Photo: Kelly Cestari//WSL
There are some years where the WSL’s announcement of World Tour wildcards turns into a soap opera. The year Rob Machado got voted off tour or when Caio Ibelli called out Kelly Slater immediately come to mind. The transition from 2021 into 2022 doesn’t seem like it will be all that dramatic.
The League announced over the weekend Lakey Peterson, Malia Manuel, Kolohe Andino, and Owen Wright have been awarded wildcards for the upcoming season.
“We’re excited to welcome these surfers back on the Championship Tour as the 2022 season Wildcards,” said Jessi Miley-Dyer, SVP of Tours and Head of Competition. “Lakey and Kolohe sustained injuries early in the season, with both athletes missing a total of five events. Malia and Owen both had good results in 2021, and were very close to re-qualifying for 2022 at the end of the season. All four surfers had proven performances over the recent years and earned a spot among the world’s best.”
As mentioned, Peterson and Andino missed most of the 2021 year due to injuries. Kolohe sat out five of the tour’s seven stops in 2021 with an ankle injury and was in the rankings’ top five the last time the WSL enjoyed a full season. In fact, he was wearing the yellow jersey in Tahiti during that 2019 tour, in the thick of the title race wire to wire and earning Team USA’s top Olympic qualifying spot on the men’s roster. Peterson last competed at Pipeline in the end of 2020 and then the Rip Curl Newcastle Cup before a back injury sidelined her. She won two events on the 2019 tour and finished third overall that year.
Meanwhile, Wright and Manuel were both within a single heat of qualifying for the upcoming year on points alone. In fact, Malia Manuel could have qualified with a win at the Corona Open Mexico in August when the league announced it was canceling its next stop in Tahiti due to COVID, effectively ending the year for all but the top five men and women who would compete at the Rip Curl WSL Finals. She made it to the Final in Mexico and missed out on a win over Steph Gilmore by just 0.56 points. Wright went into that same stop in Mexico above the cut-off line but his equal 17th dropped him five spots in the rankings and two spots below the eventual re-qualification line.
With 20 men and nine women qualifying via World Tour results and the two wildcards now given to each side, there are still 12 men and six women who will be earning spots on the 2022 schedule through the WSL Challenger Series, with this week’s Quiksilver and Roxy Pro France and the Haleiwa Challenger in November still to come.
