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™.

WE'RE NOT HERE TO JUDGE. WE'RE HERE TO WATCH.

Surfing hasn't changed in 30 years our team mate Barton Lynch, 1988 world champion and one of the sport's most respected voices explains. “Professional surfing hasn't really changed in 30 years” he told us. “Yes, there's been some small changes in equipment, some tweaks to the criteria.” Small tweaks. Thirty years.

We think that's long enough.

Today we're launching WPSL — the Wave Pool Surf League.

WHY

Surfing has always had a problem: it's an art form being scored like a spreadsheet. A panel of judges, most of whom will never surf as well as the athletes in the water, sit on a beach with a checklist — critical section, degree of difficulty, commitment, innovation — and try to reduce something that's genuinely creative into a number out of ten.

The result, in recent years, has been ugly. Heats decided by decimal points. Inconsistent scoring that's cost athletes results, money, and — frankly — their trust in the system. Instant replay and slow-motion breakdowns posted to social media the moment a score drops, dissecting every call in real time. The cynic in us could say some of that scoring drama is good for engagement. The surfer in us knows it's bad for the sport.

Surfing was never meant to be marked. It was meant to be watched.

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

WPSL flips the model. We provide the canvas — a purpose-built, arena-scale wave pool, identical waves on demand, no waiting, no weather, no excuses. What happens next is entirely up to the athletes. They draw the lines. They decide what bold looks like, what style looks like, what a genuinely great wave looks like. And the audience — the people who showed up, who are standing in the arena, who understand exciting surfing when they see it — decides who wins.

We call it People Power™ judging. No panel. No hidden criteria written by committee. The crowd scores the heat, live, through the app, in real time. It's simple: if you're a fan and you found it thrilling, that counts.

Yes, it's controversial. Good.

We're also running open heats — men, women and juniors competing together in the same heat, on the same waves, for the same result. We know that's going to raise eyebrows. We're doing it anyway, because a controlled, identical wave pool is the fairest environment surfing has ever had to test this properly, and because we think the audience wants to watch great surfing, not a category. Skill, style and innovation aren't gendered or age-gated — let's actually find out what happens when everyone's judged on the same wave, by the same crowd, at the same time.

We'd rather start a conversation than protect a format nobody's questioned in three decades.

THE TEAM

WPSL is being built by people who've lived on both sides of this problem — inside the judging towers and inside the barrel.

Justin West, Founder & CEO, has spent 28+ years across competitive surfing, wave pool training and global athlete culture — including a stint as Director of the Saudi Rugby Association. He's also an IBJJF European Masters Jiu Jitsu Gold Medalist, which tells you most of what you need to know about his tolerance for being told what “correct” technique looks like by someone who isn't in the arena.

Dan Luger MBE, Co-Founder & Chairman, is a former England Rugby World Cup winner and British & Irish Lion whose post-rugby career has spanned finance, investment relationships and international business development. Dan leads our strategic partnerships, investor relations and capital raising — someone who's built things at the top level of elite sport and knows exactly what it takes to scale one commercially.

Barton Lynch, our Surfing Sage & Ambassador, is the 1988 World Champion and one of the most respected voices in the sport. Nobody understands the gap between what surfing is and what surfing scores better than a world champion who's spent three decades watching the format stand still — and Barton brings that expert knowledge and authentic credibility to WPSL's broadcast presence.

Jamie Mitchell, our Athlete Ambassador, is a world champion waterman and elite big-wave athlete with global recognition across surfing and endurance sport. Jamie brings athlete credibility and performance insight straight from the water into how WPSL is built.

They're backed by a broader team and advisory bench spanning finance, brand partnerships and international communications — people who've worked with organisations like Red Bull, adidas, Universal Music Group and Chelsea FC — brought together for one reason: to build the league the sport's been asking for, and to give it the commercial and creative infrastructure to actually scale.

WHY NOW

34 wave pools are already operational worldwide, with 200+ more in the global development pipeline (WavePoolMag, 2026). Countries with genuinely spectacular natural conditions and serious capital behind them — the United States, Australia and across Europe among them — are entering the sport at scale. Surf tourism alone is a market worth $71.7B today, projected to reach $95.9B by 2030 (Grand View Research).

At the same time, the world is leaning hard into health, recovery, longevity and wellness — and surfing sits right at the intersection of all of it. Movement, ocean, lifestyle, hospitality. The opportunities for tourism and wellness collaboration around events like ours aren't a side note; they're a huge part of why this moment exists.

Arena events give us controlled conditions, festival energy, and a broadcast-ready product — the pieces that were always missing. Now we have them. That means the only thing left standing between surfing and its next era is the format itself.

So we changed it.

The numbers back it

We're not asking anyone to take this on vibes alone. Our WPSL1 pilot event model is built for a healthy EBITDA margin even in year one, before you even count the value of the media assets, sponsor proof and IP an event like that generates. Scaled to a full six-event annual tour plus a season-ending Global Final, we're modelling toward meaningful revenue growth and league-wide profitability. That's before broadcast rights and sponsorship mature the way they typically do once a league proves itself in year one. We're building this deliberately — pilot first, prove the concept, then scale.

WHAT'S NEXT

WPSL1, our flagship pilot event, launches at Adrena, Saudi Arabia — October 2027 — three days, open categories, People Power™ judging, and a festival atmosphere built for fans, not just competitors.

We're not asking surfing to be perfect. We're asking it to be honest about what makes it great — and letting the people watching decide.

Welcome to WPSL. Let's see what the athletes draw.

WPSL — Wave Pool Surf League. wpsl.live