Did you watch the Abu Dhabi tub event last weekend?

What about the Natural Selection Tour event later this week?

Though the latter was held in the ocean - the Marshall Islands to be precise -  it had much in common with the nocean comp in the Emirates.

Before explaining how, I should ask: Were you even aware of the Natural Selection event? Going on viewer numbers I assume not many people were.

It’s ostensibly a surf event born out of Travis Rice’s snowboard tour, also called Natural Selection, which eschews traditional scoring - i.e judges giving numbers for individual rides - in favour of a more holistic approach where judges award a win to athletes building momentum, showing creativity, getting in rhythm, even if they may fall at otherwise critical times.

It’s not hard to see how that would be a good fit surfing. Send a bunch of surfers over the horizon to confront a great swell, run longer heats so they’re more akin to a session, then let the judges pick up on the vibes.

We’ve all seen recreational surfers dominate a session. Natural Selection essentially tries to capture that same spirit but in a heavy water zone. 

It’s an idea with merit, but did it work? 

I’m not sure that it did…

Do you recall how, after the first few wavepool events, we suddenly realised how boring a contest can be when you take away the ocean’s volatility? Remove unpredictability, replace it with clockwork waves, and the spectacle loses excitement.

Natural Selection obviously doesn’t suffer from the same problem, the first day saw incredible waves heave over the ledge, but in shifting from a traditional comp format other issues arose. Theoretically, having longer heats feels more like a session, but, to state the obvious, it feels less like a heat; like there was less at stake.

Similarly, without scores the results felt arbitrary and hard to follow. I can’t sit there for hours at a time and watch the surfing intently, as I might if I was there in the water, so I trust the scores to tell me what’s happening, yet there are none in Natural Selection.

Put those issues together and it didn’t feel like a contest, more like a recreational session - which is the point, right?

But there’s a difference between a recreational surfer dominating a session and a made-for-telecast contest, and by doing away with the drama of limited time, heat construction, including strategy and rat cunning, the spectacle loses excitement.

Much as a contest without the ocean suffers from repetition, a contest without rules and restraints is meaningless. Yeah, it’s great that Soli and Al and Harry got barrelled, but how much do viewers care?

There’s a reason similar ventures, such as the Billabong Desert Challenge or The Country Feeling Dream Sequence at J’Bay were short-lived. Viewers not only want winners and losers, but they also want the theatre of winners winning and losers losing.

This morning, when I searched for the Natural Selection event, YouTube suggested a number of raw surf videos, which are cheap and easy to make, and have recently become extremely popular. Pipeline, Straddie, Hossegor, all of them pumping and all filmed in the last few days.

From this side of the screen there isn’t that much difference between them and Natural Selection.

- Stu

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