Longboarding has had to struggle for its moment in the sun since its richer cousin of shortboarding was incepted back in the late ‘60s. The first men’s Longboard World Champion was crowned in 1987 and the women’s tour commenced in 1999. Since then it has varied from being somewhat of a dream tour heading to locations like the Maldives to being a one off event held in China.
In the early 2000s, like the rest of the surf industry, longboarding had significantly more money than it has had over the last decade. Prize money was good, sponsors paid a living wage and professional longboarders were pretty much just that – fully professional. Since then, the state of the tour has dipped and weaved, with only the very top of the crop having sponsorship and even then not always. In 2014 Australian Chelsea Williams won a World Title without any kind of major sponsorship and she was far from the only one in this situation.
The state of the longboard tour has in the past gotten so dire, it was rumoured the WSL wanted to cut it out completely. A changing criteria and formats have sparked rebel tours and boycotts until finally in the last three years there seems to have been a kind of stability established. The criteria is set, the tour has four stops and with this stability there is greater opportunity for surfers to gain sponsorship because they have a clear proposal to show to companies who might be interested. Then, there has been the Olympic possibility that breathed a new level of anticipation into the longboarding community.
“I think there was just so much excitement about the prospect from all of the longboarders,” said reigning WSL World Champion Rachael Tilly, fresh off a victory at ISA World Championships in El Salvador. “I feel like we’re always fighting for recognition within our own sport and so that was going to be another really exciting step,” she said.
Sadly, in early April the Olympic dream was dashed for longboarders globally for LA28 and with it the idea that longboarding might gain the institutional and sponsorship support it has always lacked. So, where to from here for professional longboarding? According to Tilly, the longboard tour faces a similar problem to the Challenger Series: “the prize money is still not great at all, and I don’t think you could go more than four events without increasing the prize money significantly,” she said. “The way we have it structured right now, it at least gives people seven months of the year to work or figure something out in order to fund it, whether you have sponsors or you’re working a job and saving up,” the World Champ explained.
Tommy Pierucki/World Surf League via Getty Images
With a full range of professionalisation across the tour, there are surfers with PhDs and full time jobs juggling the demands of training all year, taking leave and travelling to compete. The tour is largely stratified by those who surf full time and those who don’t – those who do occupy most of the places at the pointy end of the rankings with those with crowdfund campaigns and 9-5s mostly forced down to the lower end of the rankings come the year wrap. But, with multiple stops locked for multiple years, the impacts are already visible, with a lift in the performance level showing a greater depth of talent as the years progress. When the tour just one event, for some it might have been a little bit of an annual holiday to the warmth during winter. Now it’s a test over multiple venues and multiple months.
But again questions still linger over what will happen next with the WSL World Longboard Tour. With the WSL announcing big changes in the structure of the shortboard tour for 2026, there have so far been no signals as to what might happen to the longboard tour. Since 2022 the Longboard Tour has had its own version of a finals day which was last year run at El Sunzal in El Salvador where Tilly prevailed. With finals day scrapped for shortboarding, will it remain for longboarding?
Related: Longboard Surfing Denied for LA28 Olympics
WSL has made no announcement of planned changes to the longboard, but it has reinforced its commitment to the tour and not ruled anything out for future years: “We are always evaluating new opportunities to elevate the Longboard Tour with input from our surfers, as well as internal and external stakeholders. We do not foresee any immediate changes for the 2025 season, but we will of course share updates if and when adjustments are made,” tour manager Will Hayden-Smith said.
“The Olympic decision does not diminish our long-standing commitment to the WSL Longboard Tour. We remain dedicated to supporting longboarding at the highest level and to continuing to crown World Longboard Champions each year.”
As for Rachael Tilly, who went viral at ISAs in El Salvador, not for her victory but for this gladiator effort scaling the wall while an eight foot set marched toward her, she has proved her dominance in El Salvador. She won the finals day in late 2024 to claim her second World Title, eight years after she won her first in China where she became World Champion at just 17 (a fact that WSL mysteriously forgets in the youngest WSL World Champion ever conversation, despite her being younger than Caity Simmers at the time), and backed it up just months later to win ISA gold. She will now be forced to watch the Olympics head to her home break in San Clemente, sadly without her sport.
But, as Tilly puts it: “I think overall people were disappointed, but in the same breath, it’s not like you can be too disappointed by something you never had.”
“I think longboarders are uniquely resilient in the sense that we’ve battled so hard over the last decades to have a spot within the WSL tour. The way that longboarding exists in the industry, I think that does make us more resilient for peaks and troughs such as this as well,” she added.
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