Come and read the World Surf League's exciting plans!
Olympic news, as it relates to the Pastime of Kings, can be a little… dry. Oh, of course there is one thrilling storyline, (Will a 47-year-old Kelly Slater be able to surpass an injured John John Florence for a spot on the United States Olympic surf team?) but the rest is… brittle. Brazil will win men’s gold, silver and bronze (Gabriel, Italo, Filipe) and that will be that.
Still, the World Surf League is thrilled with the possibilities and Santa Monica’s Chief Marketing Officer Pri Shumate is absolutely bullish. I stumbled across a story titled With Olympics Looming, Sponsors Jumping Aboard World Surf League and I was excited to see which.
None new, as it turns out. Jeep, Harley-Davidson, Michelob Ultra brewed with Zoë Kravitz’s sultry whisper and Organic Grains, Boost Mobile, Red Bull but then the conversation turned to how over-the-moon the League is for the Olympic kick, hoping that surfing can soar as high as snowboarding and let’s dig in together for a little Chief Marketing.
The WSL hopes the Olympic spotlight can do for surfing what the Olympic rings did for snowboarding at the 1998 Olympics.
The two youthful sports have a lot in common. Like surfing, snowboarding was regarded as an outlaw sport back in the 1990’s. The traditional alpine sports establishment looked down their nose at snowboarders, even banning them from many ski resorts.
That all changed when snowboarding made its Olympic debut in Nagano, Japan in 1998. Fans loved the fearless, high-flying athletes and rock ‘n roll atmosphere. When budding superstar Shaun White won the halfpipe gold medal at the Torino Olympics in 2006, snowboarding went global. In the WSL’s ideal world, surfing would boast the same crossover appeal.
“Imagine the next Shaun White is a surfer? That’s the level of opportunity we feel we have,” noted Shumate. “And how amazing would it be if the next Shaun White were a female surfer? We have so many good storylines going into the Olympics.”
Ok, and I don’t need to be rude but I think this snowboarding analogy has gone a little far and/or is being rolled out… I don’t want to say ignorantly but…. let’s just say ignorantly. It’s true that Shaun White got rich off of his Olympic Snowboarding but as a “sport” in the year 2019, it is dead in the frozen water. There is no tour, declining participation, market conglomeration that has lead to a lack of innovation and next to zero general public interest other than for a few minutes every four years.
Snowboarding itself is still wonderful, of course, and I’d imagine the hard-core are overjoyed not to have “an industry” but two decades of Olympic spotlight has certainly not helped any governing body or exploded non-endemic interest or really done anything at all except shrink it down to a real community again where neither VAL nor blow-in dominate the narrative.
Is this the World Surf League’s ultimate and final plan? To turn surfing into a money-less passion?
Is Dirk Ziff a philanthropist?
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Exactly! This whole idea of the Olympics making surfing mainstream or even making any sport that’s not already mainstream, mainstream is ridiculous. The Olympics is all about niche sports that get their two weeks in the spotlight then are shelved for the next four years!!
Can you get Derek to spring you a trip to Sydney? Surely she can talk to media if she wants?
Flicked on the WSL app few days ago and a Seadoo ad came on. A Barry Crocker. Anyone else notice?
Sean white?
Surfing in the Olympics! Tune in for the 2 a.m., two-minute recap (right after the Dressage final) on the USA Network.
Yeah Roller Hockey really took off after the Barcelona Olympics too.
If they really want to take over the world make it nude surfing. Oh that means events only held in the tropics but life is full of compromises. Hell, the girls would probably get paid more. Glass ceilings be damned!
What about Paraguay? Does it have waves?
Just heard that for a time, as a result of civil wars, coups and other shenanigans, most of the men were killed off, so you had a large imbalance in the female to male ratio*. Just being able to walk around made you a very eligible bachelor.
* Not sure how current that information is. Or in fact if Paraguay has a coast, and I’m way too lazy to check it before work this fine morning.
and lets not forget who killed them
And ya gotta think… what’s the biggest summer olympic event? Swimming? Gymnastics? Look at the size of those. the basketball and soccer events aren’t that hype yet those are by far the largest market caps sporting-wise. Think there’s an inverse relation between popularity in Olympics and real-world interest outside of the olympic games.
Yeah, the Olympics doesn’t change the actual nature of a sport. It’s still what it is.
by the way check out this little recent zinger from Fernando Aguerre, the person actually responsible for surfing’s Olympic inclusion, in an ISA interview, celebrating that World Surfing Games in Miyazaki:
“The ocean is a true democratic field of play. All are welcome and the waves belong to all, not to any single group. These values underline our ultimate goal of making the world a better place through surfing.”
Tell me that wasn’t a wave pool niggle.
HANG THE FUCK ON.
Surfing was an “outlaw sport” in the 1990s?
How can that be when:
– Kelly Slater won six world titles?
– Quiksilver increased its earnings from $40 million to just under a billion dollars?
– Over 1700 surfers competed on the men’s QS in a single year (in 1997, still the biggest QS number in history)?
Hell the WSL itself was already 20 years old!! Oh wait.
Like I get that people have been telling fibs about pro surfing since it began, but jeez.
One is not civilised until one signs a content partnership with IKEA.
Tyler Wright is the big missing story. What really happened. You should do a Brad Melekian style piece.
All this Surfing in the Olympics talk is getting me really excited to watch golf instead. Schauffele 2020 gold. Cant wait.
More importantly, that dang auto playing pop-up video chewed through all my data. Previously I’ve never had much of a problem with Rob Machado, but now I can’t read BG whilst hanging a long-un at work. Furious with ol longshanks now.
when my boss asked how I had managed to use up all my data I had to lie and say it was on porn sites.
Ahhh okay, got the dad thing confused, mainly because i always associated him and her together during surf contests… but this article explains that! GREAT job.
Maybe i’m biased cause she’s one of my favorite surfers (male or female), but seems like there could be something interesting w/ Carissa’s upbringing, being raised by her dad and all that. Maybe it’s nothing and not even that big a deal, but seems like there’s at least a chance for something there?
So you got maybe that and then the brazilians that came from poor areas (i.e. Italo). But otherwise it’s like, “hey i’m a pro surfer, i came from a privileged family who lived close enough to the ocean and had the means & time to allow me to surf enough (and blow off school) in order to become pro. And i’m white.”
In the end you not only have a lack of intriguing stories but you also got the “WSL approach” to “story telling” which as we’ve all seen yields bland, uninteresting content.
Best surfers competing in the best (ocean) waves. That’s all there is to it.
So you’re saying Burton shouldn’t be looking to CI to rescue it from snowboarding?
Got it.
A long term play. Once global warming disappears all the snow, the mountain folk will be forced to turn to surfing. The Neck Beard 17 will be flying off the shelves!
Brazil will win men’s gold, silver and bronze (Gabriel, Italo, Filipe) and that will be that.
They only get two spots though. So will it be gold and silver, gold and bronze, silver n bronze or maybe just one medal or none. Yes it is confusing – but two surfers max per country has been the only real consistency since it all started. So what will they get? And who will they be is more the question. I think the medals have already been spoken for.
You’re technically right but I think Filipe will go surf for neighboring Bolivia…
Dubai, UAE – The last competitor with the chance to steal gold at the 2040 Olympics from rival and six-time World Champion, Zhan Zhihao, Yemen’s Hemingway Smith readies for her final run in death defying 13-foot waves on the Cyclone Mustafa, the state-of-the-art wavepool churning out waist-high runners constructed just two-months ago. Full of nerves, like any competitor in her third Olympics would be, her thoughts drift not to her prospective placing, but to the future of the sport itself.
“I kept thinking about what is going to happen to this sport? My dad always said we need people to quit. What will it take to get people to stop doing it? Hopefully, after this Olympics, the industry, so bent on increasing participation, will finally die and leave the core alone. It happened in snowboarding,” she says.
The surf industry, once containing billion dollar companies that 40 years ago handed out hundreds of thousands dollar contracts to B list surfers and former pros without any real world skills way past retirement, has nearly totally collapsed. Outside Zhan and Masters Mens World Champ, Gabriel Medina, nobody makes more than $80,000. Even with this reality, influenced by the celebrity culture that has built up around the sport over the last 20 years, participation continues to increase…
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Mr. White is american, that makes a big difference if you look only to the money aspect.