With nine CT wins over his first five seasons, no one on tour has a better event win percentage than Jack Robinson. Could the new-look 2026 tour be his chance to win it all? Photo: Pablo Jimenez//ISA
The World Surf League’s title race will get turned on its head in 2026. The short-lived Final 5 era is over, and, according to the WSL, reverting to the previous ranking-based system favors Jack Robinson to win the title this season.
In a new profile published by the WSL to hype the start of the Championship Tour season, the League noted the 28-year-old Australian has the highest event-winning percentage on tour. Robinson has nine wins over his first five years on the CT, and that’s even with a nagging knee injury he’s been nursing since 2023. His ratio of events entered to events won is better than that of the world champs on tour: Gabriel Medina, Italo Ferreira, Filipe Toledo, and Yago Dora.
“Now back to full fitness, and combined with the highest win rate on tour, Jack Robinson is the odds-on favorite to win the cumulative world title in 2026,” a Joe Turpel voiceover says in the video.
Robinson qualified for the CT the first year of the Final 5 format, so we’ve never seen him gun for a title with the traditional rankings system. When you look at the wide range of venues that he’s won at on tour, it supports the Robinson title bets.
He’s won at Tahiti (twice), Bells Beach, Sunset, Margaret River (twice), Pipeline, G-Land, and Barra de la Cruz. He also happens to have an Olympic silver medal to his name. If you were to just look at that resume over five years, it’s actually shocking that he hasn’t won a title yet. But from rights to lefts, points to slabs, turns to tubes, Robinson has proven he’s one of the most well-rounded on the tour with a style of surfing that will benefit from the yearlong ranking.
Plus, he’s a proven surfer at Pipeline — winning the event in 2023. The season finale at Pipe will be weighted 1.5 times greater for the rankings, a new wrinkle in the 2026 format that rewards those who can surf the famed reef.
Robinson recently made the cover of Esquire Australia, sporting a fancy watch and a carefully combed hairdo. Taj Burrow commented on the photo, saying, “More surfing, less modeling, mate.” Maybe a new-look tour format, and some wise words from Burrow, are what it will take to push Robinson over the edge and earn his first title in 2026.
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