Your Olympic questions answered: How is surfing scored? | CBC Sports | Maqvi News

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Thanks again to everyone who has submitted their burning questions about the Summer Olympics. Remember, no question is too big, too small or too weird! Send them to thebuzzer@cbc.ca and I’ll continue to answer the best ones as the Paris Games approach.

Today’s question comes from Steve in British Columbia, who asks: How is Olympic surfing judged and scored?

This is a timely one because the World Surfing Games (the sport’s equivalent of the world championships) just wrapped up over the weekend in Puerto Rico. The big news for Canada was Erin Brooks’ failure to qualify for the Olympics. The 16-year-old rising star looked like a medal contender after winning gold at the 2022 world junior championships and silver at last year’s World Surfing Games, and she got her Canadian citizenship just in time for this summer’s Paris Games. But she won’t be going after fumbling away her final chance to qualify.

With Brooks out, 18-year-old Sanoa Dempfle-Olin is set to become Canada’s first Olympic surfer. The native of Tofino, B.C., (the country’s surfing capital) got in with her silver-medal performance at last year’s Pan Am Games in Chile before tying for 13th last week in Puerto Rico. No Canadians qualified for surfing’s Olympic debut in 2021.

Though Dempfle-Olin will be going to the Paris Games, she’ll actually be far from Paris. Really, really far. The Olympic surfing events are taking place some 15,000km away in Tahiti, the French Polynesian island located in the middle of the South Pacific.

OK, back to Steve’s question. Each of the two Olympic surfing events (men’s and women’s shortboard), is made up of 24 athletes who are scored by a panel of five judges. For each round of the competition, the surfers are divided into heats of two or three who go out on the water together and try to catch several waves within the time limit — normally 20-25 minutes, but officials can extend it based on the conditions. For each wave they ride, the athletes are scored by the judges on a scale from 0.1 to 10. A surfer’s two highest-scoring waves are combined to give them their total score for the heat. So 20 would be a perfect score.

In the first round, the winner of each three-person heat advances straight to the third round while the two losers go to the second round (no one is eliminated yet). Starting in the second round, it’s two surfers per heat and only the winner advances.

Judges score the surfers based on factors like the degree of difficulty, variety and creativity of their moves. Sharp turns and smooth transitions between tricks can help surfers display the combination of “speed, power and flow” that the judges are looking for.

If you want to know more about both Olympic surfing and Sanoa Dempfle-Olin, I suggest this story on the Canadian Olympic Committee’s website.