World Surf League comes under heavy mainsteam media fire for brutally mangling women’s surf history

"Weston-Webb’s perfect 10 wasn’t even the second..."

Paris. The City of Light. The City of Love. Host of the ’24 Summer Olympiad wherein athletes from around the world will come and enjoy fine cuisine, heavenly art, architecture, music, poetry… ballet in a finest form. Yes, the runners and jumpers, balance beam balancers and iron ball throwers will be in heaven. I will be covering, from the gilded streets, lightly dusted with Pomeranian waste and be sure to bring you all the gossip.

Unfortunately, our surf heroes, both men and women, will not be here. They will, in fact, be as far away as one can possibly get, exactly halfway across the world, sharing time with Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost at “The End of the Road” in Tahiti.

Teahupo’o, or Head Place, is no slouch unless we are considering cuisine, art, architecture, music, poetry and ballet. It is one of the most intimidating waves on earth framed by the greenest of crags jutting into the bluest of skies only mocked by the clarity of the water, only lightly tainted by a 25:1 gasoline to oil mixture.

Surf fans are certainly well-acquainted with Teahupo’o, its terror and its glory. The World Surf League, which bills itself as the “global home of surfing” circa 1976, via 2015, maybe less so.

It came under serious criticism, less than one month ago, for its “cruel and sloppy” smear of big wave icon Keala Kennelly. The Tahiti Pro had just been run with tremendous performances from Rio Waida, Gabriel Medina, John John Florence but mostly Vahine Fierro and Tatiana Weston-Webb. The latter caught and amazing, throaty beast and scored a perfect ten, which the World Surf League stamped as “first ever” by a woman.

Per the press release:

Despite losing to eventual event winner Fierro, Tatiana Weston-Webb (BRA) made history today with the first Perfect 10 ever from a woman at the Tahiti Pro. Weston-Webb dug deep to paddle over the ledge and into a huge set wave, making it to the bottom and almost catching her rail in the critical part of the wave only to recover and put herself deep in the barrel, behind the heavy Teahupo’o curtain. Weston-Webb then navigated the foam ball and the spit to fly out of the barrel for the Perfect score. Weston-Webb’s amazing surfing continues to push surfing’s progression even more in today’s pumping conditions.

Unfortunately, over two decades earlier, the aforementioned Kennelly dug deep to paddle over teh ledge and into a huge set wave, making it to the bottom, putting herself deep in the barrel and scoring a perfect ten. The Kauai local was forced to take to social media to declare:

I’m getting very tired of the media diminishing the surfing legacies of my generation (and other past generations) I recently had a history making accomplishment of mine completely erased and bestowed on someone else then spread all over the internet.

Maybe included in the “past generations,” though not specifically mentioned, was Chelsea Hedges and let us turn to the mainstream media titan Guardian for the pile on:

Weston-Webb’s perfect 10 wasn’t even the second. Australian surfer and 2005 world champion Chelsea Hedges also scored a perfect 10 at the wave the same year the event was cancelled, Kennelly said in a video posted to Instagram. Reporting from the time of these events verifies Kennelly’s claims, and the WSL website now refers to Weston-Webb’s perfect 10 as “the first since the women’s event’s return at the Tahiti Pro”. The WSL did not respond to a request for comment on the dispute.

But do you imagine the AI bot that wrote the press release has been unplugged? Maybe even replaced by one that enjoys strong coffee, spicy food and live music?

One “Emily Morgan” is certainly looking for a job now that her old employer, Surfer Magazine, is helmed by a “real boy.”

The World Surf League refusing to respond to a request for comment is not uncommon, as the organization makes Kim Jong Un’s North Korea look like a free speech paradise.

Erik Logan?

Are you there?

More as the story develops.