In 2019, the World Surf League became the first American-based global sports organization to implement equal pay for male and female athletes. It was a historic move for a sport in which gender discrimination had been so radically entrenched. For most of the competitive surfing’s history, women were treated like sometimes pretty, but mostly irrelevant, sideshows. Parallel to surfing as a spiritual outlet and art form, there has always been a competitive element to wave riding in societies with developed aquatic cultures. Ancient Polynesians rode waves for centuries before Europeans witnessed surfing, and in both Hawai‘i and Tahiti, competitive surf gatherings were common, as was gambling on those events.
Professionalized surfing as a distinctly Western tradition arose in the 1960s and birthed in the 1970s. Many surfers and contest organizers had … More