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

Image of surfer Sierra Kerr performing the first ever womens backflip thanks to Surf Total.

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™.

Article written by WPSL CEO Justin West.