The first event on the newly revamped WSL Longboard Tour is in the books, and Justin Quintal and Chloe Calmon came away on top.
The new longboard tour is comprised of four events: Noosa, Queensland, Pantin Spain, New York City, and Taitung Taiwan. The Noosa Longboard Open took place over four days and used three different locations to crown the pair of winners, the last of which was Castaways Beach.
Calmon, a 25-year-old Brazilian, was a force in the lineup. In a final against Hawaii’s Honolua Blomfield, she surfed almost perfectly. She loves the direction that professional longboarding is heading.
“I’m so stoked to win this event but I’m more stoked about the direction Longboarding is going in,” Calmon said to the WSL. “With the new events and the new format longboarding is in such a good position. There is more opportunity to win the title and even more opportunity for more surfers to compete which is so cool. It’s such an exciting time to be involved. This is such a shock to me I really wasn’t expecting this to unfold like this. Obviously, my aim was to win this event, but I thought if it was going to happen it was going to be at First Point. I have been practicing over there on the point and getting my backside dialed in so to win on left-handers at a beach-break is not what I had in mind — but I’ll take it for sure.”
Justin Quintal, although very well known in longboarding, hasn’t surfed in a WSL event in half a decade, but that didn’t seem to phase him at all. He came up against reigning world champion Steven Sawyer in the final and surfed the way only Quintal can.
“This feels amazing and definitely a little unexpected,” Quintal said. “It was a super long trip to get here and a bit of a last minute decision which I’m pretty glad to have made. It’s been a really crazy week with the swell dropping and the event moving around a lot. The way the event crew has dealt with it is super impressive and we’ve always been in the best waves possible each day. The direction the WSL is taking with the Longboarding Tour is a really great one. I think we will see a lot more great longboarders competing at all of these great locations which are going to put longboarding in such a good place. I’m really excited to compete in Spain and New York and hopefully go all the way to Taiwan at the end of the year.”
