Stab Loves Brazilian Champions
A response to a fire we started on Instagram.
We got in trouble.
Last week, Stab published a Premium story called “Are Brazilian Champions Detrimental To The WSL?”
This, sadly, is not an uncommon belief in the surf world. The article opens with a quote from a Brazilian CT surfer that reads, “The Brazilian domination is not good for business. The WSL is tired of Brazzos winning everything and they’ll bring us down whenever they have the chance.”
From there, it explores how and why someone in that position could arrive at this opinion. It enables you to hear from a range of individuals, calls out some little-known injustices to the WSL’s Portuguese-speaking audience, and concludes by stating that Brazilian surfers are good for the WSL.
The story was pitched, written, and titled by a Brazilian, Steve Allain. Steve has put a lot of his heart into Brazilian surfing over the years, starting and heading his own publication and serving as a correspondent for many international surf magazines.
We posted a teaser for the story on Instagram and it received over 4,000 comments, mostly from people who were upset.
Which is fair. The headline could easily be interpreted as blatantly racist when coming from an outlet headquartered in Australia and the USA. It was an oversight to post it like that, where context is minimal and headlines are often the only words that are read (less than half the amount of the people who commented hit the link to read it on our site).
However, the piece itself took a journalistic approach to removing a saddening belief in surfing. And the title took that controversial belief by the horns, which is not rare in the world of headlines.
We love surfing. All of it. And we’re going to keep venturing into its depths and its corners.
To make that clear, we have made the story available to our entire free audience here.
If you want extra credit, you can also read Steve’s Premium piece on why there is no female Brazilian storm here, which we also just set free.
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