"32 years of blatant segregation."
Open war broke out, this morning, between the World Surf League and its 2021 longboard champion Joel Tudor. Days ago, Tudor took to Instagram having become frustrated by the rumored decimation of the longboard tour as well as the paltry sums longboarders receive from the League even though they are heavily used by the selfsame League’s social media, marketing etc.
“Yo @wsl @jessmileydyer @elo_eriklogan can y’all explain this kind of equality?” Tudor wrote. “Not very woke of you to treat the log gals with so much disrespect in regards to pay? It’s kinda clear on your own Instagram which style is more favored by your audience! Urging all log gals , parents & friends to write the @wsl asking why this is still happening….also they are planning on canceling the longboard tour to a one event stop! Hit em up , post about it & make some noise to make things right!! Awoooooooooo!”
The aforementioned @jessimileydyer, World Surf League commissioner Jessi Miley Dyer, did not allow the missive to slide and, last night, issued a letter that began, “Hello everyone. I wanted to address a post that our 2021 Men’s Longboard champion made on his IG account yesterday that was both inaccurate and misleading related to the WSL’s approach to equality. Joel created confusion and called into question whether female athletes competing on the Longboard Tour receive equal prize money. It is important that you know, and that you hear directly from me, that we take great pride in the fact that our male and female longboard athletes all receive equal prize money.”
Etc.
Miley-Dyer’s willful misreading of Tudor’s initial points and gaslighting of “longboard athletes” was not appreciated by Tudor who, in turn, tripled down taking to Instagram yet again and writing:
Well my morning went like this yesterday….woke to a text sent via @jessmileydyer asking me to take my post down saying that I was being unproductive…..I respectfully declined! While it’s quite hilarious that now all of the sudden y’all are open for discussions after the 22 when prior to the post you could of all cared less if we disappeared! Also way to not address the difference on pay between womens ct and womens longboard when gals longboard is fastest largest area of growth for female surfing & used by the entire surf industry as 70% of all female surf brand imaging …..yet paid peanuts by the governing body of surf @wsl for no other reason than they just don’t feel like paying them equally ……on paper and in actual numbers value the log gals are incomparable!!!Yo @wsl you can do better than this!!!!!!!!! Also if yall are short on event costs you can very easily piggyback us on to some of your pre existing comps with 14 day holding periods …run on the down days …once upon a time you use to include us …bells , margret river , narrabeen , Kirra , hossegor , Brazil all use to include us at asp stops but after 1991 you never invited us back ever again. The only time we’ve shared a stage since has been the @vans DTI at Us open / @wsl care to expand on 32 years of blatant segregation? Put us together on occasion and see how much your audience enjoys the style change! Keep those hands up y’all we ain’t done fighting yet!
Uh oh.
A very clear win for Tudor as a multitude is now marching on Santa Monica, ready to breech the Wall of Positive Noise. Will Miley-Dyer rethink her strategy and go dark, as is typical for the League, and hope that it all just goes away or gird her loins for war?
Will this 32 years of Jim Crow-esque “blatant segregation” finally but finally come to an end?
Exciting days.
David Lee Scales and I, anyhow, chatted about how the World Surf League has a magic ability to get everything, literally everything, wrong amongst other dribs and drabs. Listen here while petitioning the WSL to let longboarders paddle Bells instead of Filipe Toledo.
Wow
Joel Tudor might have been smoking dope when he posted that. He is very proud of his love of marijuana and he says that is good for you.
The adds on these Beach Grit articles are ridiculous. So tired of trying to scroll down and simply read the Beach Grit articles, and getting flooded with a punch of garbage. I am not going to try anymore. I am blocking these articles from now on, out of my Google feed.
Yeah nah, I don’t think they get less in the CT and Qs. I think the point is that the longboard girls and dudes get less. I do have a habit of missing the point though.
What a load of crap. WCT men and women get paid equal. Longboard tour men and women get paid equal. Clearly longboarders are never gonna earn the same as WCT surfers. Get over it.
WSL is just silly. Is that the best the world can really offer surfing. The irony is, maybe the world doesn’t need a “World Surf League”.
Exhales, sets down the bong, and heads into battle with the WSL on IG. The WSL just needs to send Joel a Hacky Sack and a Kendama to distract him from his phone.
Longboard contest interest = Rollerblading contest interest
bells is a longboard wave only good on a short board when it is medium to big. But still better on a longboard! Let the longboarder compete on the waiting days. That would be worth watching – hang tens from Rincon all the way to the beach
“Jesse paint a picture about how it’s gauwn be..”
Hey Joel dude the Olympics dont even have longboards how fucked is that go get em dude ,
love Goatdaddy
I would speculate that the woozle focus groups and backers are suggesting less pro surfing rather than more.
The shift too a one comp world title decided format is just the beginning.
As everything that is old will become new again in surfing so will a invite only once a year world champion event raise from the ashes.
The Olympics make a woozle title look less than impressive.
I was thinking about the whole equality thing whilst watching pipe
I thought a great system could be worked out where everyone got paid per second they were in the tube…maybe you multiply that by the size of the wave or something…
Equal work equal pay?
They should be paid on there % Instagram following.
That’s the future
WSL lost it when they tried to make you sigvup facebook towatch a contest.
Kinda clever move by Joel: since the WSL does equal pay between genders in each surfing discipline, if he can get the women longboarder’s pay increased, his own pay gets increased too. He’s really just using the cries of “SeXiSm” and “EqUaLiTy!” as a battering ram because he knows it’s more effective in the current social climate than “Hey I’m a white guy in his 50s, give me a raise now”
Anyways hopefully they cancel the longboard tour entirely, it’s very boring.
I heard that thousands of longboarders are massing on the Kam hwy , lying their logs on the road to block traffic in a protest ! Log jamming for FREEDOM!!!!
LBLM
I read that “ya’ll” is working it’s way into a lot of woke folk’s speech patterns largely because it’s not gender-specific. So you get all these west coast doofuses who don’t want to say, for exmple, “Hey how’s it going guys” and will instead say “Hey how’s it going ya’ll” so as not to offend/misgender other doofuses.
JMD seems like a good person doing a thankless job. Joel raises perfectly reasonable questions and as usual when a company has super “progressive” posturing, it’s all blown apart by, like, one degree of rationality.
Use the females to market the sport, crow about equality and in reality pay the gals less. Just like canceling Spotify in place of Amazon.. completely misguided, and actually more harmful than progressive.
I say I say…..count me as one southerner that is most highly offended by this cultural appropriation ya’ll!
Joel has been binge watching Outer Banks and got carried away with his love of John B
Who wrote this? It says “as the head of the longboard tour”, thats Devon Howard