Hair greasy, million watt smile gone.

Wow!

Pro surfing just got completely turned on its ear with an announcement this morning via video (the closest the WSL gets to a proper presser) by CEO Erik Logan of a completely restructured Tour in 2021 and no start date for 2020, perhaps the closest thing yet to an admission that the Tour is cooked for this year.

A quick rewind is in order and some context, before we slice the main meat off the bone from ELO’s presser.

World Sport has obviously been gutted by the pandemic, but the noise has been getting louder from professional leagues around the world of at least tentative plans to get action happening again.

The English Premier League, one of the wealthiest sporting leagues on earth, has been making plans for a summer reload under it’s Project Restart banner.

Formula One, with it’s reliance on global travel, has rescheduled the year and making plans to race again.

Australian football codes have named starting target dates to get the game going again.

From the WSL, in the last six weeks there has been nothing.

Complete silence.

The pressure to say something, anything, must have been enormous.

So we get a very haggard, gaunt looking Erik “Elo” Logan coming to the podium early this morning Australian time.

Hair greasy, million watt smile gone.

The dream job of turning WSL into a media company has been torpedoed, and now the bare bones of what the WSL purports to be: a sporting machine designed to pump out a credible World Champion at year’s end are on display and looking very, very shaky.

Here’s the gist of ELO’s pronouncements.

The Championship Tour, as we know it, and as it has existed moreorless in stable form since the early 90’s is gone daddy gone.

What we will have now is a rejigged Challenger Series taking up the first quarter or third of the year, which will serve as an on-ramp to a truncated CT which comprises the rest of the year.

No details given on number of events or where events will be held but that obvs means huge changes and the Aussie leg, the only leg that has ever made financial sense due to govt support, is likely to be sacrificed to the new Challenger Series*.

The climax of the year, to produce a World Champion, will involve some kind of surf-off, in an as yet to be detailed format. Elo used last year’s Pipe Masters Finale between first and second as the desired template but as to how that situation is achieved we have been given no clues.

Only that finishing the “regular” year in first place would confer some kind of advantage.

OK, great.

Back to the abandoned Goldschmidt plan.

I wonder if Sophie watched the Elo video with a wry smile.

The entry to the CT, the QS is finished. At least as far as the missing letter W, as in World goes.

Now there will be a patchwork of regional QS events, with the aim of reducing world travel and hence costs for upcoming surfers with a dream of qualification.

How the fuck this will work in practice is anyones guess.

Once again, Elo threw this spitball out with no details.

Many, many more questions than answers on this issue.

It does throw the whole financial viabilty of the Tour in question, seeing as the QS with it’s legions of starry eyed kids all chipping in big-time to compete was one of the WSL’s more reliable cash cows.

With that gone, or severely attenuated, where does the funding stream come from?

Of course, the devil will be in the details and we only know the broadest outlines at the moment.

With no Tour to distract him and a captive audience the moment was there to be seized. Instead, what we’ve seen has been the utter bankruptcy of that idea. I tuned into the WSL the other day and watched a moustachioed cat spruiking pop-out mid-lengths at surf ranch. It was only compelling because it was so completely bizarre that this somehow passed muster as “content”.

Elo promised further announcements on June 1.

That’s if he lasts that long. This pandemic has been particularly cruel to sporting CEO’s, especially those whose threadbare business models have been left spinning in the breeze.

The reason for hiring Elo, the big pitch, was his promise to bring the magic of story-telling in to transform the WSL into a media powerhouse. From that perspective the pandemic should have been a golden opportunity for Elo’s vision to be realised.

With no Tour to distract him and a captive audience the moment was there to be seized. Instead, what we’ve seen has been the utter bankruptcy of that idea. I tuned into the WSL the other day and watched a moustachioed cat spruiking pop-out mid-lengths at surf ranch. It was only compelling because it was so completely bizarre that this somehow passed muster as “content”.

Elo won’t make thanksgiving.

WSL, if they survive, will pivot back to sport.

They’ll need a very hard arsed sporting administrator with a deep knowledge of surfing and strong existing relationships to the funding bodies who keep the sport afloat.

That guy is Andrew Stark, current WSL Australasia boss cocky.

I do feel sorry for Elo.

This is desperation stuff, and he’s clearly out of his depth on every level. The only question now is what sort of phoenix will rise from the ashes.

Pro surfing is a dream that is too beautiful to ever truly die.

*This does bear resemblance to a Jimmycane proposal from 2014 published in Surfing.