Presents Surf City El Salvador

Cover photo by ISA.

1: The waves
La Bocana and El Sunzal will be the venues where the event will take place. The first is mainly a left-wing and the second is definitely a right-wing.

In La Bocana, right-handers break anyway, and in more than one event, those right-handers were decisive in determining champions.

La Bocana is a more powerful and shorter wave, El Sunzal is perhaps “calmer” and the entire route is quite long, you can surf a wave from the outside point to the shore.

On more than one occasion, the comparison of the spots in El Salvador has been made in the following way: If Punta Roca is the Latin Jeffreys Bay, La Bocana is Lower Trestles and El Sunzal is Malibu.

2: The wave forecast is good 

The world's largest surf forecasting site, Surfline, announced last week that four southerly swells will be hitting Central America during the month of May, and the extended forecast (which is less reliable but shows a clear trend, especially in the Pacific) shows waves through at least June 4.

3: Olympic implications
Twelve spots will be up for grabs at the event, seven for women and five for men. Spots are not ranked, they are what we call “eligible”; if an athlete is already ranked, he or she moves down one spot in the rankings to find an “eligible” one. It is very likely that the last ranked athlete will place 10th or 12th, or even 15th in the tournament.

Related: Refreshing your memory on some important terms and criteria for Olympic surfing classification

Related: Decoding La Bocana, the Lowers of Central America

4: Athletes qualified for Tokyo through the CT are required to go to El Salvador
In addition to the first alternate, this means that the following surfers, if they do not suffer or maintain an injury, will be competing in the event:

5: Spain and Latin America
For now, only two surfers from Spain or Latin America are provisionally qualified for Tokyo 2020: Lucca Mesinas and Daniella Rosas from Peru. These countries have high hopes of securing a spot in Tokyo through El Salvador.

If we look from south to north, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico and Spain have at least one and in many cases more than one surfer with Olympic potential.

6: The importance of crossovers and the 2019 World Surfing Games
It has been mentioned on more than one occasion that the presence of CT surfers will end up harming the emerging nations' chances of going to Tokyo.

ISA President Fernando Aguerre was more in favour of the rules, saying that it should be taken as an opportunity, that of a surfer who perhaps did not have the same chances as the CTs, to beat Kelly Slater in the championship.

But being practical, to reach the top 15 and dream of qualifying for Tokyo, there will be athletes who will cross paths with Slater, Wilson, Wright, Moore, Medina and Ferreira and others who will not.

The ranking of nations for the 2019 World Cup plays a big role in this. The highest-ranked countries in Tokyo have a better chance of avoiding the powers, at least initially.

See the 2019 ranking:

7: The situation of John John, Kolohe and Slater
All three American stars are injured at the moment. Neither Kolohe nor John John seem likely to be available to travel to El Salvador. Not much is known about Slater other than that he did not compete in the Australian leg due to injury and can be excused from doing so.

Who will go to El Salvador if none of the three make it? Seth Moniz, Griffin Colapinto and Conner Coffin are the next in the 2019 CT rankings.

8: How did we get here?
One of the important proposals in the campaign of the then candidate, now president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, was to create Surf City, a project that would encourage surfing and surfer tourism in his country.

One of the first executions of the project was to organize international events such as the historic ALAS 2019, won by Noe Mar McGonagle and Bethany Zelasko.

El Salvador then went all out to secure the largest ISA World Cup in history. Spain, Australia, Japan and Costa Rica also entered. In January 2020, it was announced that El Salvador had won the bid.

Related: Nayib Bukele: “We want people to think about El Salvador and think about surfing”

The project, despite the pandemic, has gone full steam ahead. In 2020, the Central American country organized one of the first international events, ALAS in December, which had a record number of entrants and saw Carlos Muñoz and Rachel Presti win.

Throughout 2021, El Salvador became a world capital of surfing, with hundreds of surfers going to practice there for the championship that starts next week.

And, during the event, it will be the one and only capital of world surfing.

9: The defending champions At the 2019 Miyazaki World Championships, the winners were Italo Ferreira and Sofía Mulanovich. Both will be in El Salvador looking to defend their gold.

10: Where can the event be seen?
On the ISA website: www.isasurf.com and also on some international sports channels. We will expand on this.