At the end of last year’s Association of Surfing Professionals season, something fairly remarkable happened. A third-year surfer won a Third World Championship, thereby accomplishing a remarkable feat of dominance for any athlete in any sport, an accomplishment that no surfer had ever managed before.
It followed a familiar pattern in the surfer’s career. This surfer became the first to win a world championship in a rookie year on tour, in 2007. And by winning the world championship three times in the first three years on tour, this surfer set the bar in a way that no one — not even Kelly Slater, the undisputed “best surfer of all time” — had ever done.
Thing is, that surfer is a woman, so you may not have heard about it.
The surfer is 22-year-old Australian Stephanie Gilmore, who has so dominated the ASP Women’s World Tour since she joined it three years ago that she seems to be changing the nature of competition in that realm.
If you haven’t heard much about Gilmore or her feat, though, it’s not at all surprising. The surf media, such as they are, are fairly histrionic in their presentation of competitive surfing, a fact that has come under increasing criticism as the Internet democratizes how surfing is covered. So if a man, like Gilmore’s contemporaries Dane Reynolds and Jordy Smith, both of whom are on the Men’s Tour and both of whom have been hyped up by the media since they were teenagers, had accomplished the same feat, it’s likely that the surf media would have a difficult time containing their enthusiasm.
As it is, though, Gilmore received a fair bit of press, but nowhere near the accolades that her feat deserved, or which would have been doled out to a man.
Gender inequity in sports is not novel, nor is it surprising. But what’s surprising is the way that the realities of the growth of women’s surfing often aren’t recognized.
Estimates vary on the number of surfers in the United States, but it’s generally accepted that somewhere between 2 million and 3 million people are considered surfers in this country, and of that number, nearly 25 percent are women.
That is a remarkable number, and one that would have been much smaller only 10 years ago. Anecdotal evidence reflects this growth, particularly in San Diego, where women make up a significant portion of every lineup.
To date, though, women’s surfing has been mainly considered a “lifestyle” more than a sport. While the same can be said of surfing in general, the companies who market surfing products increasingly do so with a focus on competition, at least on the men’s side of things.
Women’s surfing is most typically marketed as the purview of bikini-clad, fun-loving young women, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether they surf or not.
Nevertheless, strides are being made in legitimizing women’s surfing, and the charge is being led by women themselves. In competition, surfers like Gilmore are demanding more respect.