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Organizers of other individual sports, like the PGA Tour and NASCAR, have engineered playoff-style events to concoct season-ending punch.īut surfing is different. “As an athlete, you just really dream to be able to win in that kind of situation,” Gilmore said. The exact day of this year’s event is uncertain (the unpredictability of waves is among competitive surfing’s charms and aggravations) but it appears most likely to happen Monday or Tuesday. The idea is to build a playoff atmosphere, a singular event to stamp into the minds of would-be fans and the media outlets that they follow.
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Now the season will end in September - this time at Lower Trestles, off a bulge in the coastline at the southern end of San Clemente - with a one-day surf-off among the top five men and the top five women. Surfers, building points at events around the world all year, sometimes arrived in Hawaii having already clinched a world title. The championship tour season used to end in December on the North Shore of Oahu, usually with dramatic barrel-shaped waves but often without suspense. Under new leadership, it hopes to ride a swell from surfing’s Olympic debut in Tokyo while overhauling its schedule and, most notably, the way it crowns champions. That is why the World Surf League is operating this year with a jolt of urgency. It is the indefatigable belief that there are more fans to hook and more money to be made.