Calls for the World Surf League to remove its latest addition to the 2025 Championship Tour calendar in Abu Dhabi are growing louder, as the decision to host an event at a new surf pool in the UAE – where homosexuality is illegal – is called into question.
“The WSL have chosen to support a government that criminalises LGBTQIA+ people and discriminates against women, and in doing so are choosing to place their athletes, support teams, and spectators at risk,” reads the opening paragraph of a Change.org petition.
It follows a social media post by Lilli Wright, the wife of two-time world champion and 2024 Australian Olympian Tyler Wright, that points to the fact that homosexuality comes with heavy consequences. The WSL has not yet publicly addressed the campaign, nor the issue, but thought should certainly be given to what it would mean to push on with the event at Hudayriyat Island.
The WSL has put Wright, as the only openly queer athlete on the tour, in an impossible position. Queerness in the world of surfing has long been a taboo. Female surfers have stories of being dropped by sponsors when they came out, such as when Jodie Cooper was outed in the early 1990s and then faced exclusion while competing on the professional circuit. As such, people have kept quiet about their sexuality over the decades. Until Tyler Wright along came.
After taking almost a two-year break from the tour after a severe case of influenza, when Wright returned in 2019 she was loud and proud about her sexuality, adding the pride flag to her jersey and carving a path for a more inclusive future of professional surfing. The shift felt momentous – at last it was OK for surfers to be themselves, compete fairly and be supported. But five years later, is the WSL asking Wright and any other queer surfer on the tour to quietly put their sexuality away again while it brings professional surfing to the UAE?
The alternative would be for Wright to not attend the event. But the WSL doesn’t have a provision in its rulebook that allows surfers to miss a Championship Tour stop because their identity could land them in prison. The penalty for missing an event without a doctor’s certificate is as much as US$50,000, not to mention the loss of points and momentum in a world title campaign. To add to the sting, Wright or any other surfer cannot criticise the event or the WSL’s decision as this would violate the surfer agreement signed with the WSL – which also carries a US$50,000 fine and possible suspension.
The decision to hold the event in the UAE is a curious one. The WSL, while it governs professional surfing, is primarily an entertainment company. Yet, a surf contest in a wave pool is the least entertaining form of surfing. The waves are all the same. The turns are basically identical. Personality, risk and drama are all gone. So why push this event?
The WSL hasn’t made public how much it was paid to turn a blind eye to the problems in the UAE and bring surfing to the Gulf, but presumably it was a significant amount, given it already has its own wave pool made with the same technology in California and the event has been added to the 2025 calendar, rather than replacing another.
The UAE promotes itself through the world of sport as part of a broader Gulf Cooperation Council strategy to encourage tourism and foreign investment in the region by hosting major sporting events. But this sports diplomacy, when it’s done without actually fixing the problems it’s been criticised for, is known as “sports-washing.”
It takes two to tango and the decision to bring a Championship Tour event to a location known to target and imprison critics of its government, be involved in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world unfolding in Sudan, and impose heavy prison sentences on queer people, lies with the WSL.
So what now? Will the WSL consider the petition and prioritise the safety of its surfers, sending a message to all those watching that the rights and safety of LGBTQI people matter? Or will Wright be forced to not attend? Because from where we’re sitting, it seems that forcing the person who has forged a path of inclusivity in professional surfing to hide who she is is a far higher price than anyone should have to pay for the perfect wave.
