Cover photo: Bielmann-WSL 

Vans' failure to broadcast the Pipe Masters live will go down as one of the biggest mysteries in surfing today.

The reason behind this decision is probably unknown to some executive within the company, but at first glance it seems truly bad.

Not long ago, former Rip Curl CEO Brooke Ferris was interviewed about why she sponsored so many CT events and her response was that it is a perfect equation as it translates each webcast view into a potential customer and effectively leads to transactions.

Having the license of one of the most prestigious events in the world, if not the most prestigious, the Pipe Masters, to throw away that opportunity when talking about a company that has a large marketing budget, is strange.

However, it is known that Vans or the owner of Vans, VF, has not had the best of years.

On the North Shore sand was Sal Masakela, Makua Rothman and the entire band hired for the webcast.

But there was no webcast and that equation that Rip Curl makes was not addressed by Vans executives.

They then left the door open for Nathan Florence to do a “pirate” stream of the event and gain a total of around half a million views across all days of the event, breaking records on the final day, yesterday, with over 200.000.

Vans' highlights video of the day hasn't been posted yet, the one from day 3 has about 70.000 views. Nothing compared to eight hours of streaming versus a few minutes of VH.

And this is coming from a Youtuber who has a heavy channel of 490.000 but it is assumed that if Vans and the WSL had put together a broadcast through official means, this number would have been larger.

Of course, here comes the thing about Vans and the WSL being at odds… But they both shared the event as if they were best friends. I mean, they could have easily done it.

It was extremely rare that they would pass up that opportunity.

And Nathan did a great job. He ended up having more than 20.000 people connected at the same time with a computer, a camera connected to it and a cell phone acting as a hotspot.

The Hawaiian gained a few new subscribers, saved everyone from being able to watch the final day of the championship on pumping waves, and to top it off, won the championship.

The most plausible explanation that comes to mind for Vans passing up this opportunity is that it exemplifies what happens when there are people in charge who know nothing about surfing, or there are people but they have no contact with those in charge and who provide the money and who know nothing about surfing.

Nowadays they broadcast live national stages from any country in the world.

Well, Vans failed to make one of the most prestigious events in the world.

A real madness.