NEWS

January 8, the third day of the WSL (World Surfing League) World Men's and Women's Shortboard Challenger Series (Wanning Station) ended, and Chinese player Qiu Zhuo stopped in the second round competition and all 32 Chinese contestants have ended the surfing competition. Industry experts believe that the development of surfing in China is not yet mature, and it needs to "break the waves" to move forward.

This event is a qualifying point competition for the shortboard surfing event of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Nearly 200 world's top surfers from 30 countries and regions participated. As the host, China has 32 wild-card entries, which is a major training for the Chinese national surfing team.

The competition system adopts a four-in-two system, that is, there are four players in each group, the top two attend the next round, and entering the second round is equivalent to defeating half of the players. Chinese players Qiu Zhuo, Huang Yingying and Yang Siqi entered the second round of the competition, which is a great improvement for Chinese surfers.

However, from the perspective of competition results, the gap between Chinese players and top foreign players is still very large. Among them, French player Joao Dilu, who ranks 28th in the world in WSL points, is in the same group with Qiu Zhuo. Qiu Zhuo's best score is 3.2. points, less than half of the results of the French players.

Nan Dongbin, a surfing technical referee, said that the gap between Chinese players and foreign players is mainly power. How to release the power to produce big splashes requires mature surfing skills.  How to catch a good wave when it comes will test the athletes' ability to "read the wave".

Surfing has become a sport at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and most professional surfers are now from Australia, Brazil and the United States. In order to make surfers perform better in their Olympic debut, China has established a national surfing team in 2017.

Ma Fulai, the leader of the national surfing team, admitted that compared with the surfing level of high-level international athletes, the members of the national surfing team have a lot of "things" that are inferior. 1-2 points to reach the current 4-6 points.

Another gap is surf culture. China's national surfing team has just started to develop for more than 2 years, and other advanced countries have been developing this project for decades. Japan has a history of developing surfing for more than 40 years and has formed its own surfing culture.

Steve George Robertson, general manager of the Asia region of the World Surf League, believes that the promotion of surfing is not limited by geographical conditions in many cases, but by cultural differences. Surfing culture does not exist in China's traditional cultural genes, and "entering the Olympics" of surfing will make more young people understand surfing.

In order to make breakthroughs in Chinese surfing, more international events are needed to train the national team members, and it is also necessary to develop a good surfing culture, so that more people can go to the beach and fall in love with surfing.