Gabriel Medina, always one to push the envelope between contest surfing and freesurfing. Photo: Matt Dunbar//World Surf League
Surfing is a weird sport, especially where professional competition is concerned. I can’t think of another in which top-ranked pros regularly perform decidedly better outside the competitive arena, than in the heat of battle. Imagine Carlos Alcaraz playing better tennis down at the local club than on Wimbledon Center Court; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander playing better ball down at the playground than in Game 5 of the NBA finals. Yet after contrasting a number of recent freesurf clips with the action on display during the final day of competition at the 2025 Trestle Pro, I couldn’t help but wonder why our best competitive surfers routinely surf better when not being judged.
Good example is Kelly Slater, who was gifted a wild-card slot at Lowers. I know, I know, he’s an old geezer, and all that, but in two clips released just prior to the event — one shot at Snapper Rocks, the other at Lowers a couple days before the contest — Kelly, absolutely scorching with an eye-pleasing combination of creative spontaneity and flawless technique, lit up both breaks with performances that should’ve won him every heat at Trestles. Yet before he ignominiously exited the elimination round, his highest-scoring ride was a mid five — barely in the “good” range by WSL standards.
Similarly, Rio Waida, currently parked at 18th on the Championship Tour, just posted a YouTube video shot at his Balinese home break of Keramas, where the young Indonesian is shown surfing with such jaw-dropping flair and precision, it’s hard to figure his mid-range ranking. And while the YouTube/ Maps To Nowhere Caity Simmer surfs better and is more exciting to watch than two-thirds of the men on the world tour, her semi-final finish at Lowers belied what could generously be deemed a tentative performance.
At first consideration this contrast might seem completely understandable: contest surfing is constrained by judging standards and time limits, while freesurfing is…free. Not to mention carefully edited for consumption. But as a reasonably enthusiastic fan of both pro contests and YouTube videos, I think the difference goes deeper than merely the pressure of performing in front of a judging panel. It’s the manner in which these top performers are being judged: with a lamentable lack of imagination.
Having been adjacent to, competing in, and covering surf contests since the late 1960s, you don’t have to tell me that the unobtainable summit has always been a completely objective, universally agreed-upon standardization of surfing performance; think: compulsories in Olympic skating, diving and gymnastics. And yes, objective judging standards make for better packaging and presentation, not to mention a better viewer experience. But does “objective” necessarily have to mean mechanical?
Surfing is the ultimate fluid sport — the medium is constantly changing shape. Picture baseball, but with the distance to first base changing with each pitch; a downhill ski course dropping not onto a solid mountain slope, but a steep, snowy treadmill, continually in motion. Sports like these, and virtually all others, would be unrecognizable without specifically established boundaries and standards of performance. By contrast, there is nothing rigid, nothing mechanical about surfing. So why should there be in surfing competition?
Henri Bergson, an early-20th century French philosopher best known for his rejection of that period’s mechanistic world view, instead espousing a dynamic and creative process based on a continuous flow rather than a series of static moments, wrote: “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a machine.”
Henri should’ve been an CT judge. Then again, what would he have made of the “attitudes, gestures and movements” of so many of today’s pro competitor’s bodies, as they mechanically move down the line, repetitively setting up and then tagging the lip, predictably sliding the tail and the “wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, here it comes” telegraphing of every end-section aerial? When, had Henri instead been hanging out on the beach watching a freesurf session, he’d no doubt have been stoked at the dynamic and creative process on display.
So, I’m with Monsieur Bergson. Why not incorporate continuous flow, spontaneity and, most importantly, imagination into the current judging criteria, establishing standards that more effectively reflect the medium. Encourage the best competitive surfers in the world to surf like no one is watching, and I’d bet you’d have a lot more people watching.
