Stab: Okay, so let’s get into the why of all this?

Pat: There are a couple reasons. The easiest, for us being in the business of telling stories, is we wanted to be able to get these surfers in front of people more. Last year, the Big Wave Tour happened one week apart. Then it kind of disappeared off everybody’s radar. Like, big waves pop up around the world and surfers go there, but the media focus is on the tour. It’ll be easy for people to focus on Mavericks not being a part of it anymore as a negative. We feel like we can do a better job telling stories, and we can do that all year round.

Gotcha, so this is a big strip back on the tour itself, and a focus on content that the WSL can produce and own.

Yeah, to be honest, this change might come as a little bit of a surprise, but maybe not a complete surprise. But the reality of this is, it was always going to be sponsor-dependent and selling standalone big wave events is challenging. It has been way before we started doing this.

A while back we jumped in and thought, Okay, maybe we can make a tour out this. Which, bringing the tour back down the line isn’t off the table. But there are too many challenges around it right now. So, we took a step back and thought, Okay, let’s put all our energy into the two contests we are still going to run. Then produce content and do a better job telling stories about the men and women who are on each big swell.

Take Tahiti for example, before the trials on that tow day, I really wanted to see what was happening behind the scenes. And, we feel like this is a great opportunity to shift gears and elevate those stories, whether they’re surfers that our on our big wave tour or not. In doing that, hopefully we can get more interest and more people to invest, and when that happens, then we can start adding more events.

That touches on something I wanted to ask, you guys eat more money than you make running a big wave event, and as the WSL is obviously a business first, which I think a lot of people don’t realize, your bottom line was a deciding factor on making these changes to the Big Wave Tour.

One-hundred percent, man. I don’t want to pin it all on the finance, but throughout time it’s been a challenging space and we definitely were eating the cost. So we looked at that and thought, can we do something that is different and bring more energy into the big wave space?

Will this be a detriment to the Big Wave Surfers who are on tour and aren’t of Kai Lenny, Twiggy, or Billy Kemper status?

Right now, there’s a restricted number of people who get to compete on the Tour and there’s no qualifying series. The hope is to build stories and give a stage to the people who aren’t the same five or six surfers mentioned every year. If you look at the current model, last year we only ran three days. One day at Nazaré and two at Jaws. Even if you’re a big wave surfer on tour, you could have only had two heats and that’s your year. There’s just so much more to big wave surfing, and the amazing surfing that happens outside of the stops.