The WSL Championship Tour's first-ever day in New Zealand handed its left-hand wave to the surfers who had been waiting all season for one — the goofy-footers — and the wider field paid the price.
Manu Bay's first competitive day under WSL banner produced what the broadcast called a 'reset' for the year. The wave's long, sloping left forced regular-footers to ride backside on a face that does not easily yield power turns to anyone who has not put time in. Gabriel Medina, Yago Dora and Italo Ferreira — all natural goofies and all part of the Brazilian storm front that has dominated the early season — strode through their heats without lapsing into early-event hesitation.
"It was nice to see the tour start to swing the other way," commentator Jessi Stilling said. "Today was fun. So many people just rose to the occasion of a new location here."
WSL commentator Richie Lovett added that the wave's quirks had served as a kind of leveller across the field.
"It's a bit of a different slope to the face of the wave as well," Lovett said in his preview earlier in the week. "I know a lot of the goofy-footers are literally rubbing their hands together. I can see Gabe doing incredibly well. I can see Yago bouncing back in a big way. And it's going to be up to the natural footers to work out this wave and really find their form."
The day delivered on that prediction. The morning swell rolled in cleanly across the inside section, and Medina opened the heat draw with a textbook clinic, going on to put up a heat total of more than fifteen points and dispatching Eli Hanneman in the opening pairing.
"We grew up going left," Tru Stilling said in the broadcast. "But this place — it forced everyone to be a rookie again. It evened out the playing field a little bit more."
Not everyone got the memo. Several natural-footers struggled to read the wave's tempo and were eliminated into the Round 2 repechage, where they will face the survivors of the goofy-footer heat draw. The repechage will run through Day 3, with the contest planning to push through the morning swells of the back half of the window before the wind switches onshore.
"Beautiful conditions," Stilling said. "This place forced everyone to be a rookie again. Some really high-scoring action, some great surfing and some problems from some people actually trying to figure out the wave as well. We had a little bit of everything today."
Day 2 was scheduled to run through both Round 2 matchups and a fresh chunk of women's Round 1 heats, with Caroline Marks, Carissa Moore and Lakey Peterson all marked for action. The contest window runs through May 22, with a forecast favouring the back half of the week. Raglan, having handed Day 1 to the goofy-footers, may yet swing back the other way as the tide changes.
