For the first time in history, Czech Surfing will be sending its national team to the ISA World Surfing Games to compare their skills with the best surfers in the world. The national team will be selected based on the results of the first two competitions of the Czech and Slovak Surfing Tour.
World Surf League x ISA World Surfing Games
The ISF World Surfing Championship was the first world surfing championship held at Manley Beach, Australia in 1964 and continued in the same form until 1973 when it was replaced by the semi-professional Smirnoff World Pro-Am Surfing Chamionship. After that, in 1976, a professional world tour has first been organized by the International Proffesional Surfers (ISP) and then by the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP), which since 2015 has been called the World Surf League (WSL). Parallel to this professional tour, however, the International Surfing Association (ISA) began to re-organize the amateur ISA World Surfing Games in 1978, which had been rather in the background for many years. However, with the inclusion of surfing on the Olympic Games programme and the appointment of the ISA as the main governing body for world surfing, the ISA World Surfing Games became important again, as it became the main way to qualify for the Games alongside the WSL.
Czech national team
Until now, Czech Surfing has never officialy been represented at the ISA World Surfing Games. Our mission is to change this. In the first two events of the Czech and Slovak Surfing Tour, the competitors will have a chance to secure a nomination to the national team, which will be sent to represent Czechia in this prestigious event.
An eight-member team will be sent to the competition venue, the composition of which will be determined on the basis of the results in the first two competitions of this year's Czech and Slovak Surfing Tour. The first four members of the national team will be known at the end of September and will be the two male and two female competitors who will finish in the top two positions among the Czech participants in the Caparica Czech Surf Open 2022. The rest of the team will then be decided at the end of the year at the Bali Big Wejf 5, where the top two male and two female competitors who have not yet secured a nomination from Portugal will be nominated.
You can read the exact wording of the nomination criteria on our website in the section REPRESENTATION.
World Surfing Games El Salvador 2023
This year's World Surfing Games will be held in a few weeks in California, but we have decided not to participate in this event yet, because no nomination criteria have been set for the selection of the national team. We will therefore make our first appearance at the next World Surfing Games, which is expected to be held in El Salvador at the end of May 2023. This event will also be one of the main qualifying events for participation in the 2024 Paris Olympics outside of the World Surf League. You can find out more about the Olympic qualifiers here.
The last ISA World Surfing Games in 2021 attracted around 260 competitors from 51 countries, but next year the numbers are expected to increase significantly. Both individual rankings and team rankings are awarded during the event, which include the results of all team members and were dominated last year by Team France, led by Joan Duru, Jeremy Flores and Pauline Ado.