Alana Nichols on her way to the first-ever perfect 10 in ISA surfing history and the highest heat total, as well. Photo: ISA
It’s been a pretty good week for the 2023 ISA World Para Surfing Championships. For one surfer in particular: Alana Nichols scored the first-ever perfect 10 in ISA para surfing history.
Nichols, who competes in the Women’s Sit classification, became paralyzed from the waist down after she broke her t10 and t11 vertebra in a snowboarding accident. She was incredibly active before it happened, but she didn’t let it slow her down. Far from it, in fact. Her mantel is running out of room for trophies.
Nichols holds Olympic/Paralympic Games gold medals in wheelchair basketball and alpine ski racing. She took 7th place at the ISA Worlds Adaptive Surfing Championships in an all-male field for the upright division. She has a paralympic silver medal in downhill alpine skiing, two gold medals in downhill and giant slalom, a silver in Super G. She was the 2011 Paralympic Athlete of the Year, and that’s not even half of her accolades.
Her first wave of the event was a shot across the bow of any competitor in the event. Opening with a 9.40, she was just getting started. Late in the heat, she pulled into a barrel — at Huntington Beach, no less — to the amazement of everyone watching. It wasn’t just the first-ever perfect 10 in ISA para surfing history, it was Nichols’ first-ever barrel in the ocean.
“I honestly wasn’t expecting it to barrel over me,” Nichols said. “I thought it was going to break behind me, and when it did, it was just like, ‘This is happening!’ I don’t know if I have the words yet for that, but it was so sick.”
When the horn sounded signaling the end of the heat, she was sitting on a score of 19.40, the highest heat total in ISA para surfing history.
“To set that heat record is pretty phenomenal,” Nichols continued. “I just feel like I had the perfect conditions all around. I can’t tell you how proud I am of the women that I get to surf with and against, because to be a woman with a disability that loves to charge, that’s a rare combination.”
Watch the event on ISAsurf.org
