Liam O’Brien, and Matthew McGillivray.
Groggia, Pittar, and Bunch were all CT rookies in 2025. The rest of that field had a range of CT experience. One that stands out, in particular, is Ian Gouveia because he had shared last year that the 2024 Challenger Series was going to be his last hoorah. The Brazilian had spent two years on the CT in 2017 and 2018, and his return to the tour for 2025 came after a five-season CT absence (2020 was canceled during the COVID-19 pandemic). He called 2024 “do or die.”
“I wasn’t feeling frustrated with my career. I was just like ‘maybe it’s time to do another thing and enjoy family, enjoy freesurfing,’” he admitted.
Last week, Gouveia was singing a different tune as he geared up for another run on the Challenger Series.
“Grateful for everything I lived, life is not a dream and I will fight for it again,” he said. “Without apologies and crying, let’s go together for more of a CS season.”
Josh Kerr
Josh Kerr stepped away from the Championship Tour after 2017. This past year, at 41, he put a jersey back on and competed in a handful of QS events. He was boosted by a second-place finish at the Nias Pro and earned a spot on this year’s Challenger Series.
Kerr’s seven years on tour weren’t highlighted by any wins but he was still a fan favorite in the 2010s, turning in some of his best results throughout his career at Teahupo’o and Pipe. Now he’s one-half of the WSL’s first father-daughter duo on the Challenger Series, alongside Sierra.
Julian Wilson
You’ve already heard Julian Wilson is on a comeback tour — a comeback tour that kinda morphed into a comeback rampage when Wilson made it to the final of the Gold Coast Pro in May. It was his first CT action since 2021, and it proven that he’s still got enough in the tank to wreck the leaderboard at any given time. Wilson was already one of the most intriguing draws on the CS the moment the WSL announced he’d be given a wildcard for this season. That performance upped the ante though.
Should Julian Wilson re-qualify for the Championship Tour by the end of this Challenger Series campaign, he’d be 37 years old. He made his CT debut in 2010 as a 21-year-old wildcard in the Quick Pro France. The next season he was a CT rookie at 22 years old.
Kolohe Andino
Yes, Kolohe is still getting after it. The former Olympian and 11-year Tour vet has kept busy since missing the cut in 2023. Earlier this year, Andino announced a split from longtime sponsor Red Bull and promoted his own new brand, Steko. This came after a short-lived run with his first brand, ‘2% Union.’ The restart turned out to be nothing more than a copyright issue, which appeared to make things easy for Andino because he “never loved the name, either.”
Competitively, Brother’s been busy the past couple of years. Three months after missing the mid-season cut, Andino won an East Coast QS event in Virginia and has logged a total of 10 events on the Qualifying series in that span. He competed in four of the five Challenger Series events in 2023 and just half of the 2024 Challenger Series’ events, however, so we still have yet to see him piece together a full campaign in his hunt for re-qualification.
Morgan Cibilic
Morgan Cibilic was shot out of a rocket ship in his 2021 rookie CT campaign. At just 21-years old when that season started, Cibilic was the Rookie of the Year and a competitor in the WSL Finals, finishing the season fifth in the world rankings. He missed the cut the very next year and has continually come up just shy of re-qualification ever since. It’s one of the most brutal, cut-throat stories in the mid-season cut’s short-lived era.
Going into the final event of the 2022 Challenger Series, Morgs was just one spot shy of earning re-qualification. He finished 1,065 points short of the final spot. In 2023, Cibilic finished number 16 in the CS rankings. In 2024, he was 19th. Meanwhile, the NWS star has served as a wildcard in four CT events between 2023, 2024, and 2025, making the quarterfinal or better in all but one of those events. He’ll be a wrecking ball on the CT once he can string together the results to re-qualify.
