Longtom: “New mandatory diversity quotas on pro surfing tour to smash Australian, US, Brazilian dominance!”

A massive shift in the status quo looms.

It might have been the old wife stabber Norman Mailer or gallic poet Paul Verlaine who said “Life is Divertissement”, meaning life is entertainment, amusement, distraction.

True enough, I think, and reason enough for us to celebrate the upcoming Tour Openings at Honolua and Pipe.

In these hyper-polarized times is pro surfing not the only thing that can enable us to stand in the same room together?

Is that not a blessing? Kelly Slater, E-lo, JJF, Gabby not gifts from God sent to entertain us?

Thus we give thanks for the upcoming resumption of the CT and our ability to gather together and talk shit about it.

One thing though.

There is no Championship Tour without a runway to the Tour. Which be the Qualifying Series, and buried in an inauspicious part of the WSL website, unheralded by any presser or Podcast is the upcoming QS schedule.

It demands a little of our attention, in the way Dark Matter demands the attention of cosmologists as an unsolvable riddle.

Actually, I got that wrong.

It’s now the Challenger Series which is the runway to the CT. The QS is the runway to the CS.

The QS is to be divvied up into regional slices to lighten the load on aspirants credit card bills. Surfers no longer need to travel the world, they just surf their region and then get make the cut from there to the CS.

Clear as mud?

The devil, as noted when E-Lo first mooted this in June, is in the details.

And, if someone here can decipher those details you’re a smarter person than me.

According to the released schedule there are 11 events scheduled for Africa, and only four for Australia. Also according to the schedule of the 40 events proposed for the Jan to July QS only four are listed as upcoming, the remaining 36 are listed as tentative.

Maybe more worryingly for Ziff and E-lo is the fact that no CS events are currently listed.

Of course, many, many questions abound.

Will surfers be restricted to their regions?

Can Australian surfers, for instance, crash the proposed four Indonesian events or will those be restricted to Asian surfers?

Australia only has 1000 and 3000 events.

What happened to the Sydney Pro at Manly, which was booked for three years until 2022?

Is the Sydney Pro being re-booked for the August-December CS? In the spring?

If this QS Tour gets off the ground, and that’s a major if, then obvs the biggest losers are the incumbent surfing nations because their numbers on Tour will be cut by new mandatory diversity quotas.

No longer will numbers on Tour be allocated according to talent and grit (and sponno dollars) but according to where you were born.

That’s good or bad depending on where you are from.

Qualifying for the Tour just got much harder if you are a pro surfing hopeful from USA, Australia or Brazil and much easier if your parents birthed you in Asia, Africa or Europe.

Hundreds of QS aspirants in Australia will be culled to just 10 after our leg.

A massive shift in the status quo looms.

It’s made the QS equivalent to club contests, with the meat in the sandwich now belonging to the Challenger Series, of which we know absolutely nothing.

How many events, how many qualify from CS to CT etc etc.

I know it’s my job to decipher this shit-show but if we could be honest, it’s obvious we – and I mean the royal we – are making this up as we go along.

Which will make 2021 the greatest possible year to be a pro surfing fan.

Be you enthusiast or reluctant hate watcher. We will create this as we go along.

So in the interim, before the siren sounds and we get to bathe once more in the sound I think we have all sub-consciously craved during this crazy year, the soothing make believe world constructed by Joe Turpel, can someone please explain the muther-fuggin QS?

Or should we just forget about it and wait for Pipe?