There’s something odd about Carissa Moore’s World Surf League championships besides the fact that they came in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2019, and 2021.
If the rules had not been changed, she’d officially have won two more, in 2022 and 2023.
Moore announced Friday she’s stepping away (she’s not calling it retiring) from competitive surfing.
She should be doing so as the reigning three-time world champion.
But, in 2020, the WSL announced a drastic change in how it would crown its champions going forward. Instead of the annual title being awarded to the surfer who accumulated the most points over the course of the year (makes sense), it is now determined in one meet at the end of the season (doesn’t make sense, except to create drama).
If the WSL had not changed the criteria, Moore, 31, would have seven world championships in 13 years — and knowing that, what I write at the end of this column might make fewer of you think I’m crazy.
In 2022, Moore was first after the 10 regular events with 57,670 total points. Stephanie Gilmore was fifth with 46,370, barely getting into the five-surfer finals.
But Gilmore won in the finals, and hence was crowned the year’s champion. And while Moore was winning in all those odd years, Gilmore was doing so in the even years — plus some from before, giving her a record total of eight.
So, you may ask, how does someone with the fifth most points for the year win that year’s championship?
The answer is the hard way.
It’s called a stepladder playoff. If you follow professional bowling you know what it is; it’s one-and-done, and if you’re the fifth and last qualifier, you have to beat Nos. 4, 3, 2 and 1 to win the championship.
Gilmore beat everyone, including Moore, who in effect had a bye into the championship final.
Last year, Moore suffered a similar fate. This time she won three of the 10 CT meets, and had 62,490 points during the season to top the list going into the finals. Moore’s 2021 Olympic teammate, Caroline Marks, climbed the stepladder from the No. 3 spot to beat her in the winner-take-all finale.
If the season-points- total system hadn’t been changed, Gilmore and Moore would now be tied with seven world titles.
You might be tempted to say that’s how it goes, that a big part of being a champion is coming through with your best performances when it matters most. Gilmore certainly did that in 2022, surfing her way through that gauntlet.
You could compare it to other sports that have playoffs and wild-card teams that have a chance to peak at the right time and win it all.
But here’s why that comparison doesn’t work for me.
Surfing has so many more variables that are beyond the competitors’ control than other sports. Although it’s true that the best surfers often make their own luck through preparation and instinct, that’s not always the case when your real opponent is nature and its unpredictability.
Also, this is a sport where scores are determined by judges, and we all know what that can mean.
The best way to balance out variance is with a larger sample size — and the CT’s 10 events each year is obviously a much larger sample size than one final meet.
Go ahead and call me biased — and I probably am, because Moore is one of the best people I’ve ever met. She’s an ambassador of aloha in the mold of her idol, Duke Kahanamoku. She cares about and acts upon the right things, like helping people who are struggling.
In my mind Moore is a seven-time world champion, because she was the most consistently excellent surfer throughout each of those seven years.
If you need rising to the occasion as a measure of greatness, don’t forget about her winning that Olympic surfing gold medal. She’s the first woman to do that, and might still be the only one after this year’s Games, since she’s planning that as her last competition, at least for now.
Whether she wins gold again or not, whether she ever competes again or not, she’s right up there with Duke on a short list of two as Hawaii’s greatest athletes of all time.
