The World’s Most Agressively Rockered Surfboard Contest Is Coming To Australia This Weekend

In 2024, two 20-something-year-old Kiwis who’d kinda been living in Portugal (don’t tell the immigration authorities) decided to scour secondhand sites and compile a quiver of approximately ten boards from 20+ years ago and convince a bunch of people to surf them semi-competitively.

The reasoning was simple: The boys had been born too late to appreciate the late ’90s/early ’00s era of surfing, but there was something in it that they wanted to explore. They called their event the Alto Pro Am, and it arguably only began once the sun had set over Ribeira d’Ilhas.

The next year, Billabong stepped in to make it a lil bigger (and better), but the roots still ran as deep as your lawn. The surf side of the event could be summed up as follows: A well-executed roundhouse will get you an excellent score, while an air reverse would see you disqualified.

This weekend — again with the help of Billabong and a few other brands — they’re bringing the concept to Sydney’s Northern Beaches. We’ll let them pick up the yarn from here.

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Instead of traditional heats feeding into a rigid contest structure, surfers will run through a series of sessions on Saturday, with their best scores stacking onto a live leaderboard on the beach.

Judging follows the ALTO lens: radical manoeuvres performed with speed, power and flow — but with style carrying the most weight.

The top six men and women move through to Sunday’s finals. The final heats are filmed, and later that night the footage is shown back to the crowd at 7th Day Brewery, where both competitors and the audience vote to decide the winners.

If you’re around and can demonstrate a proficiency to forcefully direct a 6’4″ at a big end section, you might even be able to sweet-talk your way into a wildcard. Otherwise, the night comp is open to everyone and is not one you’ll want to miss.

Godspeed, power, and flow.