2024 ISA World Surfing Games Final Wrapup
The Right People Won But Did The Right People Lose?
When the likes of Gabriel Medina and Sally Fitzgibbons win a surfing competition you might be hard pressed to come away thinking something just seems amiss. I don’t have a hard time thinking it but you might and no one could fault you for that.
Since I watched the entire competition beginning to end, (as much as possible with the split webcasts and no available replays for the Podium 2 webcasts etc), a few things did stand out leaving me with some lingering questions that we’ll likely never get the answers to.
For example…did the right surfers…lose?
If you look closely at the above image you’ll notice that two of the top surfers from the 2023 and 2024 ISA’s, (Erin Brooks and Sally Fitzgibbons respectively), are not in fact going to the Olympics while all of the other athletes shown are going.
How is this possible you may ask?
Good question.
Unfortunately the answer to this question requires a basic understanding of the Olympic qualification system for surfing. The only problem is that there is no such thing as a “basic” understanding of the Olympic qualification system for surfing.
The closest one might come to being able to understand the qualification process without delving deep into the darkest recesses of bureaucratic induced nightmares, or without having as PhD in quantum mechanics, is to simply embrace that old communist slogan first summoned from the pits of hell by Marx himself, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Well, unless like is the case with actual communism you just so happen to be the wrong one “in need” that is.
I’ll try to sum it all up as briefly as possible focusing only on the women’s side of the draw for simplicity’s sake but fair warning: there’s no TL;DR for this.
(Note: The process works very much the same on the men’s side although the numbers differ slightly due to the number of male surfers versus female surfers on the WSL’s Championship Tour. The ultimate total number of athletes awarded Olympic spots per gender is the same at 24 however.)
Here’s a breakdown of how the spots were awarded on the women’s side:
8 spots from the WSL
1 spot from the 2022 ISA "Team Gold"
1 spot from the 2024 ISA "Team Gold"
4 spots from the 2023 ISA's
1 spot from the 2023 Pan American Games
8 spots from the 2024 ISA's
1 spot from the Universality Place
You may notice that the numbers also differ slightly between my breakdown above and the image below. This is due to the hierarchy nature of the qualification process—which incidentally is the crux of the problem with this whole process by the way.
So for example since the guaranteed “Host Nation” spot, (as seen below), wasn’t needed for the French Women’s Team, (because France had already qualified Johanne Defay through the WSL’s qualification tier), that spot was reallocated down, or up depending on how you’re looking at it, to the 2024 ISA World Surfing Games.
This means that there were ultimately spots awarded to eight eligible women instead of only seven at the 2024 ISA World Surfing Games while the overall total of 24 spots never changed.
This “hierarchy” system displaces any notion of common sense fairness when it comes to falling into a blackhole within the qualification process.
What do I mean by a “blackhole” within the process?
Just consider that Sally Fitzgibbons won the Gold Medal at the 2024 ISA World Surfing Games today, (yes, the very games awarding EIGHT Olympic spots), setting a record for the most ISA World Surfing Games Gold Medals in the process.
Amazing.
Stupendous even.
Just…wow!
But not so fast…because Sally still didn’t qualify for the Olympics!
And she’s not the only one to suffer being sucked into the blackhole of surfing’s Olympic qualification process.
The afore mentioned Erin Brooks was also unable to escape from beyond the event horizon despite winning the Silver Medal at last year’s 2023 ISA World Surfing Games. A feat she accomplished after a herculean effort progressing through 11 repechage rounds, only narrowly losing in the last seconds to the eventual 2023 Gold Medal winner, Brazil’s Tatiana Weston-Webb.
In Erin’s particular case a series of unfortunate events came into play that stymied her Olympic efforts that when combined with the qualification process challenges were all just a bit too much for her to overcome. I won’t go deep into detail here but Erin’s Canadian citizenship woes, (gotta love those bureaucrats), prevented Erin from competing at the 2023 Pan American games in Santiago, Chile.
When you factor that in with the hierarchy system limitations preventing any athletes from the Americas of being able to qualify for an Olympic spot via 2023 ISA World Surfing Games, regardless of how well they did, then things should begin to come into focus.
Erin couldn’t qualify through the 2023 ISA’s, was prevented from competing at the 2023 Pan Am Games due to citizenship issues, and then fell victim to being forced to compete in what many would consider to be inexcusable conditions wholly unworthy of a world class surfing competition on Day 5 of the 2024 ISA’s.
Yes, I understand “someone” still had to win and I discuss that here.
In the end it was all just too much for the young surfing legend to overcome. The obstacles were relentlessly piled in front of her until she eventually just simply ran out of time. I’ve been fond of saying that Erin may run out of time but she’ll never run out of heart. While my sentiment is definitely true the champ is only human. But this isn’t only a problem for Erin. Oh no. This goes well beyond that.
To help bring this all even more into focus let’s take a look at each qualification spot according to which tier they were awarded:
This is a problem for the Olympics even if they don’t realize it.
As bad as this all appears to be in Erin’s particular case, Sally’s predicament for the whole process is much worse.
Just keep repeating to yourself that Sally actually won the Gold Medal at the 2024 ISA’s and yet she still didn’t qualify.
Something is simply wrong here.
Erin won silver in 2023 and although Tati beat her, Tati was not actually vying for an Olympic spot at the 2023 ISA’s because she had already locked in her spot via the WSL’s tier as seen above.
The same goes for ALL FOUR of the other 2023 ISA Olympic qualifiers (also seen above) that Erin beat at the 2023 ISA’s.
Johanne Defay, (who Erin also beat at the 2023 ISA’s), like Tati, had already qualified for the Olympics through the WSL’s tier while Vahine Fierro, (who Erin also beat at the 2023 ISA’s), had already locked in her golden ticket to the Olympics earlier in the 2023 ISA competition as well by simply finishing “high enough” for a non “Americas” country—France—so that no other European not already qualified, (remember Johanne Defay and Teresa Bonvalot were already qualified via the WSL’s tier), could finish above her.
That means that in the 2023 ISA World Surfing Games Final, Erin competed against three women who were already in the Olympics, and who could not “win” a trip to the Olympics no matter how well they did in that final because they had already secured their spots, and yet Erin also could not win a spot to the Olympics because she was surfing for a country from the Americas, (Canada). Granting that it’s theoretically possible that Johanne Defay and Vahine Fierro could have qualified by making the final under other circumstances since they were surfing for European countries, it shouldn’t be missed that the ultimate Gold and Silver medal winners, (Tati and Erin respectively), could not.
What was the purpose of the 2023 ISA World Surfing Games again?
Well, I suppose it was for creating the illusion that the other four ladies actually “won” their Olympic golden tickets at the competition. Even if they actually only did so by simply finishing “high enough”, (is that hierarchy problem starting to come into focus for you yet?), to win one of the predetermined global regions that were “allowed” to win.
So again, at the 2023 ISA’s, as shown above, there were 4 spots available. And again, no one from the Americas could win an Olympic spot no matter how well they did at that competition. It was simply off the table and every competitor from the Americas was prohibited by rule from even being able to win a spot to the Olympics before the competition even started.
Al Cleland Jr managed to do it but he got kicked into the proverbial cracks by Jordy Smith eventually securing his own spot via the WSL tier which meant that after the contest was over Al retroactively took Jordy’s 2023 ISA spot even though Al represents Mexico—which as you may know is in the Americas.
Make sense yet?
So with the one rare exception in Al’s case, the spots available at the 2023 ISA’s were exclusively for ONE surfer each from, ASIA, EUROPE, AFRICA, and OCEANIA (aka NZ). No one else. Welcome to your blackhole Erin.
These four spots on the women’s side went to Vahine Fierro (France), Saffie Vette (New Zeeland), Sarah Baum (South Africa), and Shino Matsuda (Japan), all of whom finished below Erin in the competition.
Similarly, and even worse in Sally’s case, all EIGHT of the women who qualified via the 2024 ISA’s finished below her—which should be obvious to everyone since she won the gold medal. Welcome to your blackhole Sally.
(Please note: It’s actually NINE that finished below Sally when factoring in the extra Brazilian woman—probably Luana Silva— who will receive a spot based on the 2024 ISA “Team Gold” and then TEN if you count the Universality Place slot that’s still TBD)
The point of all of this hierarchy nonsense is, as the ISA commentators often put it, so that you can’t have only the top surfers in the world competing at the Olympics.
The example one of them used was that if you organized the sprinter’s track contests in such a way then your top 50 Olympic sprinters would all be Jamaicans.
While I’m not entirely sure if that’s exactly accurate I do get the sentiment.
Still, the way Olympic surfing is currently organized is a problem. You can’t have athletes competing in good faith, (with ‘good faith’ at the ISA’s being a whole other can of worms we won’t get into right now), at surfing competitions where they cannot win, (aka qualify for the Olympics), no matter how well they do.
I mean how psyched would you be to know the only real outcome—the actual ultimate purpose of your participation in a competition—was to ultimately “lose”…even if you won?
Did the right people lose in this Olympic cycle on the women’s side of the draw?
I think that for at least two surfers a good case can be made absolutely not!
Unfortunately this all definitely detracts from the other great stories because how you “win” should matter.
As for the men’s side of things it’s no real surprise that Brazil came out on top. France made it interesting but no ultimate surprise there.
One of the highlights of the entire competition (imho) was in repechage round 10 when Team Brazil’s Yago Dora froze out Team France’s Marco Mignot in the final seconds of the heat to help ultimately secure Team Brazil’s team Gold medal.
If Gabe Medina was Batman then Yago Dora was definitely Robin.
Yes, I’m sure it had to sting if you were rooting for the French but Yago knew it was necessary and so he took on the challenge of playing the villain brilliantly.
And if you follow surfing then the irony here shouldn’t be lost on you given that Yago seems like one of the most genuinely humble and likeable guys in surfing.
He had a job to do however and so he did it. It was a pretty epic moment in an event where you can never be too sure who is losing because they can’t win and who is losing because, well, maybe they can’t win?
Don’t think about that last one too hard. The powers that be prefer you just watch what you’re told to watch while fully content with how you’re being entertained.
~~~
—Nuance Wire