The Championship Tour is about to look very different down the stretch of the 2022 campaign. With the mid-season cut finally (officially) in the rearview mirror, the only thing the CT surfers have to focus on right now is working themselves into the Top 5. Fans got a taste of that last year with a condensed schedule that didn’t feature a cutline in May but did wrap up with the Finals Day circus at Trestles.
Mathematically, everybody that puts on a jersey right now is within one big result of jumping into that Top 5. Jack Robinson wasn’t even in the Top 10 before the Margaret River Pro but his win in West Oz catapulted him to world number three. Jadson Andre and Jackson Baker were the last two men to make the cut and a win for either would leave them within reach of the Top 5 – even with a half-decent result in El Salvador. The women are even tighter, with less than 2,000 points separating Tatiana Weston-Webb at number 10 and Courtney Conlogue in that fifth spot. It’s very likely neither of the men’s or women’s Top 5 following the cut looks anything like the Top 5 surfers we actually see competing in September.
So what’s actually different about each contest format now?
For starters, each event now starts with a field of just 24 men and 12 women as opposed to the pre-cut 26 men and 18 women. That leaves room for every surfer who made the cut plus two wildcards when things kick off at G-Land this weekend (Gabriel Medina and Rio Waida for the men, and Sally Fitzgibbons and Bronte Macaulay for the women). On Wednesday, the League announced Seth Moniz had withdrawn from the Quiksilver Pro G-Land and injury wildcard selection Yago Dora would take his place in the men’s field.
The condensed rosters only actually impact one heat when it’s all said and done. Everything starts with a draw of three surfers in the opening rounds, with second and third place being reseeded into the first elimination round. Winners of those opening round heats advance straight to the round of 16 for the men and round of 8 for the women, whereas they’d have advanced to the Round of 32 for the men and Round of 16 for the women before the cut. Those rounds are effectively gone now.
And that’s it. That’s more or less the entirety of the changes we’ll actually notice watching the final five events before Trestles — less time cutting through early elimination rounds and a quicker path to the high-stakes quarter and semifinal rounds. In theory, that will lead to fewer lay days, with the earlier rounds eating up less time and contest officials getting a little more precision when trying to line up optimal surf conditions with finals-day heats. League officials have reminded us over and over that the shorter format will allow them to run contests in a single swell cycle, which we would hope means every heat is run in those fabled “Dream Tour” conditions.
