There’s a new sheriff in town – the Wavepool Surf Tour (WPST).
<Enter Rick Kane joke here>. I’ve seen this coming for a while now. See here and here for example. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I find myself surprisingly excited at the prospect of this new Tour. Anything different from the ol’ WSL, you know what I mean?
Described as “a new era of competitive surfing”, the Wavepool Surf Tour is going to be an online qualification format, with 9 events across 12 divisions, in wave pools located in 9 different countries. The Grand Final is said to be “an elite live event crowning champions across all categories”. By Year 3 they are projected to be up to 24 events in the season.
The judging criteria, or ‘scoring methodology’ for this new Tour is dubbed the “Triple C Criteria”, standing for: Commitment, Creativity, and Control. Waves will still be scored on a scale of 0.1 to 10, with the classical verbiage used for each range:
0.1 – 1.99 = Poor
2.00 – 3.99 = Fair
4.00 – 5.99 = Average
6.00 – 7.99 = Good
8.00 – 10 = Excellent
Each event is said to have a window of around 2 months to upload your best two waves, and the organization will keep a live leaderboard running through the event. The interesting part to me is that the Tour will be running in pools with different wave technology. Each entry is only approved if the wave in question was surfed on the defined wave setting at the participating venue. WPST addresses that “the objective is fair and credible comparison, not perfect mechanical sameness across every machine.” Well spoken.
Another interesting factor that will come into play is this – there is around a 2 month window, and you can surf as many times as you want (read: can afford) in that window, improving your wave as many times as you’d like until the deadline. To me, this gives a clear advantage to someone with the financial means, or the support (hookups at the pool) to surf as much as possible – which means paying for time in the pool.
On the FAQ page of the website for WPST, one is informed of prizes that “may include cash, product prizes, trophies, rankings points, qualification opportunities and WPST exposure”. It is also further elaborated that an event prize purse may be around $10K US, but the official event page will confirm the amount. They already have a number of brands backing the Tour, some like Hurley, Ocean&Earth, and flowstate (the AI video tracking at a lot of wavepools). I’ve actually got high hopes for this thing.
Hear me out: imagine some of the Stab High crew getting a whiff of this thing. $10K? For a wave pool strike mission? Zeke gets to surf those things for free if he promotes them on his vlog. I’m sure a few other crew do as well. And imagine if, say, Hughie Vaughan, Eithan Osborne, and Matt Meola get interested? Maybe Mateus Herdy falls off Tour this year and looks for a new avenue. The potential is there for this thing to take off. I will say that looking through the videos they have posted right now and seeing the scores some of those rides are netting, I am wondering how I can get my entry into one of these events ASAP.
The first official event of the WPST will take place in the Swiss wave pool Alaia Bay, running from August 1st until October 31st (10/25 being the last day for entries). There is a $20K prize pool listed, although it’s unclear how that will be split between the divisions. Anybody getting on a plane to Switzerland?
While there is no official list of pools that will be approved under the WPST, you can look under the locations of the videos posted now and see that there is nothing listed in the USA just yet. Unfortunate. I was hoping to get on Tour.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
hwilsin
Drew Stanfield