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On Tuesday, as a towering swell groomed by the Roaring Forties across the Indian Ocean reached its explosive final destination on the Western Australian coast, two surfers battled for their careers. Australian-Japanese surfer Connor O’Leary and Queenslander Liam O’Brien took on each other and Margaret River’s pumping conditions to retain a spot on the World Surf League’s Championship Tour.
With O’Leary just above and O’Brien just below the dreaded cut-line, victory would be a major step towards safety; defeat would likely consign the loser to a re-qualification slog on the second-tier Challenger Series.
The round of 32 heat seesawed and the lead changed – O’Leary scored the wave of the heat, while O’Brien nailed one of the best turns of the entire day with a stabbing hook. But when the dust settled, O’Leary found himself a point ahead and O’Brien’s two-year career on the Championship Tour came to a devastating close. The pair embraced at the top of the Main Break stairs, friends and rivals sharing mixed emotions.
“It sucks, man,” O’Leary said after securing his elite status for another year. “To come up in such a high-pressure heat with one of your close mates… I’ve been hanging around with LOB [O’Brien] for a couple of years now, we’re really close. It sucks, but I guess you’ve just got to put it all aside and put yourself first.”
Stop seven on the 2025 tour at Margaret River is home to “the cut”. The feature, added in 2022, serves two purposes. It slims the field for the remainder of the season – from 34 to 22 men and 18 to 10 women – and determines which surfers are guaranteed a spot on the following season’s campaign and who must re-qualify.
“It sucks that we had to match up in this round, but I’m sure he’s going to be back better than ever,” O’Leary insisted of the defeated O’Brien. “He’s too good of a surfer not to be on tour.”
The cut has been among the most controversial of a series of changes to the WSL introduced by tour authorities in an attempt to garner greater casual interest; the WSL also changed from an all-season cumulative points total approach to crown the champion, to a final-five playoff for the title.
Local surfer Jacob Willcox knows the feeling. The 27-year-old made his first WSL appearance as a wildcard over a decade ago, in 2013. He was a semi-regular wildcard feature on the tour over the years, before finally securing qualification in 2024. But last year’s WSL only saw five events before the cut, and so after battling for years to reach the pinnacle of the sport, Willcox was unceremoniously dumped off the tour in a matter of months.
On Tuesday, back in the event after winning the local trials, Willcox downed world No 1 Italo Ferreira; a day later he saw off João Chianca at the Box, a fearsome slab wave used as an alternative venue, to qualify for the quarter-finals. But the bitterness of last year’s cut still lingered – he described the format as “unfair” in one interview.
“It feels a lot better than it did last year, that’s for sure,” Willcox said after beating Ferreira. “Last year was just bitter disappointment – this year I feel like I’m going for a bit of redemption at home, and set myself up for a good year on the Challenger.”
Willcox had been unable to re-qualify on last year’s Challenger series, finishing 21st (only the top 10 surfers secure a place on the top-tier tour). At Margaret River, as Willcox won through the heats, he saw friends and compatriots – including O’Brien, veteran Ryan Callinan and rookie George Pittar – vanquished and on the wrong side of the line.
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“It’s heartbreaking watching those boys – I know exactly how they feel,” Willcox said. “If I can say anything, it all comes around – you’ll get your chance again. Both those guys are so talented, they’ll get back on tour.” For Willcox, there was a silver lining – globetrotting companions in the months ahead. “And I get to travel with them for a year, so we’ll have a good group of people all getting around each other and all getting back on tour for next year,” he added.
After several years of controversy, the WSL has unveiled major format changes for 2026 – including an end to the cut, an expanded female field and a return to the overall points total method for determining the Champions Tour winner. An end to the cut has been well-received by the travelling surfers, although there is no denying the excitement it adds to the competition – even if it is artificial. The cut will be replaced by a late-season mini-cut – with the field slimming for two final events – before the entire field returns for the final event, at Pipeline in Hawaii.
WSL commissioner Jessi Miley-Dyer says that returning Pipeline to its traditional role as the end-of-season event was a decisive factor (in recent years, Pipeline has opened the campaign). “There’s a lot of pressure that’s come with the mid-season cut,” says Miley-Dyer. “The main thing for us when it comes to relegation lines is qualification [for the following season]. There’s nothing more exciting than Pipe. If there’s a wave as an athlete, as a surfer, that you think about, dreaming about, competing at, to make your career or break your career, it’s Pipe. So being at Pipeline, having that full year, it makes sense.”
Returning to Pipeline to crown the champion and ending the mid-season cut embeds the WSL in its own traditions, a rejection of the for-television modernity that had been ushered in by former WSL chief executive Erik Logan (a former Oprah Winfrey Network executive). But while the excitement of the cut may be calorific, it is thrilling all the same.
On Tuesday, after winning through the elimination round, Australian veteran Sally Fitzgibbons was in tears; she needs to go deep, and probably win the Margaret River Pro, to avoid the cut. Surf magazine Stab described the “emotional spectacle” of that moment as “visceral”. The cut is cruel and dramatic. “Have we not been entertained, for the past four years?” Stab added.
Miley-Dyer, a former pro-surfer herself, had plenty of empathy for the highs and lows on display at the Margaret River Pro. “I feel for people,” she said. “It’s one of those events where we’re going to watch people have incredible performances and leave on really big highs; if you haven’t qualified for the next year, you’ll have to pick yourself up again.”
