Surfing confronts sexual abuse allegations after ISA provisionally suspends surfer
Last week a surfer was provisionally suspended from international competition after the International Surfing Association (ISA) cited "recent reports of serious allegations of abuse within the surfing community," and the online reaction to that announcement was described as unprecedented in the world of surfing. Investigations are ongoing and the suspension triggered a flood of accounts alleging sexual misconduct across surf industry settings.
In 2019 I stood in a bar in New York City at the afterparty of a World Surf League (WSL) Longboard Tour contest; it was after midnight and the bar was packed with competitors who had just wrapped an event on a windy North Atlantic Ocean earlier that day. From the women’s side of the tour, teenagers gathered; nearby, other competitors and event staff, many well into their 40s, were dotted across the room. Alcohol flowed freely, the event was private so there was no one checking IDs, and surfers themselves could be found behind the bar pouring drinks. I reflected in that moment on who was tasked with keeping these young women safe and on how, and to whom, we would report if something were to happen.
Over the years stories among women working and competing in the industry accumulated in private, ranging from sexual harassment to assault, and none of these stories ended in accountability. When I raised the issue with Surfing NSW a few years ago I was told the process for something that happened at a Surfing NSW event would be to make the complaint to the event director, and it would then be passed on to the state body’s CEO; Surfing NSW said they had never received any such complaint. In the WSL context, despite more than a decade competing in sanctioned events, I have never received any information about how to report an incident of sexual abuse to the WSL, or how that report would be treated.
The industry’s structure—male-dominated, tight-knit and insular, with the same people moving from institution to institution, work often contract to contract, and sponsorship decisions and other opportunities relationship-based—means that acting against those ranks in search of accountability carries potentially career-ending risk. Without any clear independent reporting mechanism or a track record of taking reports seriously, these institutions create a culture of silence that protects the accused and buries the stories of women who may have faced sexual violence while competing or working at surfing events.
What was most surprising about the recent allegations that prompted a statement from the ISA was not that they are being made, but that there has actually been a response: a surfer has been suspended, pending investigation, in a culture that had previously glorified a lifestyle where women’s bodies were sacrificed in favour of surfing talent. The suspension and the accompanying online outpouring brought to the surface accounts that had previously been confined to private conversations.
Australian surfer Nat Young, the 1966 world champion credited with being one of the pioneers of the shortboard revolution of the 1970s, described a disturbing scene in the opening chapter of his memoir Nat’s Nat and That’s That, published in 1998. Young writes in the book that a friend “had strategically positioned the girl so that she was lying on her back with her head facing away from the youthful group of lechers and so was able to give the nod over her shoulder”. He adds that when the friend “slipped out”, another “slipped in”, then a third person and Young “had our turn in the same manner”. “The Grunter”, as Young describes the girl in the book, “was really into group sex and we all greeted her with open flies every time we saw her getting off her school bus”. “The scene was starting to get a bit out of hand, the line getting longer and longer as friends and acquaintances from other beaches joined in,” he writes.
Accounts of this type also exist across surfing’s magazines and memoirs, where they have served to validate and normalise such behaviour and at times to laud it as part of the industry’s culture. For the first time since I joined the surfing community, I have seen the rumours written down — in comment sections and Instagram posts — rather than confined to the private spaces where women have long spoken in secret for fear of professional or social reprisal.
Will this be a reckoning beyond a passing moment of outrage, and will it lead to actual reform of the structures that have maintained this culture? Lucy Small is a professional surfer, journalist and film-maker from Sydney, with a special interest in women’s sport.