Recently the World Surf League has been hard at work on its site, piling more and more past-life data into the back end of the offering. One of its resulting visual tricks is the startling new CT rankings graph. I guess we should call it the Jeep (™) Leaderboard graph. You can now see each surfer’s year not just as a series of placings, but as a squiggly line, tangled up with everyone else’s squiggly lines, like they’ve all had heart problems, or all dropped in on each other at once.
Some of my friends thought this was pretty funny — like, are we children? Do we need special colored lines to tell us someone came third in Rio?
But it must have preyed on my mind, for when Surfline began agitating for a preview of 2019’s CT, the first thing I thought of was the squiggle. What were and weren’t they telling us? And what remained to be explored in this milieu? Could we, indeed, think up some squiggly lines of our own??
Read More: Welcome the WCT Class of 2019
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“Building house”, they call it on the broadcast. You know, when someone’s slowly amassing a series of fives and sixes, looking like they’re doing something, while the opposition waits for a set.
It’s nonsense. No houses are built in 25 minutes. Statistically speaking, heats are about the two best waves you ride, and nothing more, really. Houses are careers, and they’re built over longer arcs which are seldom analyzed beyond the stats from the last event, or beyond personal stories generated during the building. The Hero’s Journey stuff. Mick vs the Shark. Kelly vs Andy. Gabriel and the Storm. Whatever else we choose to project upon them. And so forth.
But we’re five years into the WSL era, and that’s long enough for the current top guns to have developed their career arcs beyond a heat, an event, or even a year. Could a close look at these arcs — not through storytelling, but through the harder judgement of numbers — tell us something concrete about how 2019’s CT might pan out?
View: Live Superbank Multi-Cam
I spent possibly a bit too long on a five-year breakdown of 2018’s top six men finishers, along with the semi-MIA two time world champ John Florence. The breakdown involves a simple look at the past five years of rankings, and a much more complex look at performance, based on each surfer’s heat scores through the period. It sheds a fascinating light on how pure score analysis can lead to predictions of future performance — and on how these surfers’ career trajectories seem likely to carry them through 2019.
YEARS: 2014-2018
SURFERS: Gabriel Medina, Julian Wilson, Filipe Toledo, Italo Ferreira, Jordy Smith, Owen Wright, John Florence
HEATS: Every single goddam one in which they surfed.
Ranking Arcs
A year’s worth of squiggly lines is one thing. My thought was, it’s just not enough. Professional surfing is a messy sport, with a lot of variables, often working in conflict with each other: surf conditions, judging panels, surfboards, countries and coasts, even time-of-day variances. Thus, ranking arcs play out better if they’re stretched over years, not contests. The longer the arc, the more the messiness comes out in the wash.
Five year ranking arcs.
Look at the last five years of these seven surfers and there’s a few obvious conclusions:
– Gabriel is the dominant competitive surfer of the WSL era. This is kind of a no-brainer. He begins and ends it with a world championship, and never falls lower than third. In the past three years his ranking arc has sloped up, which suggests he may still be improving.
– Julian is the second most consistent surfer on rankings, behind Gabriel. He may have benefited from Jordy’s and JJF’s injury outs in 2015, but he’s been on a steady three-year upward arc since 2016.
– Surfers of this caliber bounce back from injury, hard. Four of the seven have suffered rank-affecting injuries in this period: JJF and Jordy (2015), Owen (2016) and Italo (on and off through 2016 and 2017). In each case, the surfers bounced back to match or exceed their previous best. John and Jordy went one two in ’16, Owen went from nothing to sixth, and Italo went from the 20s to his current ranking of four.
This might be an indication of what to expect from John in 2019 — if his knee has fully recovered, that is.
– A couple more trends. Italo’s acceleration up the arc is the swiftest of all current top sixers. That’s a good trend — a swift ascent seems to top out or continue an improvement in the following year. And Jordy and Owen have flat-lined or drifted down slightly. They have trends to arrest, not to continue, in 2019.
Read More: New CT Format: Pro Surfing Easier Than Ever!
Average Heat Scores
Well, this was fun. I assembled every heat score for all the surfers, per year, added ‘em up, and divided by the number of heats each had surfed. I deliberately did not try to balance any score against any other, or try any single-event trickery at all. Aside from the foolishness of trying to correct for any variable in this ridiculously variable sport, it seemed like a waste of time.
Average heat scores.
A quick look at this graph tells you a few more things:
– JJF has a tiny edge here on the field. Over five years, his averages are just ahead of Gabriel’s, though Gabriel’s have been way steadier.
– The gaps are pretty small, at least in the upper echelon like this crew. Most averages are floating between 12 and 14. This shows you that performance, even at this level, tends to balance out over time.
– 2017 was the best year on record in the WSL era. Overall averages were higher in this year than in any of the other four. And last year, by the way, was the worst. You can see here the impact of good surf versus bad. J-Bay was epic in ’17 and Teahupoo was pretty damn good, while neither got close to their true form last year. That takes a lot of 18s and 19s out of the picture. 2018 also saw the sidelining of the highest scoring surfer of the era in JJF, who topped every scoring measure in his second world title year. That’ll dampen any average.
– Averages are crude measures, but they matter. The only year in which the world champ didn’t earn the best average heat score was 2015, when Adriano got the title. Adriano’s not in this graph, but he got a 13.83 heat average that year, just behind JJF. The trouble for JJF that year was the knee injury that limited his heat appearances to 31 heats. Adriano surfed 51, right on the world champ average*, and that was enough.
[* World champions surfed between 50 and 54 heats each year through the period; the average is 51.]
View: Snapper Rocks Spot Check
Great Scores, Poor Scores and the Differential
Massive scores always get attention. 20/20 sends everyone into a head spin. So do the few times in which a surfer has scored less than 2/20. On the one hand, brilliance! On the other, well, yeah.
These scores are outliers. They’re sensational but they don’t decide world championships. What counts for more over time is very good vs pretty bad.
High heat scores.
16/20 is an average of two eights. That’s a very good heat. 8/20 is an average of two fours, that’s kind of crap.
Low heat scores.
I combed through and extracted each surfer’s 16-pluses and 8-minuses, every year for the five years. Made each into a percentage of the surfers’ overall scores. Then I subtracted the shit heats from the good heats, looking for a differential, figuring this would tell us something about who actually surfed the best. And….whoa.
The Differential.
– Come on down, John Florence. JJF’s two world title years are the stars of the show over the period by a long way. His 2017 in particular is staggering. Half the heats John surfed that year scored in the top range; only one scored in the bottom range. The differential of 48% is far and away the biggest generated by any surfer in the period, let alone the world champ, who has to surf more heats than anyone, and who thus is at greater risk of the lows along with the highs.
– When you look at that stat, you get a much better sense of why John has been so cautious around his knee injury. His instinct as a competitor is not so much to win events as to outscore everyone, including himself. If he’s uncertain about his body’s ability to withstand that pressure, he won’t compromise with half-measures.
– Gabriel, on the other hand, isn’t anywhere near John’s sheer scoring prowess. Maybe that’s because he is more focused on winning events.
– Underlying that though, you can see something else interesting. The world champ, whether it be JJF or Gabriel, always comes out on top of the differential — there’s always a bigger gap between highs and lows for the champ than there is for the others in the game. In only one case does this not hold true, that of Adriano in 2015, again not on the graph, but who beat everyone but JJF on differentials that year.
– Somewhat ominously, Italo improved on this stat too — the only surfer of our seven who improved on all of the squiggly lines we came up with.
– Oh, and nobody’s won a world title with more than five bad heat scores over a year. If your favorite surfer has five bad heats by mid-year, write him off.
Putting it Together
It’s hard to weigh up one graph against another. You could be simplistic and say “well, the ranking is all that counts”, but that’s not the case when it comes to understanding performance arcs. Some years, like 2017, are hotter than others. So let’s just look at all three and go there with each surfer.
– Gabriel has to be favored for 2019. His ranking arc trended upward for three years running. His average heat score is incredibly consistent, only drooping somewhat in 2018, and you’ve gotta take that shitty surf year into account on those scores. You’ve also got to take into account that he has surfed more heats than anyone overall, and thus knows the game better. On only one area does he look minorly soft to me, and that’s in his lack of high score leadership. His differential has been tracking downward since his first world title year in 2014. That means he is not having a major impact on the judging panel. They don’t see him as the performance leader. It’s an Achilles heel.
– Julian has been a rock. His ranking arc is second only to Gabriel’s, and in other ways he’s shown possibly more stability and consistency — his average heat score has barely budged over five years. Yet like Gabriel, in only one of those arcs, the ranking, has his trend been upward in the past two years. I think he’s a bit exposed on the high-low differential and will need to make a breakthrough on high scores throughout the year to make the next step to world champ, or even to hold his current ranking.
– Filipe is like a flea on all three graphs — jumping about like a maniac. His ranking has been up, down, and up again, his differential is an M-shape. But his average heat score is as stable as Gabriel’s and Julian’s and his ranking arc is headed up. That slightly wobbly differential score derives from too many low scoring heats in the past and shows you he has plenty of improvement in him. If he can shift that differential out a bit, he’s a good chance of moving up I reckon.
– Italo is the danger man here. He has zig-zagged on every graph, but that’s been partly based on injury. The thing to note is that he’s heading up on all of our measures, and nobody else is doing that. He may not have yet surfed enough heats to have amassed world title-style experience, but I’ve heard it said that experience counts less than enthusiasm. I think he could jump up to set new bars in scoring and fight for a world crown, or do the opposite, drift back a bit out of lack of consistency. But the graphs say, UP.
– Jordy’s on the other side of the fence. His trajectory is down on all three measures, most worryingly I suspect on the average heat score, which drifted below both Filipe’s and Julian’s in 2018. Something, well probably a few things, will have to have occurred in the off-season for him to push back up from this overall arc.
– Owen’s also on the other side, in very similar fashion to Jordy. His ranking arc is on a plateau; his average heat score and differential have dropped to their lowest points in the five years, other than during his complete out in 2016. In this way his actual performance decline in heats is a little steeper than Jordy’s. It’s unlikely he’ll get away with this performance in 2019 and hold the same ranking.
– JJF is coming in both hot and cold, if he comes in at all. There’s a lot of gossip about his intentions for 2019. If we look at the squiggly lines, though, what we see is a surfer coming back from injury — an almost certain indicator of a banner year — and one who has repeatedly blitzed this field with huge scoring ranges. I guess he will be testing that knee under pressure in Queensland and seeing if he thinks it’ll hold together the way he’ll want. If it does hold together, I think, get ready.
(Help with data compiling came from Hugh McAlpine)
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