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PRINCETON-BY-THE-SEA — Massive waves won’t be crashing off of Pillar Point for at least two more months, but the organizers of the Mavericks surfing competition already are calling off this year’s contest.
Unless someone else steps in to put on the event at the last minute, it appears the 2019-20 Mavericks season will be the fourth in a row with no official competition. And organizers say they haven’t yet decided whether they will try to hold the event next year.
The cancellation is the latest blow to the iconic Bay Area surfing event that has spent much of its two decades in existence tied up in internal politics and stymied by not-quite-right conditions.
The competition is supposed to take place sometime between Nov. 1 and March 31, when waves as high as apartment buildings attract surfers from around the world. It has been held just 10 times since its founding in 1999, however, and last took place in February 2016.
The World Surf League — which has held the permit for the Mavericks competition since 2017 but has never actually put on the event — announced the cancellation Friday in two sentences buried near the bottom of a press release about the company’s plans for the coming year.
Pat O’Connell, the league’s senior vice president of tours and competition, said the company was struggling to attract sponsors in part because it had to cancel the past two Mavericks contests when the needed combination of consistently huge swells and light winds never materialized.
“There is a lot that goes into the making of the big waves,” O’Connell said. “It’s not impossible, but it’s been very challenging to get things to come together.”
Surfing fans had hoped the league would bring stability to Mavericks after buying the event permit from previous the organizer, Cartel Productions, which filed for bankruptcy.
But Sabrina Brennan, president of the San Mateo County Harbor District Board of Commissioners, said the problems that led to the Mavericks’ cancellation this year were of the league’s own making, because organizers failed to get other permits they needed for the event.
“They have been so late and disorganized with getting their permits in order, they have missed every opportunity to hold a competition,” Brennan said. “I don’t think they want to put it on.”
O’Connell said permits were not a factor in the decision to cancel Mavericks and drop the event from the league’s Big Wave Tour, which is now made up of two events, in Hawaii and Portugal.
The World Surf League opened the Mavericks competition to women for the first time last year. And Brennan, as co-founder of the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing, was part of a successful push for the league to offer equal prize money to men and women.
Now, she said, it’s frustrating to see that women surfers once again won’t get the chance to make good on those victories.
“Women have been waiting on the sidelines this whole time to surf Mavericks — and now the WSL is cutting it,” Brennan said.
The towering waves will still swell off of Half Moon Bay this winter, of course. With or without an official competition, they are certain to draw plenty of spectators and surfers brave enough to take on some of the world’s most dangerous waves.
It will be very difficult, however, for anyone else to put on a Mavericks competition this year, according to Brennan.
O’Connell said the World Surf League, which holds the exclusive permit to access a nearby harbor and parking areas, would not try to block other organizers from holding a contest. But even with that permit, Brennan said, another organizer likely would struggle to raise prize money and get other permits in time.
“Given that they waited until the 11th hour,” she said of the World Surf League, “it would be very difficult for anybody to try to pull off a competition at this point.”
The league’s permit for Mavericks continues through the 2020-21 season. O’Connell said it is too soon to say whether the league will attempt to organize a Mavericks competition next year.
League officials on Friday said they are shifting their efforts away from organizing competitions at specific sites and toward “strike missions” in which surfers travel to impressive swells around the world whenever they form.
“We’re really flipping it around,” O’Connell said. “Who knows — a year from now, it could be an entirely different situation.”
