Surf Athletes
We all like to think we are surfers who “could have” made it. These surf athletes actually are making it. From underground heroes to rising groms – this is where we lay bare the best talent in the country.
Jono Smit captures Billy Stairmand during some down time away from the pressure of the World Qualifying Series. Raglan’s favourite surfer has battled funding issues as he campaigns the toughest qualifying series in the world. Let’s hope 2019 brings him the breakthrough results he needs. Credits: Filmed by Jono Smit......
Paige Hareb is New Zealand’s most successful surfer and her achievements, as the World Surf League (WSL) season for 2018 come to a close, stand testament to her competitive character and determination. The 2018 season was her seventh year competing on the WSL Championship Tour and she was thrown every......
Well, it’s about as official as unofficial gets. Our team of analysts have crunched every possible scenario and WSL possibility and it’s beyond a shadow of doubt. We’ve put ourselves out there, we’re calling it first: our Kiwi QS charger, Ricardo Christie, is now squarely cemented and set to rejoin......
Ricardo Christie laid down a new chapter in New Zealand surfing history today when he went blow-for-blow with three of the world’s best in the final of the Hawaiian Pro at Haleiwa. His third place finish catapulted Ricardo from 14th to seventh on the WQS rankings and puts him in......
Taranaki’s Paige Hareb has re-qualified for the 2019 Championship Tour today at Birubi Beach, Port Stephens, NSW, Australia. It was here last year that she re-qualified for the World Surf League Championship Tour with an outstanding quarterfinal result. Today she’s once again booked herself a starting spot in the 2019......
On September 3, 2010, Andy Irons won the Billabong Pro at Teahupoo, Tahiti. Two months later, on November 2, 2010, one of the world’s greatest surfers was found dead, lying on his back in a bed, sheets pulled up, in a hotel in Grapevine, Texas. That’s about the centre of......
The twelve-strong New Zealand Junior Surfing Team heads off to the United States next week to compete at the 2018 VISSLA ISA World Junior Surfing Championship. Held at Huntington Beach, California, the New Zealand team is fresh out of the National Scholastic Surfing Championships event where nine surfers competed. Three of......
A late-season swell offers one last roll of the dice for New Zealand’s big-wave riders and the stakes are high. As the winds swing through the ideal bearing the focus falls on a reef on a remote corner of coastline. Four teams of surfers get the session of a lifetime.......
In a sheltered bay off the end of the Kaikoura Peninsula columns of bubbles spill out of the sea floor like shimmering mercury and make their way to the surface. It’s a dazzling display, like a scene that belongs in Wonderland. This is Hope Springs, aptly named, and just one......
Bobbing around on a jet ski near a reef off the southernmost tip of New Zealand’s South Island it dawned on me that I had been drawn here like a moth to a flame. Each passing set of waves grew in size and intensity and started to look more like......