Surfing Australia supports The Clubbies – Inside Sport’s grassroots sports awards.

CLICK HERE to nominate a local sports star, volunteer or club.

You’ll be putting them – and you – in the running for fantastic prizes!

SURFING: A SNAPSHOT

It was exactly a century ago this year that the great Hawaiian Olympic swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku travelled to Australia and was invited to give a surfboard riding exhibition. He shaped a surfboard out of a solid piece of Queensland sugar pine and took to the water at Freshwater, on Sydney’s northern beaches, in front of a large crowd. That day has been called the birth of the sport in Australia, and hasn’t it grown since! Once considered a fringe sport back in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, these days it is decidedly in the mainstream, with families surfing together across a remarkable age span, on boards of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

At the elite end of the sport, in the World Surf League, Australians are a major force, with the likes of Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson, Stephanie Gilmore and Sally Fitzgibbons almost routinely winning world titles – at least when the phenomenal Kelly Slater isn’t! At grassroots level, a thriving club scene sees 17,000 members representing more than 200 clubs in regular competition, ensuring Australia’s production line of worldbeating champions continues. Dozens of surf schools now educate new recruits on every major stretch of coastal sand in the country.

Surfing is riding an incredible wave of popularity that only seems to be growing. To find out more, visit: www.surfingaustralia.com