The inaugural season for the The SUP Champions Tour has come and gone with Annabel Anderson and Danny Ching taking overall titles. The Tour released a presser yesterday. Here’s the gist:
Six months ago several of the top male (Travis Grant, Connor
Baxter, Danny Ching, George Cronsteadt, Lincoln Dews, Jamie Mitchell,
Casper Steinfath, Chase Kosterlitz, Matt Becker, Chuck Patterson and
many more), and female sup racers (Annabel Anderson, Jenny Kalmbach,
Lina Augaitis and others) sat down with the goal to unify professional
SUP racing around the world.
There are currently at least three entities that claim to crown a
world champion: the WPA, World Series, and ISA. However, none of them
have the support of all, or even most, of the athletes. And all are
restricted to a particular board class and racing style.
The Champions Tour athletes wanted to support the biggest and best events (in the sport), events we felt deserved our support. (And we posed these questions to our panel): Does bringing top competitors to an event help grow the sport? When professional paddlers show up to events, does it help grow the event and make it better? Where do athletes rank at the end of the year based off race results at the best events, against the best racers?
The Champions Tour picked seven races that encompass a wide range of styles and board classes. The men were scored for their top five races and women for their top four results. Here are the seven:
Carolina Cup, Graveyard elite result, winner Danny Ching
Olukai Ho’olaule’a, line honors, winner Connor Batxer
Lost Mills, distance race, winner Eric Terrian
Ultimate SUP Showdown, race side final result, winner Kai Lenny
Gorge Paddle Challenge, combined 2 day result, winner Connor Baxter
BOP elite, line honors, winner Kai Lenny
BOP distance, 14′ elite division, winner Danny Ching
The Champions Tour athletes wanted to support the biggest and best events (in the sport), events we felt deserved our support. (And we posed these questions to our panel): Does bringing top competitors to an event help grow the sport? When professional paddlers show up to events, does it help grow the event and make it better? Where do athletes rank at the end of the year based off race results at the best events, against the best racers?
The Champions Tour picked seven races that encompass a wide range of styles and board classes. The men were scored for their top five races and women for their top four results. Here are the seven:
Carolina Cup, Graveyard elite result, winner Danny Ching
Olukai Ho’olaule’a, line honors, winner Connor Batxer
Lost Mills, distance race, winner Eric Terrian
Ultimate SUP Showdown, race side final result, winner Kai Lenny
Gorge Paddle Challenge, combined 2 day result, winner Connor Baxter
BOP elite, line honors, winner Kai Lenny
BOP distance, 14′ elite division, winner Danny Ching
The tie breaker this year was a count back to next best
result (sixth result for men, fifth for women) to reward consistent
finishes.
So that’s the meat of it. Here’s where the racers that made enough starts to qualify ended up:
1 Danny Ching
2 Travis Grant
3 Connor Baxter
4 Georges Cronsteadt
5 Kai Lenny
6 Jake Jensen
7 Chase Kosterlitz
8 Eric Terrien
9 Slater Trout
10 Beau O’Brian
1 Annabel Anderson
2 Lina Augaitis
3 Sonni Honscheid
4 Candice Appleby
5 Jenny Kalmbach
6 Angela Jackson
7 Fiona Wylde
8 Andrea Moller
9 Kelsa Gabehart
10 Talia Decoite
A quick takeaway before we get into more analysis for the upcoming
season, The Champions Tour was a really solid first stab at trying to
unify a severely ...more
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