Funding Approval Details

In the mid-eighties, surfing exploded. A sport that up until that point had been epitomised by the hippie counterculture of the 70s, and the Beach Boy scene of the 60s, was now ‘going pro’. Surfers were no longer local beach bums, now there was money and a career. They were to become gods in mainstream magazines and television. All of a sudden surfing was ‘Pro Surfing’ – a circus of loud colours, peroxide hair and radical male egos. But still, Pro Surfing was struggling to attract sponsorship dollars. Contests were held at city beaches on weekends in order to attract maximum crowds and that meant the men were forced to surf shitty waves for very little graft. And so it goes that at any given contest in the middle of the day when the wind came on-shore and the waves were deemed truly unsurfable, event organisers would call lunch - and that was when they let the women hold the ASP World Professional Women’s Surfing Tour. These girls were the afterthought, a scrawny addon of a male-dominated, male-run sport. They were The Sideshow. Interestingly, this year, for the first time every, a pro female has the chance to earn more winnings than her male counterpart (just because she kicks ass, the total prize pool is still half the men's).