France: Dream Tour Worthy. Photo: @ripitup.fr
You’d be hard pressed to find a surf fan who doesn’t believe Hossegor is worthy of a slot on the Championship Tour’s yearly schedule. Every year, slotted between this change of seasons and our soon-to-be laser focus on the North Shore of Oahu, we get peppered with highlights of symmetrical barrels breaking throughout Basque country. Not to make this about winters on the North Shore, but falls in Europe are more than a worthy appetizer holding us over for the main course. But when the WSL shifted its calendar from an April-December cycle to one that begins in January and ends in early September, the annual visit to France got the ax.
The inaugural Quiksilver Festival just made a solid case for rethinking that major shift. As Darren Broadbridge, who lives in the area, told The Inertia last week, there are a lot of factors at play when it comes to re-establishing the Dream Tour’s Pro France event. But as far as surf fans are concerned there’s really only one factor that matters when we boil down whether or not a location should be on Tour: waves. And the event that just went down over the weekend had plenty of them. World class, worthy of a broadcast, and worthy of putting butts on the sand just to see what elite level talent can do with those waves.
The event itself was far from your typical CT format, featuring two-person teams and novelty challenges like best tube, best combo, twin fin heats, and so on, with Jeremy Flores and Michel Bourez winning. It’s the kind of surf fest that is built purely for fan engagement. But the waves that showed up for this first run didn’t hurt things at all. David Berthet’s highlight reel from the weekend caught action in and out of competition and there’s no arguing an early autumn swell in France is as much of an argument (or incentive) as one needs to get this place back into the CT mix.
