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As Surfing Makes Its Olympic Debut, Billionaire-Owned World Surf League Hopes To Catch A Wave Of Opportunities

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This week, 40 surfers, including four Americans, are hitting Tsurigasaki Beach in Japan for surfing’s Olympic debut. (That is, if the weather allows.) Two Brazilians, Gabriel Medina and Italo Ferreira, are favorites to take home the gold medal in the men’s competition. But if everything goes right for billionaire Dirk Ziff’s World Surf League, Medina and Ferreira won’t be the only winners. 

Surfing’s inclusion in the Olympics is a big moment for the Santa Monica-based World Surf League—and the press-shy billionaire behind it. Ziff, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is one of three brothers who inherited a publishing fortune and then grew it by investing in hedge funds and more. He invested $25 million into the league in 2012 and subsequently became the majority owner, pouring in at least $25 million more, according to a 2017 lawsuit filed by a former investor. It’s all in pursuit of a larger audience that will hopefully generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue—enough to cover the cost of putting on 12 major championship surf competitions every year. So far, that bigger audience has been elusive. The Olympics could play a role in changing that.

“There’s going to be an expansion of surfing across the globe funded by Olympic enthusiasm,” says former championship surfer Ian Cairns, who in 1983 founded the Association of Surfing Professionals, a precursor to what would ultimately become the World Surf League.

Ziff’s World Surf League has already seen a 25% increase in hours of online content watched by viewers of its first six events of 2021, compared with the first six events two years ago, according to Erik Logan, the league’s CEO. “People are excited about surfing because it’s in the Olympics,” Logan says.

The World Surf League was not directly involved with helping surfing become an Olympic sport, but athletes could qualify for the Games through WSL events. The league is known for putting on the Championship Tour—held in various locations around the world—and qualifying series events, and for crowning the surfing world champion. According to Logan, the core of WSL’s business model is sponsorship revenue. 

Although the WSL has been tight-lipped about how much it hauls in annually, since the start of 2021, its surf events streamed over YouTube have reached an aggregated total of 10 million views. That averages out to about 1.7 million views per major event. By comparison, the IndyCar racing league had an estimated 400,000 viewers on NBC per race in 2019, across 17 races; with its races televised, it generated an estimated $25 million in sponsorship revenue that year.

Running a league like WSL adds up. Cairns says it costs approximately $3 million to put on a large-scale surfing event like those in the WSL’s Championship Tour; given that WSL has about 12 of those events a year, that’s $36 million in expenses. 

Cairns estimates that the WSL’s overall costs are likely much higher than that, after accounting for additional smaller events, the cost of running its office in Santa Monica and the WSL’s newly minted TV studio business. Its first TV project, The Ultimate Surfer, is a reality show that will premiere on ABC in August. 

Logan says he hopes the publicity from the TV show will ultimately bring new viewers to WSL competition events. He joined the WSL as CEO in 2020, having spent seven years as co-president and then president of the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Before Ziff owned the league, it was known as the Association of Surfing Professionals and was owned 50% by professional surfers, who paid dues, and 50% by surf brands, including Billabong, Quiksilver and Rip Curl, which functioned as the licensees of its events. Each surf brand organized its own events under the banner of the ASP.

But by 2010, as board shorts rapidly fell out of the cultural zeitgeist, those companies were struggling. Revenues dropped, and both Billabong and Quiksilver filed for bankruptcy in 2015. They were looking to unload the league, and in 2012 an investor group called ZoSea Media Holdings offered a solution. ZoSea was founded by Paul Speaker, a former executive at Quiksilver, and Terry Hardy, the career manager of championship surfer Kelly Slater. They offered to take over the league and centralize the running of all the events. Their buyout offer was to take it on for no money at all, according to Neil Ridgeway, the current chief brand and marketing officer for Rip Curl. After a vote, the surf brands took it. 

ZoSea quickly found a deep-pocketed backer in Ziff, whom Forbes estimates to be worth $5 billion. According to the 2017 lawsuit filed by a minority owner of the WSL, Ziff pumped $25 million into the ASP, which became a subsidiary of ZoSea, and Speaker and Hardy remained controlling owners and managers. In 2015, the ASP was rebranded as the World Surf League with Speaker as CEO. 

According to the lawsuit, by 2016 Ziff had invested a total of $50 million into the league and a wave pool business the league had acquired. It also claims that Ziff terminated Speaker in 2016 (press releases at the time say that he resigned) and essentially, through a series of transactions, ended up acquiring 60% of Speaker’s stake in ZoSea for $12 million, turning Ziff into the majority owner. 

After Speaker’s departure, Ziff took over as interim CEO, before handing the reins to Sophie Goldschmit, the former NBA managing director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, in 2017. She held the role until Logan’s appointment in 2020. 

Ziff has publicly spoken about the league only once, at the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association’s 2018 Waterman Ball, when he and his wife, Natasha, accepted awards as Waterman and Waterwoman of the year. 

In his acceptance speech, Ziff said, “It seems pretty obvious that if the WSL keeps growing in popularity, and surfing takes its rightful place among the great and elite competitive sports, everyone connected with our sport, and certainly all the members of SIMA, will prosper, except maybe a few grumpy locals who have to deal with some new faces in the lineup.”

The reclusive billionaire has been a polarizing figure for many in the surfing community. Some have seen his quest for a mainstream audience as alienating to the core surf community. Specifically, one irreverent online publication known as BeachGrit has positioned itself as a nemesis to Ziff, writing headlines like: “If you were drowning, and co-waterperson of the year Dirk Ziff was in the water, would you feel confident?”

Others in the community say that without Ziff’s backing, it’s possible that the league would have ceased to exist completely. “I’m so supportive of investments that the Ziffs have made in terms of taking over the tour and running it and investing money,” says Cairns, the surfing legend.

Yet it remains to be seen whether surfing can ever enter the mainstream. Sean Doherty, who’s covered the industry since 1997 for various publications and now owns Surfing World Magazine, isn’t optimistic. “[Surf brands] have always believed that there’s a huge mainstream audience, particularly in America, who don’t surf but, if surfing was presented the right way, would engage with it,” he says. “The previous incarnation of the sport learned that this was always fool’s gold and it’s never really existed.” 

WSL’s plans might have found a way to capture that audience in 2016. Kelly Slater, who’s been called the greatest surfer of all time, created a wave pool that could manufacture the perfect surfing swell. The technology made waves, literally and metaphorically, with the New Yorker declaring: “Yes, surfing might now become ‘mainstream.’” WSL bought a controlling interest in Slater’s wave pool for an undisclosed price. In a company statement at the time, WSL said it envisioned “the build-out of a global network of WSL-branded high-performance training centers utilizing this wave technology.”

That never happened. Five years after the purchase, Slater’s first pool in the Central Valley town of Lemoore, California, remains WSL’s only location. It’s not completely clear why the pools didn’t take off, but Doherty imagines it’s likely a combination of the cost to run it and competition from other wave pool companies that have popped up. 

Now, the sport’s backers are hoping surfing’s Olympic debut finally captivates mainstream audiences. History shows it’s possible: When snowboarding debuted at the 1998 Winter Olympics, it helped propel a burst of enthusiasm for what had previously been a niche sport. By the 2002 Olympics, snowboarding was broadcast during prime time in the U.S., and by 2010 audiences were enthralled by breakout star Shaun White. 

The 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro reached a TV audience of 198 million people, and almost 80% of American homes tuned in to the Games, according to a report by Nielson. Surfing’s place in the 2024 Paris Olympics has also already been confirmed, with the competition set to occur way off-site, in Tahiti. 

Still, it took 12 years after its Olympic debut for snowboarding to find a Shaun White, and it’s unclear how long Ziff will continue backing the WSL. Rumors swirled before the pandemic that he was shopping the league around for a sale at a price of $150 million. The WSL declined to comment on these rumors.

In the meantime, rain and wind are threatening the surfing competition at the Tokyo Olympics—a week that could help land a wider audience.

“We've done a lot of work over 2019, 2020 to really improve and solidify the stability of the business,” Logan says. “We’re very excited where we sit today.”

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