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Posted on Thursday December 24th 2009 at 11:47 a.m.
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The wildcards for 2010 are Andy Irons, Luke Stedman and Neco Padaratz. How was that decided?
Wildcard committee. On that committee are the doctors, who give a recommendation based on severity of injury, likelihood of recovery, and whether it actually affected their performance. They have all these categories and they rank each surfer anonymously. There were six wildcards up for two spots. We gave one to Andy, 'cause at the end of last year, he came to us and said he didn't want to do the tour this year. We agreed to guarantee him a spot in 2010 if he gave up his spot in the top 27. And we told the guys at the ning of this year there'd only be two wildcard slots. So we had two spots for six guys. We had Jeremy Flores and Adrian Buchan they ended up qualifying through the tour. Gabe Kling, Josh Kerr, Neco Padaratz and Luke Stedman were remaining for two spots.
Neco hadn't been on tour for over a year?
Neco had applied for the injury wildcard last year. But then he withdrew his application saying he wasn't going to be ready. In 2009, we gave the next in line to Marlon Lipke because Neco pulled out his application. His injury was a July-June injury. He would have gotten the wildcard last year, and that factor played heavily onto our decision. We had representatives from the ASP (myself, Renato Hickel and Al Hunt) and the surfer reps from the WPS (Kieren Perrow, Ace Buchan and Mick Fanning) all come over here and debate for three hours the day after Mick's title party. This year being a lot harder than previous years, we then had this little sheet, which included stuff like: events missed, ability to requalify, severity of injury, past performance, longevity -- we went through a heap of different categories. And we categorized 'em in one to four. We debated, we took everything into consideration. It was the toughest decision for wildcards since I've been here. Having said that, when we cut the tour from 45 to 32 guys midway through the year, we get another two wildcards. So we said to Gabe and Josh, come the middle of the year, come that cut, if we have no other wildcard applicants, there's a chance you could get into for the rest of the year.
"We debated, we took everything into consideration. It was the toughest decision for wildcards since I've been here."
There's been a lot of confusion around the whole "one-ranking" system. Can you talk about that? Have you nailed all the points down and everything?
Next year we're taking a soft launch approach to it. How it's going to work is that any ASP event has points related to it. Those points go into a bucket. At the end of each event, 'QS or World Tour or whatever, you pull out your best eight results, and then you're ranked according to everyone else in the world.
What will a 6-star prime WQS win be equal to on the world tour?
A six-star prime win will be roughly equal to a third on the world tour. Five stars and below aren't really going to affect much. Maybe a win on a five-star is something you might wanna keep, but you really need to be winning six-star and six-star prime events. A World Tour win is going to be worth 10,000 points, and everything else scales below that. A 17th and 33rd on the World Tour are going to be worth hardly anything. If you're scoring 17ths and 33rds, you're going to be off the world tour quick.