Cover photo by Zanocchi

The president of the Brazilian Surfing Confederation, now Brasil Surf, and former CT member, Teco Padaratz, harshly criticized the WSL in an article published by The Inertia last Friday.

“(The WSL) is a private company that tries to dictate the structure of a sport worldwide (…) That is neither fair nor possible, and I do not agree,” he said.

And in that context he added: “There needs to be more respect for the ISA on this issue, because the WSL is ignoring what the ISA has done (…) The WSL has done nothing to include surfing in the Olympic Games.”

The Brazilian made these statements referring to the influence and role that the league ended up having in the qualification criteria for Los Angeles 2028, causing it to change the qualification criteria and setting a date at the same time as the first ISA qualifying event for the Games.

According to Teco, some surfers supported the ISA system, but he declined to identify them. Evan Quarnstorm, the author of the article, noted that Gabriel Medina, Italo Ferreira, Carissa Moore, Griffin Colapinto, Ethan Ewing, Kanoa Igarashi, and Caroline Marks did not comment on the new criteria.

Padaratz confirmed something already reported by DUKE, that Brazil would travel with a team of world champions to Peru and gave new information: That this now does not seem possible.

The Brazilian described the situation: The ISA is "trying to mitigate the situation, not resolve it, because there is no total satisfaction with either option. If the demands of the WSL surfers are met, the other surfers will be very angry. And if the ISA surfers are favored, the WSL surfers will be very angry."