Photography: Marcus Paladino

Why We Built Open Heats: Removing Prejudice from How We Judge Surfing.

At WPSL, we are often asked why we plan to run open heats, putting men and women in the water together, scored by the same criteria, competing for the same prize purse from day one. The honest answer is that surfing's judging system has never really been neutral, and we think it is time somebody said so.

A Young Kind of Equality

Surfing likes to think of itself as progressive. In some ways it is. The World Surf League announced equal prize money for male and female athletes across its controlled events from the 2019 season, becoming the first major US-based global sports league to do so. That is a genuine milestone, and the athletes who fought for it deserve enormous credit.

But it is worth sitting with how recent that milestone actually is. Less than a decade ago, the best female surfers in the world were still competing for smaller cheques than the men, in the same events, on the same tour. And pay parity, important as it is, does not by itself fix the deeper issue: how the sport decides what "good" surfing looks like in the first place.

Even after prize money was equalised, scheduling controversies kept surfacing. Women's heats have repeatedly been run in conditions widely regarded as inferior to the men's - smaller, messier, less rideable swells - while the best waves of a waiting period went to the men's draw. Fans, athletes and commentators have called this out publicly, year after year, at some of the sport's most high-profile venues. The pattern is well documented enough that it can no longer be dismissed as coincidence.

The effect of that pattern is corrosive, and it goes beyond fairness on any single day. When women are repeatedly shown to the world in lesser waves, audiences absorb a quiet lesson: that women's surfing is somehow a lesser version of the real thing. Nobody has to say it out loud. The scheduling says it for them.

Judging Is Never as Neutral as It Looks

Traditional surf judging asks a panel of humans to award a score out of ten based on criteria like commitment, degree of difficulty, and flow. It sounds objective. It rarely is. Judges are human, and humans form preferences - for a style, a story, a favourite, an underdog. That is not a scandal. It is simply what happens when subjective judgement is applied to sport. But it has never been openly acknowledged as a factor in how surfing scores its athletes, least of all across gender lines.

At WPSL, our approach starts from a different question. If good surfing has a bias baked into it, the fix is not to ask judges to try harder to be fair. The fix is to change what is being measured, and who is doing the measuring.

People Power™: Data First, Then the Human Voice

Our proprietary judging system, People Power™, works in two layers.

The first layer is purely analytical. An AI system reads each wave in real time - wave height, amplitude and tightness of turn, positioning in the pocket, height and rotation of airs, and speed carried between manoeuvre sections. It produces a technical score out of ten, and it can show its working: an on-screen overlay on the replay, breaking down exactly why the wave scored the way it did. There is no panel to please, no reputation to protect, no history with a rider that colours the number.

The second layer is human, and we think it should be. Our commentary team, led by 1988 World Champion Barton Lynch, gives the audience genuine technical insight into what they have just watched. Armed with that context and the AI breakdown, spectators then cast a live vote through technology built specifically for WPSL, producing an audience score out of ten. The final wave score is the average of the AI's number and the crowd's.

We are not trying to remove emotion from surfing. We are trying to be honest about where it belongs. An algorithm cannot reward the underdog, back a favourite, or feel a crowd lift for a rider mid-heat - and it should not pretend to. But an audience can, transparently, in the open, as a vote rather than a hidden thumb on the scale. Heart stays in the sport. It simply moves from behind a judges' curtain into the open, where everyone can see it operating.

The Question We Have to Ask Ourselves

Here is the uncomfortable part. Is elite surfing, as we currently score it, actually biased against women - or are the very best men genuinely superior athletes by every measure that matters? Judged against the traditional criteria, most people would say the men win that argument. So we removed the traditional criteria, and the judges who apply it, and asked the question again from scratch.

Is there a real reason the world's best female surfers cannot generate as much height in the air as the best men? Some of it, honestly, is physiology - power and mass do matter in certain manoeuvres. But raw power has never been the only language of athletic excellence. Timing, strength-to-weight ratio, precision and style are just as demanding, and just as worthy of a ten.

Some of this thinking comes from my wife, Rita, who surfs and has also competed in rhythmic gymnastics. Watching her move between the two disciplines, it is impossible not to notice the grace, timing and precision that gymnastics demands - qualities that are every bit as athletic as raw power, and that surf judging has historically undervalued.

There is a sporting precedent for this. Women's MMA does not compete against men in the octagon, yet it regularly headlines fight cards. Anyone who has trained jiu-jitsu knows that technique beats strength far more often than raw aggression does, and audiences who understand the sport watch women's fights with the same intensity as men's - not despite the technical skill on display, but because of it. Surfing, like skateboarding, is a sport where grace, timing and line can be every bit as compelling to watch as vertical power. It is our judging system, not the surfing itself, that has told audiences otherwise.

One Crown, Equal Opportunity to Wear It

We are not proposing a perfect system. We are proposing a fairer starting point, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

WPSL will crown one World Surfing Champion, not a men's champion and a women's champion competing in parallel for separate versions of the same title. That is a deliberate choice. It does not guarantee a woman lifts the trophy any more than it guarantees a man does. What it guarantees is that every surfer in the field, regardless of gender, has an equal opportunity to win it - the same waves, the same scoring system, the same heat, the same crowd. Nobody's route to the title runs through a smaller field, a shorter tour, or a lesser wave.

We also do not intend to lock this system in place and declare it finished. Rigid rules can strangle creativity in a sport built on self-expression - but the right amount of structure can also sharpen it, and finding that balance is not a one-off decision, it is ongoing work. So WPSL will move and flow with what actually works in the water, across different pools and wave conditions, rather than defending a format because it was the one we launched with. We expect to adjust judging weightings, heat structures and formats as we learn. The athletes competing in these heats, and the audiences voting on them, will do more to show us the right path forward than any boardroom debate could. That willingness to adapt is not a weakness in the model. It is the model.

Where This Leaves Us

We do not claim to have the whole answer. What we have is a starting position: score the wave, not the surfer's gender or reputation; put the criteria and the data on screen where everyone can check our working; and let the crowd's voice count for something, openly, instead of quietly through a judge's private instinct.

Remove the old prejudice from the criteria, and something interesting happens. Women's surfing does not need to be protected or handicapped to be compelling - it needs the opportunity to be judged on its own terms, in the same heat, against the same standard, in front of the same audience. Level the opportunity, and the level of the sport will follow. What "elite surfing" means will end up being shaped as much by the feminine contribution to the sport as the masculine one - which, business case aside, is simply a more interesting sport to watch.

It also happens to be good business. Women's surf and lifestyle brands consistently outperform their male-focused equivalents commercially. Building a sport that treats women's surfing as full value, not partial value, is not just the right call. It is the smart one.

WPSL1 Adrena, Saudi Arabia, launches October 2027 as the first event in a new global arena-based wave pool series, judged by People Power™.

The Future of Surf Competition Belongs in Stadiums (not like a football stadium).

For more than half a century, competitive surfing has been built around one thing: waiting. Waiting for waves. Waiting for tides. Waiting for wind. Waiting for heats to begin. Waiting for scores. Waiting for conditions to improve.

For surfers, this uncertainty has always been accepted as part of the sport's DNA. For spectators, broadcasters and commercial partners, it has always been its greatest weakness. But we are now entering a new era, and the emergence of high-performance wave technology is no longer simply creating perfect waves — it is forcing us to ask a far bigger question: what should competitive surfing actually look like when nature is no longer in control?

Wave Pools Have Exposed Surfing's Biggest Problem

Artificial waves remove almost every environmental variable. Every competitor can receive the same wave. Every ride begins from virtually the same starting point. Every opportunity is equal. On paper, this should produce the fairest surfing contests ever created. Instead, it has exposed something uncomfortable: traditional surf competition formats become surprisingly monotonous when every wave is identical.

This isn't because surfing is boring. It is because the existing competition model was never designed for perfect consistency. The stop-start heat format, priority rules, score building and subjective judging evolved to manage the chaos of the ocean. Remove that chaos and the weaknesses become impossible to ignore, and the audience quickly begins watching the same manoeuvres on the same wave repeated over and over. The excitement disappears.

The Problem Isn't the Athletes

The world's best surfers have never been more talented. Their progression continues at an extraordinary pace, and they are capable of creativity, technical innovation and athletic performance that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago. Yet competition often asks them to perform inside an increasingly narrow definition of what "good surfing" looks like, and the irony is difficult to ignore: at exactly the moment technology allows surfers complete freedom to express themselves, competition increasingly rewards conformity.

Many of the people defining that criteria come from judging systems developed decades ago, with philosophies that struggle to keep pace with the sport itself. Too often, decisions are made by committees and officials rather than by embracing the evolving language of modern surfing and the diverse ways elite surfers interpret a wave. The result is predictable: surfers begin surfing for scores rather than surfing for possibility. Innovation becomes risk. Consistency becomes reward. The audience loses.

Imagine If Other Sports Never Evolved

Every major global sport has reinvented itself. Formula One transformed itself into a global entertainment product. Cricket introduced Twenty20. Rugby embraced Sevens. Golf invested heavily in stadium experiences and technology. Tennis modernised scheduling, broadcasting and fan engagement. Surfing, by contrast, has largely attempted to place new technology inside an old competition model. It feels like putting a Formula One car on a Victorian road.

Wave technology deserves formats designed specifically for wave technology — not adaptations of systems created for unpredictable ocean conditions.

Surf Stadiums, Not Surf Parks

The future is bigger than wave pools. It is surf stadiums: purpose-built venues where every seat offers a clear view, with massive screens, lighting, music, real-time athlete data and digital fan engagement. Entertainment before, during and after competition. Events designed for television and live audiences simultaneously. Not simply places where surfing happens, but places built around the experience of watching surfing.

This is a real question every surf park operator should be asking themselves right now. The infrastructure for stadium-grade surf entertainment already exists in dozens of facilities around the world — the question is whether those venues are being used to their full potential, or simply as sessions sold by the hour. The same transformation that happened to tennis, basketball and mixed martial arts can happen for surfing. Perhaps even more dramatically.

The Audience Must Become Part of the Event

Modern sports fans expect participation. They expect interaction. They expect storytelling. The next generation of surf competition should embrace live analytics, multiple camera perspectives, athlete biometrics, predictive statistics, audience voting, immersive broadcast experiences and digital engagement that makes spectators feel connected to every ride. Fans should understand what they're watching without needing years of surfing experience — the greatest sporting events in the world make complexity accessible. Surfing should do the same.

Wave Pools Have an Environmental Responsibility Too

There is an uncomfortable question that surf parks rarely address head-on: what does it cost the planet to manufacture a wave? Surfing has always drawn its identity from a connection to nature — a sport born from reading the ocean, respecting it, and depending on it. As the sport moves into purpose-built, energy-intensive facilities, that relationship with the environment cannot be left behind. It has to be designed in from the start, not retrofitted once the criticism arrives.

This is where Saudi Arabia's Adrena wave pool offers a genuinely instructive example. The facility, developed by Red Sea Global at The Red Sea destination, operates entirely on renewable energy, uses a closed-loop seawater system that filters and recirculates water through its attractions, and applies dark-sky lighting principles to limit its impact on the surrounding ecosystem. Group CEO John Pagano has said the district was "built with sustainability at its core," positioning it as an example of regenerative rather than purely extractive tourism.

That standard should not be exceptional. It should be the baseline expectation for any surf park claiming to represent a sport so closely tied to environmental awareness. Every operator building or running a wave pool has a responsibility to ask the same questions Adrena has already answered: where does the power come from, how is the water managed, and what is actually being given back to the surrounding environment. A sport that has spent decades campaigning against ocean pollution and coastal development cannot credibly build its future on facilities that ignore their own footprint.

Saudi Arabia Could Become Surfing's Most Unexpected Destination

Many people still associate surfing exclusively with coastlines and ocean swells. That assumption is rapidly becoming outdated. Countries investing heavily in tourism, entertainment and next-generation sporting infrastructure have an opportunity to leapfrog traditional surf nations, and Saudi Arabia may become one of the most fascinating examples.

Vision 2030 is already reshaping how the Kingdom approaches tourism, sport, entertainment and international events. Purpose-built destinations, integrated entertainment districts and world-class infrastructure are changing perceptions at remarkable speed, and a world-class surf stadium fits naturally within that vision. It is climate-independent. It operates year-round. It creates destination tourism. It supports hospitality, retail, events, coaching, participation and elite competition from a single venue. Unlike many traditional surf destinations, every aspect of the visitor experience can be intentionally designed.

The result isn't simply another sporting facility. It becomes an entertainment destination capable of attracting families, tourists, athletes, broadcasters and commercial partners from around the world. Surfing no longer needs to wait for good conditions. It simply opens its doors.

The Future Will Reward Creativity

Technology is changing surfing faster than governing bodies can adapt. That is not unusual — history shows innovation almost always arrives before institutions are ready for it. The organisations leading surfing today face a significant challenge: they must honour the sport's heritage while recognising that heritage alone cannot define its future. Wave technology has not simply created a better training environment. It has created an entirely new sporting platform, and those willing to rethink competition from first principles — not simply modify existing formats — will define the next generation of surfing.

Surfing Deserves Better Than Repetition

The greatest surfers in the world should not be measured solely by how effectively they repeat a judging criteria. They should be encouraged to redefine it. Sport evolves when athletes are allowed to expand the boundaries of possibility, and wave technology finally gives surfing that opportunity.

The question is no longer whether stadium surfing will become mainstream. The technology is already here. The investment is already happening. The audience is waiting. The only real question is whether the sport — and the surf parks now responsible for its future — has the courage to reinvent itself, sustainably and on its own terms, before somebody else does it for them.

Because the future of surf competition won't be built by asking how to improve yesterday's format. It will be built by imagining what becomes possible when every wave is perfect, every fan has the best seat in the house, every surfer is finally free to show us what they believe great surfing truly looks like — and every facility making that possible can stand behind its environmental footprint as confidently as it stands behind its waves.

About the author

Justin West is a professional surf coach and competition judge, grew up and later worked in Saudi Arabia — often having to travel abroad simply to catch a wave. He is the CEO and Founder of wpsl.live podcastportugal.com and justinwestcoaching.com

Surfing Was Never a Fight. So Why Do We Judge It Like One?

Let's start with the number nobody in surfing liked talking about. In 2014, the men's winner at a World Surf League Championship Tour event took home $100,000. The women's winner took home $60,000 — same waves, same event, same job. In 2018, a photo went viral of a female junior surfer holding a novelty cheque for exactly half what the men's winner got. It took until 2019 for the WSL to fully close that gap.

Let that sink in. Not 1999. 2019.

We're not writing this to drag another league. We're writing it because it's the clearest evidence of a bigger problem: professional surfing has spent decades built around a version of "great surfing" that wasn't gender-neutral to begin with — and the money followed the bias.

What "great" actually looks like.

Open the official judging criteria for any major tour and you'll find the same list: commitment and degree of difficulty, speed, power and flow, innovative and progressive manoeuvres. On paper, neutral. In practice, a lot of surfers and fans have long argued those words quietly favour one register of surfing — explosive, aerial, high-commitment power surfing — over another register that's just as demanding: flow, rhythm, line, control, the kind of surfing that reads as more finesse than force.

Call it what you want. Masculine and feminine are loaded words and we're not here to pin either style to a gender — plenty of the most powerful surfers on earth are women, and plenty of the most stylish surfers on earth are men. That's exactly the point. Surfing has never actually been one thing. It's an interpretation. But when your scoring criteria quietly reward one interpretation over another, you're not judging surfing — you're judging a house style, and calling it objective.

We don't think that's a conspiracy. We think it's thirty years of a format nobody questioned hardening into "how it's done."

The other question we can't ignore

We'd be dishonest if we wrote about gender in sport right now and skipped the debate happening across almost every governing body in the world: how sport should handle transgender athletes competing in women's categories. It's a genuinely difficult question, and different sports — athletics, swimming, rugby, cycling — have landed in different places, often after years of consultation, legal challenge and disagreement among athletes themselves. For many women who've built a career around a female category, the concern is straightforward: that category exists because it protects a specific opportunity, and if that opportunity is complicated by open eligibility rules, that's a real cost to real athletes, not an abstraction.

We're not going to pretend there's a tidy answer to that, because there isn't one — not in surfing, not anywhere yet. What we can tell you is what we did with it.

Our answer: we didn't build the category

WPSL doesn't run a men's tour and a women's tour and then have to referee who belongs where. We built open heats from day one — every surfer in the same water, judged by the same crowd, on the same criteria: was that great to watch? That's not us dodging the debate. It's us removing the plumbing the debate depends on. No binary category means no fight over who's eligible for it. Every surfer earns their result the same way everyone else does — by producing something the crowd responds to.

We're not claiming that solves gender politics in sport. Nobody's format does. What it does is give every surfer — regardless of who they are — the same blank canvas and the same audience. No panel deciding in advance what a scoring wave should look like. No category built around assumptions about what a man's surfing or a woman's surfing is supposed to be.

Surfing, more than almost any other sport, has room to be reinterpreted. Power or flow. Committed or controlled. Explosive or effortless. We don't want to prescribe which one is "correct" — because we don't think there is one. We want to hand the wave to the best surfers on earth and let them show us what they think great looks like.

Then we're going to let the people watching decide if they're right.

WPSL — Wave Pool Surf League. wpsl.live