USA Surfing has enlisted a team stacked with Championship Tour surfers to compete at the ISA World Surfing Games in Peru from November 6-15. The winning men’s and women’s teams will earn an Olympic slot for LA 2028, which becomes an “extra” slot for a third surfer if they fill the country quota of two surfers per gender through other qualification events.
Carissa Moore, Griffin Colapinto, Cole Houshmand, Gabriela Bryan, Sawyer Lindblad, and Jake Marshall have all agreed to represent their nation in search of the Olympic slot. The country that gets the slot can fill it however they please; they are not required to give it to surfers who competed in the event.
Going off the CT rankings, Team USA will use the highest-ranked athletes except for Seth Moniz, who is ranked higher than Marshall.
“Our number-one goal is to earn the qualification spot for Team USA in both the men’s and women’s divisions and put ourselves in the strongest possible position to bring a full three-man, three-woman team to LA28,” Greg Hulsizer, CEO of USA Surfing, said in a press release. “We’re bringing an incredibly talented group to Peru, but this is bigger than any one athlete.”
Team USA won’t have a cakewalk to the gold medals. Brazil has also announced a formidable squad featuring CT surfers Italo Ferreira, Yago Dora, Miguel Pupo, and Luana Silva. Notably absent from the team is Gabriel Medina, who, at the time of selection 30 days before the event, was not ranked among the top three Brazilian men.
Brazil has already determined that if it wins a slot, it goes to the highest-finishing surfer at the event, which creates one less Olympic qualification pathway for Medina.
The World Surfing Games dates overlap with the penultimate Championship Tour event at Cloud 9, Philippines. As a workaround for CT surfers, the ISA will give them all a free pass into round 3, which would start no earlier than November 11. Still, if Cloud 9 utilizes the entire window until November 10, it’s going to be a rush to fly across the globe to Peru.
