Heading into the 2021 Championship Tour season, it’s the same old names getting most of our attention – names like Steph Gilmore, John John Florence, Tyler Wright, Gabriel Medina, Carissa Moore and Filipe Toledo, to name a few. But while those kind of names are likely to fill up a reasonable amount of the spots at the season-ending Trestles event, there are a handful of roughies who could easily cause a stir.
Griffin Colapinto could be one of those roughies. Just 22-years-old, the kid from California has had just two full seasons on the Championship Tour and hasn’t exactly set the world on fire in that time, finishing 16th and 18th in those seasons. Towards the end of the most recent season in 2019, however, he showed some signs that he was beginning to rise to the level. After being knocked out in the first couple of rounds in each of his first six events on the schedule that year, he made it to the final four at both the Freshwater Pro and Pipeline in the last few events of the year, and also had a ninth-place finish in Portugal. It’s worth remembering he turned just 21 during that year, so with a couple of extra years’ experience under his belt he’s open to plenty of improvement.
Owen Wright is another who is potentially sneaking under the radar into the lead-up to the World Tour restart. At 31, he’s at the other end of his career to Colapinto and has had plenty of time competing at the top level, and while he hasn’t ever finished a season higher than third, he could benefit from the new competition format this year. In his eight seasons which weren’t interrupted by injury, Wright has finished in the top seven on five occasions, and the top 10 in all but one year. He’s perennially there or thereabouts, has won multiple times on the world tour, and it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see him loitering close to the top-five positions which will be rewarded with an invite to Trestles.
Incredibly, Wright might only be the third best hope of clinching a world title in his family. Of course, sister Tyler leads the charge as one of the favourites on the women’s side of the tour, but younger brother Mikey Wright might also finally be ready to commit to pro surfing in 2021. Just 24-years-old, there’s no denying Mikey’s talent – anyone who has watched him surf knows what he is capable of. Professional surfing, however, doesn’t appear to have captured his attention until now; he’s surfed in only a handful of events on the Championship Tour and has been more enamoured with the get-paid-to-travel-the-world-as-a-free-surfer lifestyle – and fair enough, too. But this year he appears set for his first year-long crack at the CT, and with talent oozing out of his every pore it will be fascinating to see how competitive he will be with the world’s best.
On the women’s tour, Johanne Defay is one of the name’s most under-represented in discussions about potential threats to the top couple of surfers. The Frenchwoman has been incredibly consistent since appearing on tour back in 2014; she’s finished either eighth or ninth in four of her six years, and finished in fifth in the other two. She is always there or thereabouts the top five, and even in years where she’s finished back closer to 10th there have only been a handful of points between her and fifth place. She is a definite chance of sneaking a spot at Trestles this year, and from there the 27-year-old will have a genuine shot at the world title.
Courtney Conlogue is another in a similar boat, though she has probably received a little more fanfare than Defay in the lead-up to the tour restart. Conlogue finished seventh on the tour back in 2019, but she ended the year in the top five six of the seven years prior to that. She may not quite have the talent level of the likes of Gilmore, Moore and Wright, and she’s also disadvantaged by a couple of the omissions from the tour this year – she’s a two-time winner at Bells and has also won in Portugal and Fiji – but having consistently been in the top handful of surfers for close to a decade, she can’t be counted out.
Malia Manuels rounds out the list of upset chances, but she would have to put in a career-best performance this season to do it. The 27-year-old Hawaiian has actually finished in the top five before, and has ended the season in the top seven three times, but she’s dropped off a little in the past couple of years. She went 12th, 13th and 12th between 2017 and 2019, but at the beginning of the most recent season she did show some signs that she was getting back to something resembling her best. She started that season with a third-place finish on the Gold Coast, before making it through to the final at Bells in the next event. She enjoyed another third place finish a couple of months later at J-Bay, but unfortunately finished the year with a run of bad results to slip out of the top ten. She’s pretty clearly a rung below Gilmore and co, but nonetheless she’s shown an ability to be competitive consistently and would justifiably consider herself a chance at earning a trip to Trestles.
Of course, most likely it’ll be well-known names holding up the respective trophies come the end of the year, particularly given that the talent pool at the top-end of both tours is so high. Unexpected results are part and parcel of competitive sport though, and in many sports around the world that has only been amplified by the tumultuous nature of the past 12 months. All of the surfers listed above are more than capable of finishing in the top five – in fact most of them have already done it in the past – and if they can get a spot at Trestles, it’s anybody’s game.