When I was a little kid, there was this one kid nobody wanted to play with. Just like most kids, my friends and I would always play games that we’d completely made up. And whenever we ended up playing at this particular kid’s house, he’d make up rules that magically changed every time he was losing. There always seemed to be a line we weren’t allowed to stand on or a throw that had suddenly been deemed illegal. If one of us somehow managed to squeak out an unlikely win, the victor was soon disqualified for unknown reasons. It didn’t take long for the rest of us to realize playing with this kid sucked.
Lately, the WSL is becoming more and more like that kid.
This week we saw Kanoa Igarashi top three-time World Champ, Mick Fanning, not once, but twice. Igarashi’s first win, it turned out, wasn’t actually a win thanks to a rule discrepancy/WSL judging fumble that seems to happen far too often in this sport. It was all settled, kind of, by just having the two surfers paddle back out again the next morning to pretend as if they’d never competed the day before. Kanoa Igarashi bested Mick Fanning again, but that still hasn’t made many people very happy.
In a little over ten years of watching surf contests, I can only recall one resurf before 2017. It was a heat where Jordy Smith broke some ribs surfing in Tahiti. It’s not uncommon in college sports or combat sports, for example, to see a competitor or a team vacate a win retroactively when they’ve been caught breaking a rule. But think of just one sport – football, Thai boxing, curling, competitive eating, and the list can go on – where a do over is called for after the match is over. Once the match is done, it’s done.
If the Jordy Smith vs. Connor Coffin resurf was marginally acceptable, the resurf between Mick Fanning and Kanoa Igarashi is downright cheating and favoritism granted to certain top-ranked surfers. If the judges were confused about the new rules, they had 25 minutes to correct their mistake during the heat. To quote Zeke after Kanoa’s heat, “It didn’t f*cking matter cause they didn’t f*cking call it.”
Love it or hate it, the sport and the WSL are growing in popularity and visibility. To reach the status of other mainstream professional sports, the rules need to be clear for everybody involved, from the fans to the competitors to the people running the whole show. Judging mistakes like this cannot simply be amended after a heat has ended. Otherwise, the WSL is just going to keep going on like that kid nobody wants to play with.
