“Crazy, Fast, Sketchy, Rad, Scary, Firing,
So Sick, Psycho — Never seen anything like it!”
These were just a few of the descriptors competitors used for the wave that served as the inaugural venue of the Natural Selection Tour surf competition. The backdrop — a remote atoll in Micronesia — couldn’t have been more dazzling with water in every imaginable shade of blue. The athletes, a mix of stylists ranging from heavy water specialists to progressive launch experts, couldn’t have been more diverse and exciting. And the conditions — always a gamble — couldn’t have been more perfect. Natural Selection Tour founder and pro snowboarder Travis Rice described it most bluntly, “The surf was raw as F*@k! The wave was a gnarly, slabby beast.”
British naturalist Charles Darwin may be the father of evolutionary theory, but Rice is the visionary putting that theory into play to advance action sports. Since the late 80’s, Rice - a Wyoming native - has been disrupting snowboarding with his all-mountain, freeride snowboarding event called Natural Selection. He already had thirty Grand Slam titles under his belt and still wasn’t ready to give up competing.
But he was bored. To shake things up, he created a competition format that put the freestyle acrobatics of the X Games into the wild backcountry terrain of epic destinations like Alaska and British Columbia. He ditched contest formulas and instead focused on riders’ creativity and adaptability as they pushed their limits in death defying terrain. And to make things even more interesting, riders from all backgrounds, from decorated Olympians to freeride filmers, were selected to go head-to-head through bracket-style stages to crown an all-around male and female champion.
The event has pushed the progression of the sport to unfathomable limits. Day One of the 2025 Natural Selection Tour snowboarding event in Revelstoke, British Columbia for example, was a monumental day for women with veteran American rider Elena Hight fearlessly dropping a 30-foot cliff face. “We are providing a platform where athletes can show the world that the improbable is possible,” said Rice.
A Four-Sport Expansion
Over the years, athletes from other sports started clamoring for something similar. Rice, an avid surfer and mountain biker, saw the potential for crossover. Last year, NST announced that it would expand into skiing, mountain biking and surfing. “Our goal is to bring the best athletes to the best venues on the planet for their respective sports,” said NST CEO and co-founder, Carter Westfall. And they did. The mountain biking competition, an evolution of Todd Barber’s Proving Grounds event, was held in February 2025 at Mt. Dewar in Tāhuna Queenstown, New Zealand. NST skiing took place in April and pitted athletes from slopestyle and freeride on Priority 1, a storied face deep in the backcountry of Alaska. The surfing event, arguably the most logistically challenging to pull off, was held in January in a far-flung location halfway between the Philippines and Hawaii, at a wave few on the planet have ever ridden, including the twelve athlete invitees.
Rice said the team considered four or five other locations but ultimately, they put their trust in Martin Daly. The legendary Australian captain and surf explorer has had a decades-long romance with the South Pacific and clued NST into a freak-of-nature wave. Daly’s 75-foot exploration boat, the “Indies Surveyor”, served as HQ for the judges and athletes, and the pirate himself helmed the vessel and helped with the surf forecasting.
As with NST snowboarding, advisory panels were composed of industry icons from each sport to help select the competitors and determine the contest formats. The luminaries involved in surfing included pros Rob Machado, Nathan Florence, and others. Last November, the event’s social media feed teased, “Who gets invited to NST? Well, to put it simply: ‘The mad ones.’ The surfers who are spontaneous, unafraid of challenges, unpredictable, powerful, (usually) flawed somehow, sometimes unproven, have elite talent, down for an adventure, competitive but irreverent — probably really fun to be around for a few weeks on a surf trip. Always down.” The maiden lineup of eight men and four women from seven countries did not disappoint. Athletes (see full list in this article) ranged in age from seventeen to thirty-three and included Hawaiian surf royalty Coco Ho and Olympian Kauli Vaast of Tahiti.
The X Factor
Next level talent. An unreal location. What made surfing stand apart from NST’s other events? The NST judging criteria is dubbed CREDO, which stands for Creativity, Risk, Execution, Difficulty, and Overall impression. Like the World Surf League and the Olympics, the judging weighs both technical skills and artistic expression. But it also uniquely encourages risk-taking. Fearless attempts like Australian Soli Bailey’s mind-blowing opening round set wave, where he basically paddled a tow wave, made the drop, rode over a foam ball, and then got pummeled helped him advance. One judge joked that in a WSL contest that ride probably would have received one point. Bailey would go on to claim the first-ever men’s overall title, largely for his ballsy performances.
Unlike the WSL or any other NST event, there were no points to be tallied, no spreadsheets or equations. NST did away with scores for surfing in favor of a radical, hour-long, expression session event format. At the end of each bracket, judges selected a winner based on CREDO, as well as on an athlete’s energy and emotion in the water. Similar to other NST competitions, the judging panel was made up of a group of industry peers including Australian surf icon and former world champ Pam Burridge and American pro Ian Crane, who had been an alternate to compete. Former pro and sensei of surf technique, American Brad Gerlach, served as head judge and said he ultimately made the call on the novel judging format. “Throwing numbers at surfing can turn people off from competition,” he said. “I didn’t want to get mired in the numbers. We took a black-and-white, ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ attitude and the athletes seemed to really like it.”
Milla Brown, the seventeen-year-old charger from Australia who captured the women’s title, said the expression session format took the pressure off having to worry about time and securing a certain score to move to the next heat. “It was the funnest event I have ever done,” she said. “You just had to go out, get barreled, have fun, and see what the outcome is.”
The Wave of Your Dreams (or Greatest Nightmare)
“For each sport, we seek out incredible geological and hydrological oddities that truly test the mettle of the best in the world,” said Rice. Martin Daly delivered a phenom of a wave. Terrifyingly beautiful, the meaty, freight train of a point slab intimidated even the most fearless competitors including Australia’s Soli Bailey and Harry Bryant. “It’s drawing like Teahupoo [Tahiti] and running like Kirra [Australia]. It’s f*@!ing scary out there,” exclaimed Bailey after one of his heats.
One hundred feet of water instantly became five feet as half of the ocean was sucked up and thrown at the surfers. This was the definition of a wave of consequence with the razor-sharp reef being, by some athletes' estimate, just four feet away. Yet athletes were hurling themselves over the falls, completely sending it. Five people lost skin the first day, including Bailey who required stitches for his arm. But five athletes also proclaimed they got the ‘wave of a lifetime.’ “To say you scored one of the best waves of your life in a competition rashguard gives us at NST the tickles,” said Rice. “That is the goal with these events.”
On Day One, the swell was six to ten feet and Nathan Fletcher, the event’s technical director, described the wind as “nuclear.” Eithan Osborne of Ventura, California recalled paddling out in the first heat and scoring the wave of his life. “We were still trying to figure out the waves and where to sit,” he said. “I just went for it and the wave felt huge when I was riding, like the whole ocean was folding over me. It was the best feeling. It was the best wave I’ve ever ridden in my life, but also the scariest. It was pretty much a close out.”
Kirra Pinkerton, an up-and-comer from San Clemente, California who clinched second overall for the women said watching the other competitors pumped her up. “Eithan had the wave of the trip,” she said. “It felt like six seconds before he came out of the barrel.” In her first heat, she saw Brown make it out of a double barrel. “She had a ‘I just got the wave of my life’ look on her face and I wanted that feeling too, so I turned around and went for a huge wave,” she recalled. “It was so choppy I couldn’t even get my feet on the board, but I kept pumping and I got that feeling too. But I think we all have some unfinished business with that wave.”
Amping the Viewing Excitement
Given the extreme isolation of the venue, the action wasn’t available to viewers until nearly one month after the contest ran. “A live event is the holy grail, in my opinion,” said Rice. “But there are some amazing things you can do post-show that you can’t do live.” Even diehard surf fans will admit that live broadcasts can be, well, a bit of a snooze. NST flew a 15-person production team from Aether Films (the team behind the 2024 film Trilogy: New Wave) to Micronesia to capture historic drone footage of the event and edit and package it into David Attenborough-worthy cinematography. Two approximately three-hour edits aired as ‘live’ on Red Bull TV and YouTube (the latter pulled in 102K views in the first week) with viewing parties held around the globe.
Veteran NST commentator Ed Leigh and surfing greats including Lisa Anderson, Barton Lynch, and Tanner Gudauskas were tapped to ‘host’ the viewing and provide smart, off-the-cuff commentary. The fifteen to twenty minute lulls in between sets were edited out to keep the viewing fast paced and focused on the highly suspenseful wave riding action. Colorful athlete bios and insights from the judges added compelling storytelling elements to it all. The result was something that felt like a hybrid between the highlight reel of a contest and an awesome surf film where Mother Nature is the main character.
The Surf Contest Reimagined
NST Surf comes at a time when more and more pros are stepping away from the WSL Championship Tour. The fresh format and exotic locale may be the antidote to the traditional contest model. “It was still a competition, but it felt more like a giant adventure going to this island with a crazy wave where only a handful of people had surfed,” said Osborne. “It’s a new perspective on competition surfing. Instead of the same cookie cutter contest, they’re going for something a bit more extreme, a little more intense, not so perfect.”
For many of the athletes it provided not just a dream wave, but the dream surf trip. Brown said it was by far the most fun she’s had at a competition. “I went home with so many new friendships,” she said. “We were all going for it so hard, but it still felt like a surf trip with all your mates and idols on an island with pumping waves. And on down days we were fishing, foiling, going out on jet skis.”
Pinkerton admitted she wasn’t quite sure what she signed on for when she said yes to the invite. “I left thinking, ‘This was the best trip of my life,’” she said. “This is exactly what surfing needs right now.”
THE FACTS:
The Competitors
Women
Milla Brown AUS
Anne Dos Santos BrA
Coco Ho Haw
Kirra Pinkerton USA
Men
Soli Bailey AUS
Victor Bernardo Bra
Noah Beschen Haw
Harry Bryant Aus
Al Cleland Jr. Mex
Mikey February ZAF
Eithan Osborne USA
Kauli Vaast Tah
The Evolution of
Natural Selection Tour
2008 .... Quiksilver Natural Selection
in Jackson Hole
2012 .... Red Bull Supernatural at Baldface
2013 .... Red Bull Ultra Natural at Baldface
2020 .... Natural Selection Tour test event in Jackson Hole
2021 .... Natural Selection Tour officially launches with snowboarding at three locations: Jackson Hole, Baldface Valhalla and in Alaska
2022 .... Natural Selection Tour acquires Proving Grounds and enters bike
2023 .... YETI Natural Selection Revelstoke
2024 .... Natural Selection Tour announces expansion to four sports including NST Bike, Ski, and Surf alongside Snowboarding
2025 .... Natural Selection Tour launches all four sports in first four months of the year
