Surf100 Winner Now Wealthy Enough To Think About Interest Rates
Dakoda Walters enters the next phase of adulthood, while 2500 Pacificos get drained at pace.
The 2026 Surf100 presented by Pacifico is done and dusted.
After 1,242 widget flicks, Dakoda Walters is YOUR winner.
Like most ‘bradcasted’ Stab productions, Surf100 began with a typo, technical difficulties and immense panic.
Despite stress-testing everything several times in the lead-up — WordPress, Cloudflare, our scoring widget, 80,000 simulated users logging on at once — and passing with flying colors, we found a gateway blocked by the internet gods, turning at least four hairs on our Premium Director’s head gray.
“Only 20 mins till the site crashes,” wrote clairvoyant disqusser Koonu, exactly 20 minutes before our site crashed. Prophetic indeed. Or he hacked us. Or simply stated the obvious: technical meltdowns are fairly on-brand.
In any event, he gets a Turtlebox for his divine forecasting skills, which he can play muzak through next time he’s placed on hold to watch the next one.
And while we’re here rewarding civic Disqussion, honorable mentions go to Juan Juan Florencia and Johnny Sick for these contributions.
We needed all the comic relief we could get.
The first sign of life and technical resolution appeared in the shape of Yadin Nicol making himself right at home, feet up on the couch, flanked by Todd Richards and Brett Simpson — the booth trio filling the gaps between Parko telling Kodes to go right on the Wiretap.
The second-most audible surfer was Dakoda, hitting it straight back over the net at his former Bong teammate. “Wow, he’s surfing like he actually needs 100K… Jeez, he’s really milking it.”
Hilarious. Likely the best Wiretap audio we’ve gathered in the event’s short history.
Noa Deane, 2025 Stab Surfer Of The Year, signalled his intent to play the long game in the warm-up video. “It seems like everyone got pretty stressed and hungry in the last one,” he said. “Probs just going to try and wait for some good ones.”
His first score was a solid 62 for a tube-to-carve-to-oop, squaring him up with Parko and Kodes. For the rest of the heat, however, he looked in need of Stimulant.
On the judging front, and for reasons nobody can really explain, everyone really liked the number 68. Dimitri got a 68. Parko got a 68. Kodes got a 68. For half an hour it looked like the voting widget had a single button and a strong commitment to moderation.
Safe. Civilized. Not too horny, not too radical.
The funny part was the public judging was actually excellent. Parko had a World Title, Noa had Surfer Of The Year, and both carried infinitely more accumulated surf celebrity than Dakoda or Dimitri. The crowd didn’t seem particularly swayed by nostalgia, resumés, Instagram followers, magazine covers, haircuts or who had the better archive of surf parts.
They just scored the surfing.
And rather fittingly, the judging comp running alongside the final was eventually won by a surf podcaster, Finley of the LAGO podcast, and a surf judge, Christian, who judges pro surfing for Surfing Tasmania and Victoria. Pretty solid evidence that the mob knew what it was looking at.
Meanwhile, inside the JS Garage, the IRL mob was getting loose.
The room was packed with big names from up the road at Trestles: Kanoa Igarashi, Jack Robbo, Miggy, Coco, Parker, Luke Cederman, Luke Egan, Morgan Cibilic, George Pittar, Luke Thompson, Jacob Szekely, Oscar Berry, the Hazza Twins, Ryan Huckabee, Eithan Osborne, Mateus Herdy, Kepa Mendia, Harley Walters, Matty Bemrose and several hundred other people slowly losing the ability to stand in a straight line.
Dimitri had an enormous cheering section. A proper bloc. Every time he stood up, one side of the building appeared to levitate, which is hilarious given he knew exactly what happened on every wave in advance. Take the tube he exited on his heels, then fell off on. He already knew it happened. His block party didn’t.
In hindsight, the heel wobble cost $100K.
“If he made that, he was going north of 80, easy,” said Finley on the phone, after being gifted a fresh JS.
Via the roaming camera, the place felt less like a surf contest and more like a pub had swallowed one whole. Beer towers were toppled. Wild Luke Cedermans appeared.
Every decent score elicited guttural reactions. People climbed things and hugged strangers while 2,500 Pacificos vanished at pace.
In the end, though, it was Dakoda on top as the clock ticked down, his cap obscuring his face while reality dawned on him in the form of a yeasty golden shower and a chair-up from his 4646 homies, Oscar Berry and San Clemente’s Big 20 Hammer.
Kodes took the longest route to get to the finale, and did so with aplomb. He was the first man to crawl out of the eight-person Surf100 Challenge Series primordial soup, a Darwinian little cesspool where we spent several months asking surfers to perform increasingly stupid tasks to prove they deserved a shot at the money.
He survived Capture The Flag at Blacks. Hucked his skeletal frame around Oceanside in King Of The Hill. Teamed up with Finn McGill at Steamer Lane. Became the first guy through One Trick Pony. Smeared Vaseline all over his face in the Outer Banks for reasons that seemed more logical at the time. Then he beat Zeke and Dimitri in Challenge 6 and earned the direct route to the final.
All of this while taking something of a semi-gap year from the WSL after a run of injuries helped knock him off the Challenger Series. By the time he landed in a four-man final against Parko, Noa and Dimitri, there wasn’t much question whether the money meant something to him.
When you’ve sunk that much blood, sweat and tears into something, it’s either going to be glorious or gutting.
“This is more money than I’ve ever seen in my life. Thank you so much,” he mustered, fighting back tears in front of the projector, before being showered once more in counterfeit Benjamin Franklins.
Tears shed and knees buckled while he called Waltdad back home.
Surfing is full of prize money that sounds big until you start subtracting flights, accommodation, coaches, boards, taxes and the two years of your life it took to get there. For Dakoda, $100K is transformative.
There is, of course, great lore attached to surfing’s prize-money barbequers. Matt Wilko famously won Bells in 2016, then shouted the Torquay pub and reportedly left with a $10K bar tab. Heroic stuff. But Gen Z has inherited a housing market specifically engineered to make home ownership feel like a sick joke, so blowing the lot in one glorious evening probably hits a little differently these days.
Dakoda has previously described his relationship with drinking as basically zero or 1,000. He stayed off the piss for his entire Challenger Series campaign. After winning Surf100, that policy underwent a fairly aggressive review.
Reports had him at somewhere around 20 Red Bull vodkas, plus an undefined quantity of Pacifico.
Later, Dimitri and Joel Parkinson ended up doing “We Are The Champions” at karaoke. Neither appeared particularly troubled by the contradiction.
And by some stroke of serendipity, we also got a dusty Parko into the Stabmic booth the following morning.
Dakoda, meanwhile, woke up $100,000 richer.
And probably feeling like absolute shit.
