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Surfing

No Contest goes backstage on a Hawaiian surfing season like no other

From Oahu and Maui to Honolua Bay, this Hawaiian winter will be remembered for years to come. Our friends at Stab bring you the best of the surfing action.
Written by Chris Binns
4 min readPublished on
As we all know by now, 2020 was a year unlike anything seen in recent generations. Heading into surfing's annual end-of-season Hawaiian party nobody in the sport knew what to expect. Would the islands of Oahu, Maui, Kauai and beyond be ghost towns? Could this be a return to the days of locals only beaches or somehow might things be busier than ever on the North Shore?
For the first time in a generation there would be no world title coronations at Pipeline or Honolua Bay, as the traditional big finishes were moved to open the 2021 seasons instead. What of the waves? As always, their fate lay at the whim of the weather. With so much up in the air we couldn't not send our friends from Stab along to investigate for No Contest and report back.
With the World Surf League scrubbing an entire year of competitive surfing from the books – history will forever note that in 2020 no world champions were crowned – there was a strange feeling amongst the surfing collective when they reunited in Hawaii for the first time since Australia some nine months earlier. The women started things off at Honolua Bay in Maui, and while in 2019 we saw Carissa Moore claim her fourth world title at the same event, this time around there was far from the same energy. The waves fired early, but when a shark attack tragically took place on the morning of the final, suddenly the shop was shut up and the remaining women jetted to Oahu to join the men at Pipeline. It was a bold move and one that paid off a few weeks later when Tyler Wright and Carissa Moore finally enjoyed the Pipeline shootout that the women's tour have been craving for years.
On the men's side of the draw John John Florence finally took down the one trophy that had eluded him for so long, despite not even being 30 yet. In these difficult times it seemed almost fitting that Florence couldn't be throned to the podium atop his brothers' shoulders and instead had to humbly stroll across the sand at an acceptable social distance from his throng of friends, family and well wishers. Whether head bowed in contemplation, or staring into the scrum of humans behind the ropes and soaking up the moment, you can sure our humble champ wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
Outside of the two traditional contests, the Vans Triple Crown adopted a new digital format this year and it changed the way competitors planned their seasons. Whereas in the past you might have been a Pipe guy, hard charging Haleiwa hellman or Sunset specialist, this winter the cream of the crop constantly moved between the three waves in search of the ultimate clips to boost their chances of securing some of surfing's most hallowed hardware. As always there can only be one winner, so congrats to John John Florence and Carissa Moore for keeping the trophies in Hawaii once again!
Alongside all of that, in this episode of No Contest – which can be viewed in the player at the top of the page – we hang out with tour rookie and modern phenom Jack Robinson; Coco Ho gives us a tour of Maui and Tai Van Dyke shows us how to carve wood and bake a traditional Maui Key Lime Pie. We breakdown best practices in heavy lineups, check in with usual Hawaiian suspects Jamie O'Brien and Mason Ho, and savour some of the best Pipeline sessions seen in years, starring everyone from Barron Mamiya to Crosby Colapinto, and Moana Jones to Kelly Slater. To round things out we meet the helmet-wearing, hard-charging squad of future stars who are going to redefine Hawaiian surfing for years to come... once they make it to high school.
We couldn't have crammed more into this latest (and longest!) episode of No Contest and we couldn't be happier with the resulting product. Fix yourself a plate lunch, get comfortable, settle in to take an in-depth look at the North Shore's legendary winter of 2020-2021, as never seen before. Enjoy.

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