Jack Robinson is pumped. Photo: Beatriz Ryder//World Surf League)
“Bold predictions” have to actually be outrageous in order to be truly bold. And surprises wouldn’t be surprises if they could be predicted. Still, when a sporting event is on the horizon it’s natural to look ahead and throw out some guesses about what could happen.
In that spirit and with the finale of the 2022 WSL Championship Tour about to start, here are a handful of possible finals day storylines, ranging from the “don’t be surprised if this happens” to the “wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
1. Somebody Won’t Make Next Year’s Cut
Sally Fitzgibbons was world number three going into last year’s WSL Finals. Morgan Cibilic and Conner Coffin were ranked fifth and fourth respectively on the men’s side. All three missed this year’s midseason cut.
But before you get your panties in a bunch and start screaming that’s exactly why the midseason cut should be abolished, worst-to-first and first-to-worst parity isn’t some total miracle in professional sports. The NFL is my favorite example, where a little over 30 percent of teams who lose in the Super Bowl are likely to miss the postseason altogether the next year. And of those teams more than half will follow their Super Bowl runner-up campaign with a losing record.
There are 55 years of Super Bowls to support that stat and only one WSL Finals Day. But World Tour rankings see some of these same dips and jumps. Kolohe Andino was a Top-5 contender in 2019 who only competed in two contests when the tour returned in 2021. Jordy Smith finished 2017 ranked fourth and started 2018 by losing in round three (the equivalent of today’s opening elimination round) — a deep hole in the rankings early on. Matt Wilkinson was ranked fifth that same 2017 season and 25th when he finished out 2018.
2. Kanoa Will Make a Deep Run From that Five Spot
That Round of 16 wave at Teahupo’o was very Kanoa-esque. It’s one thing to just be gifted a wave in the dying moments of a heat and come away with the exact score you need to win. But what’s really fascinating about Igarashi’s season-saving 9.7 gem is that he sat on it for more than 20 minutes.
The contest was running overlapping heats at the time and Kanoa caught three waves in that first 23-minute second-priority portion. Jadson Andre finished with the upper hand, leaving Kanoa holding priority and in need of just a 7.41. That’s not a huge hole to be in…unless the ocean shuts down, which it did. Igarashi ended up taking just one wave the remainder of the heat and it was that 9.7. More than 20 minutes of patience and discipline.
The guy has some magic in him, and while Italo Ferreira feels like a justifiable favorite in that first heat of the day and Trestles isn’t the kind of place somebody will sit and wait 20 minutes for a high-scoring wave, it’s not the wildest thing to imagine Kanoa Igarashi pulling off something big, a-la an Olympic 9.33 buzzer beater to take out Gabriel Medina.
I’m not sitting here predicting a world title. But Kanoa Igarashi winning two, maybe even three heats on finals day (at a wave 30 minutes away from his childhood home) doesn’t sound all that outrageous. Or, he could fall in that first heat of the day and…
3. Italo Exacts Some Revenge on Jack
Italo Ferreira is coming into the finals ranked fourth and somehow that feels like an off year for the former champ. I don’t blame Jack Robinson for that, but the two surfers’ 2022 paths seemed to diverge from the same point.
Rewind to mid April. The Tour’s moved to Australia, the cut is looming, it’s the hottest topic of conversation in all the surfing land — mostly just people griping about how much they hate it, because they think they’re supposed to hate it — and Jack is sitting in that nervous ranking zone where things could start to go bad real quick (15th). Italo had come out of Hawaii with some results he’d like to forget and a semifinal in Portugal, securely positioned in the top five on the leaderboard.
I am not a judge. I understand scoring as much as any surf fan on the planet, which means I can look at two waves side by side, point, and say “That one was better than that one.” Still, Italo got robbed at Bells…and it turned both of their seasons around.
What happened, exactly? Ferreira and Robinson took their last two waves of the heat in the final 90 seconds, with Robinson riding his out at the buzzer. There was nothing spectacular about either wave and if you watched them both without context of who needed what score to win, who was leading, etc., you’d probably just chalk them up to about even and move on with your life. Except Robinson’s wave was scored .30 higher than Ferreira’s — a 7.00 when needing a 6.80 to beat Ferreira’s 6.70.
The heat didn’t make or break either athlete’s season but their reactions when those scores came in feel like fair summaries of their 2022 campaigns: Italo, frustrated with the score he needed but didn’t get while Jack celebrated a close-call win.
The judges dished out higher scores for aerial surfing at Trestles in 2021 and we saw Filipe Toledo and Gabriel Medina throw the kitchen sink at them in their finals matchup. Assuming that’s what dominates the day again, Ferreira should be a favorite to leapfrog Ethan Ewing and face Robinson in the third men’s heat.
4. Tati Versus Carissa Becomes a Rivalry
Did anybody else think Tatiana Weston Webb was going to pull it off last year? She won the first of three heats in the 2021 final before Carissa Moore posted big heat totals to win her title. Moore’s 17.26 and 16.60 were higher than all but one heat the entire day: Gabriel Medina’s 17.53 in heat two against Filipe Toledo.
Weston Webb is the only female surfer with two wins in 2022 and the duo are 2-2 against one another this year. A potential rubber match would make for a great story no matter the outcome. A win for Tatiana makes her Brazil’s first female world champ and a win for Carissa adds another accomplishment to one of the most dominant stretches in the history of the sport. Of course Johanne Defay stands between them now but that just creates even more drama if we end up with another Moore-Weston Webb showdown for the title.
5. This Whole Finals Format Gets a Shakeup After This Year
The finals are a direct response to an insane and improbable end to the 2019 season when the title was decided during the last heat of the year. The mid-season cut is brand new. The Challenger Series is still new too. Surf fans have seen evolving contest formats, three-wave heat totals, two-wave heat totals, 45 surfers on the men’s tour, 34 surfers on the men’s tour, and so on through the years. Whether it’s a conscious effort to try and meet fans’ demands or just a desire to constantly keep things fresh, the CT isn’t exactly stagnant. This is why it’s fair to assume the WSL Finals as we know them will look different soon.
Maybe they’ll change locations or switch up the bracketing structure. Who knows? It’s a random prediction at this point.
