Overnight, the Wozzle released their 2023 Championship Tour schedule and, for the first time in 34 years, Quiksilver aren't sponsoring a top tier competition.

To be completely accurate, Quik also didn't sponsor one last year, but as 2021 was little more than a notional tour - a barely cobbled together hotch-potch of stops - their absence is more conspicuous in 2023, especially after this year reviving their jungle days in G-Land.

Through the late-70s and early-80s, Quiksilver played a very minor role in pro surfing. From 1976 through to 1984 they sponsored the Quiksilver Trials at the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach - the pre-QS system of qualifying into the main event.

In 1984, they pulled out of pro surfing altogether, throwing their lot in with big wave riding by creating the Eddie Aikau Invitational. It was a very deliberate extraction. The Eddie was deemed a better fit for the company which once ran a slogan: "If you can't rock and roll, don't fuckin' come."

Clearly, eighties blow wave pros weren't the vehicle Quiksilver were looking for.

As well as the Eddie Aikau Invitational, Quiksilver invested in other cultural touchstones such as film and video, with a slew of releases that crossed the gamut from goofy (Kong's Island, Mad Wax) to cutting edge (The Performers, All Down The Line).

In 1988, Quik signed Tom Carroll to a "million dollar contract" - in actual fact $200,000 a year over five years - and this precipitated a movement back towards pro surfing. When they signed Kelly Slater in 1990 for a large, yet undisclosed amount, Quiksilver was clearly back on the pro surf bandwagon.

In 1989, they sponsored their first top tier contest, the Quiksilver Lacanau Pro in France, which became the Quiksilver Surfmasters, then also expanded through the newly-created Qualifying Series, before consolidating all those QS events into the 1995 G-Land Pro, which ran in '96, and '97 before the Asian financial crisis saw Quik pull their bucks from Indonesia and launch the first CT at Cloudbreak.

By the end of the century, Quiksilver had become the biggest surf company in the world, largely on the back of solid marketing and not a little help from then-six time World Champ Kelly Slater. From 2002 onwards, Quik went all in on the CT, sponsoring three contests in a twelve-contest circuit. In 2003, they increased that to four - a full third of the tour - and they did the same again in 2004.

In 1998, Quiksilver sponsored what would've been the fourth G-Land contest, however it was cancelled due to civil unrest. Despite a lack of competition, Quik still made a video, which underscores why they poured money into pro surfing - for ratings points it ain't. The next year, the resources from G-Land went towards the first Fiji Pro.

It's worth noting that, despite all the money Quiksilver poured into the CT, very little went towards the QS. Perhaps one local contest every two or three years was the extent of Quiksilver's attention to the second string tour, though they did continue with cultural events of a different flavour, bankrolling the Quiksilver Crossing, and the Quiksilver Masters. Not to be confused with Surfmasters, the Masters was Quik's way of keeping the older folk involved. Less a surf contest than a reunion for the greying and balding.

After 2008, Quik stripped down to its two mainstay contests, the season-opening Snapper Rocks, and the bulwark of the Euro leg, the Quik Pro France (nee Surfmasters). What happened to Quiksilver post-GFC has been covered elsewhere - Phil Jarratt even wrote a book about it - but the result was a slow withdrawal from pro surfing, guided, not by cultural interests, but by the suits protecting the bottom line.

Earlier this year, the Quik Pro France was demoted to a QS, however before it was even run the contest was cancelled. Now, the Quik Pro G-Land is off the schedule too. Those two stories can't be seen as separate from the news that Quiksilver - now known as Boardriders, and itself owned by a Oaktree Capital, a venture capital firm - is a shadow of its former self.

As much as pro surf involvement can be used as a gauge for company health, Quiksilver's well-being can be charted through the yearly schedules, from a peak in 2003 with four contests and revenue of just under a billion dollars, to today when they have no contests, nor any cultural mission, and are more commonly thought of - if they're thought of at all - as a once-great company.