Mainstream media cannot get enough of Alo Slebir’s potential record-breaking “100-foot” wave. It was the surf story of the moment for several weeks. Articles were published on wide-reaching sites like Forbes, the LA Times, HuffPost, and Vice, to name a few. The news warranted a 1,000-word interview in the biggest newspaper in Italy. Even the alt-right political website Breitbart thought it was relevant.
This, of course, is not the first, nor the last time that big wave surfing has trickled into the mainstream. It’s just the latest example to prove it’s more than capable of doing so. But at the same time, the WSL big wave tour has dried up to one event at Nazaré. And while the Big Wave Alliance is trying to fill the void, that tour is still in the “believe it when you see it” phase. The Eddie successfully ran in December and was a hit among the core surf audience, but there wasn’t much traction or interest in the sought-after mainstream.
There is a disconnect. People want to consume big wave surfing content, but the competitions have proven largely unviable financially.
Surfing is always probing new paths to the “mainstream.” There is a general underpinning belief that the key to turning competitive surfing into a sustainable, profitable business is to push beyond the core audience and crack a new, untapped gold mine of fans. Surfing became Olympic. The WSL tried reality TV with The Ultimate Surfer and produced the Make or Break series. A Championship Tour event is now held in a luxury pool in the Middle East. And non-endemic brands, like Samsung and Lexus, continue to see the value of aligning with the sport.
However, I can’t help but spot the irony. Slebir’s wave at Maverick’s was worshipped on social media despite his name having little brand value outside of a core audience. SF Gate’s video of the wave on its Instagram reels garnered 3.6 million views – one of its most viewed ever. Never-touched-a-surfboard news editors adored it and wrote about it. But that exciting intrigue isn’t translating to progress for competitive big wave surfing.
It’s notoriously difficult to run big wave events. Big wave surfing is fickle and unpredictable, not to mention conducive to permitting issues. And sponsors have to gamble part of their marketing budget on an event that might not happen. So maybe the wheel needs to be reinvented.
Perhaps there’s a way to craft the event format to accentuate the action – a format that focuses more on surfing, strays from the time-consuming structure of advancing through heats, and maximizes the content output. Red Bull’s Cape Fear events seemed to have cracked the code for epic content, but that event has also sputtered out over the past few years. Is there a format more akin to a freesurf that respects the inherent danger of big wave surfing while rewarding the best performances? Tradition tells us we need to crown a champion through some type of traditional heat progression, but do we? Look where that’s gotten us.
Major League Baseball recently went through radical rule changes to stimulate slumping viewership: pitch clocks, no infield shifts, and extra innings ghost runners. The impacts have been clear. Game time is down, attendance is up, and viewership – particularly among the youth demographic – has increased. Could big wave surfing look at the MLB’s example and also risk deviating from the status quo to spice things up?
Or maybe it’s the business model that needs to change – a system that doesn’t rely on deriving success from livestreams, which appeal only to the most core audience and are prone to losing viewers in long lulls. Is there a way to weigh the event value more towards the viral digital content during and after the event, content that Slebir’s media tour has proved people love? Are broadcasters willing to pay enough for rights to the condensed TV-friendly highlights? The Natural Selection Tour seems to be taking a gamble on that model this year with its surfing event. The Mavericks Awards is trying to fill a void, but its focused purely on one wave.
I don’t have the answers or creativity to propose a tangible solution. But plenty of professional freesurfers have hacked this appetite for content. Surfers like Nic von Rupp, Justine Dupont, Nate Florence, and Kai Lenny have all harnessed an interest in big wave surfing content to create and/or prolong careers outside of competition.
The fanfare surrounding Slebir’s 100-foot wave left me feeling like there is some untapped potential for a resurgence in big-wave competition. The appetite for content exists. But if such a resurgence does come to fruition, I reckon it won’t look like what is now considered the norm. The solution might require a visionary to do some outside-the-box thinking.
