Kai Sallas in El Salvador. Photo: ISA
Longboard surfing will not be part of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic sports program. In an online press conference, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced the final athlete quotas for each sport at the next edition of the Summer Games; noticeably absent were any changes to the current quotas for the sport of surfing.
The International Surfing Association (ISA) had requested that longboard surfing be added as a separate medal event with 16 male and 16 female competitors. The request also included an increase in shortboard slots of 12 men and 12 women. Neither proposal was accepted, so the surfing quota for LA 2028 will remain unchanged from the Paris 2024 format: 24 men and 24 women.
“I think it’s very easy to look at this decision and get disappointed in a bad way,” ISA President Fernando Aguerre told The Inertia via phone call. “But it’s just fuel to do things better and different the next time. We’re fully committed to Brisbane 2032. We believe that four years from now, we will have a better chance. Surfing will once again do a great job in California at the LA Games.”
The IOC stressed it would strictly adhere to the total Olympic athlete quota of 10,500 for the 31 “core” sports – those that were not new additions selected by LA 2028. (The new sports – cricket, flag football, squash, baseball/softball, and lacrosse – received an additional 698 slots separate from the 10,500 core slots.) Aguerre doesn’t view the decision not to grant more slots to surfing as a knock on the sport. He chalked it up to a simple math problem: Twenty-four of the 31 core sports requested a combined total of 772 additional slots – only 40 were available.
Thirty-two of the available quota spots were freed up by the discontinuation of breaking (aka break dancing) after Paris 2024. The other eight slots were freed up by a reduction in athletes in modern pentathlon. Those coveted slots were allocated to three-on-three basketball (32) and sport climbing (8). It’s worth noting that with just 48 athletes, surfing has the second-smallest quota of any sport on the program, only surpassing squash’s 32.
Aguerre points out that, despite being the smallest sport at Paris 2024 in terms of athletes, surfing’s value punched far above its weight. The IOC ranks the performance of each sport with metrics such as television viewership, social media engagement, and quantity and quality of media coverage. According to Aguerre, surfing ranked in the middle of the pack.
Now that surfing’s athlete quota is confirmed, the next steps will be cementing the Olympic qualification system and the venue, which has been narrowed down to Huntington Beach and Lower Trestles. Aguerre says the venue announcement is imminent, while the qualification system will be released towards the end of the year.
