Random Surfing Athletes Generator

So the tool gave you a surfer

You wanted a surfer and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It runs from Duke Kahanamoku, who carried the sport out of Hawaii and around the world, through the competitive tour, to the big-wave specialists who do something the rest of the sport quietly regards as insane.

The tool is the simple part. Surfing deserves explaining because it is structurally unlike every other sport in existence, and the reason is very simple: nobody controls the arena.

The only sport that cannot be scheduled

Every other sport on this site is played on a surface built to a specification. The pitch is the same pitch. The lane is the same lane. Surfing has none of that. The playing field is the ocean, it is different every single day, and it cannot be ordered to turn up.

So professional surfing does something no other sport does: it declares a waiting period. A contest is given a window of perhaps ten days, and the organisers watch the forecast and call the event on whichever morning the waves look best. Competitors sit around for a week. If the swell never arrives, the contest is run in poor surf and everybody knows the results mean less. And within a heat, two surfers sitting side by side do not get the same waves, because the ocean does not deal fairly. One gets a set wave with a perfect wall. The other gets a lump. The sport has, at its heart, an irreducible element of luck that its athletes accept the way farmers accept weather. Every name on this list has lost a heat to the sea rather than to a person.

How a surf contest actually works

Because the ocean is unfair, the rules exist mainly to manage the unfairness. Two surfers are in the water for around half an hour. Judges score each ride out of ten for things like difficulty, power, flow and innovation, and only the two best waves count, so a surfer who catches nine mediocre waves beats nobody.

The crucial mechanism is priority. The surfer who has waited longest without catching a wave has the right to any wave they choose, and the other must give way. This turns a heat into a slow tactical duel, in which a competitor might sit and refuse wave after wave, holding priority, waiting for something better, gambling that the ocean will deliver before the buzzer. It is chess played on water, and it is completely invisible to a first-time viewer, who sees two people bobbing about apparently doing nothing. Once you know about priority, surfing becomes watchable in a way it simply is not before.

Eleven titles, youngest and oldest

Kelly Slater has won eleven world titles. To grasp what that means: he won his first at twenty, the youngest ever, and his last at thirty-nine, the oldest ever, and in between he retired, came back, and dominated a generation of surfers who had grown up watching him. He kept competing at the elite level into his fifties. No other sport has a figure quite like him, because no other sport would physically allow one.

Around him the list gathers the greats: Layne Beachley and Stephanie Gilmore, who between them own the women's record with seven world titles each; Carissa Moore, who won surfing's first Olympic gold; Mick Fanning, remembered as much for being attacked by a shark on live television, and punching it, as for his three world titles; Bethany Hamilton, who lost an arm to a shark at thirteen and was back on a board within weeks. And Gabriel Medina, Italo Ferreira and the wave of Brazilian surfers who arrived in the 2010s and took the sport apart.

The ones who chase the monsters

A separate group on this list does something that is not really a competition at all. Big-wave surfers travel to a handful of places on earth where the seabed shape turns ocean swell into walls of water the height of a building, and they ride them.

At Nazaré in Portugal, a deep underwater canyon focuses swell into waves that have been ridden at over twenty-four metres. Riders are towed in by jet ski because no human can paddle fast enough to catch something moving that quickly. If they fall, they are held under by successive waves in water that has the density of wet concrete, and the safety operation is a genuine rescue. Maya Gabeira, on this list, nearly drowned there and returned to set the women's record. And a name that means everything in Hawaii: Eddie Aikau, the Waimea Bay lifeguard who never lost a swimmer, and who died at thirty-one after paddling for help when a voyaging canoe capsized. The phrase Eddie Would Go is still painted on walls across the islands. Surfing keeps its dead close.

What a random surfer is good for

• Discovering the sport. Draw a name and go and watch a heat with the priority rule in mind. It changes what you are looking at.
• Contest sweepstakes. Draw surfers for a group during a tour event or an Olympic competition.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Big-wave surfers and the Hawaiian pioneers will defeat almost anybody.
• Settling a debate. Pull two surfers and argue the greater career, competition results against big-wave courage.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a surfer and research how a Hawaiian practice became a global professional sport.

Surfing questions

Who is the greatest surfer of all time?

Kelly Slater, by most measures, with eleven world titles won across two decades. He was both the youngest world champion at twenty and the oldest at thirty-nine. Among women, Layne Beachley and Stephanie Gilmore each have seven titles.

What is priority in a surf contest?

The surfer who has gone longest without catching a wave has first choice of any wave, and the other must give way. It exists because the ocean is unfair, and it turns a heat into a tactical waiting game.

Why do surf contests have waiting periods?

Because the waves cannot be scheduled. An event is given a window of days and run on whichever morning the forecast is best. It is the only major sport whose competition date is decided by the weather.

Can I pull several surfers, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. World Surf League. worldsurfleague.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, surfing. britannica.com