Who's Really Surfing's Youngest World Champion?

With her demonstrative win at the WSL Finals, 18-year-old Caity Simmers became the youngest women’s world champion in history…sort of. The convoluted history of early professional surfing and its subsequent evolution isn’t quite that cut and try.

Jumping in the wayback machine, taking a fantastic voyage to Manly Beach, Australia, on a warm summer day in 1964, Midget Farrelly and Phyllis O'Donnell won the first-ever World Surfing Championship. During the competition, the foundational meeting of the International Surfing Association was held (then known as the International Surfing Federation). Peru’s Eduardo Arena was elected its first president and promptly committed to organizing the second World Surfing Championship the next year in Lima, Peru.

Historic events were run in Peru in 1965, then San Diego in 1966, followed by Puerto Rico in 1968. And it’s here, in the heart of the Caribbean surf scene, that a 15-year-old Margo Oberg would win the World Surfing Championships. The following year, she became the first woman to earn prize money for winning a professional surf contest—$500 for taking out the Santa Cruz Pro-Am. In 1970, Oberg finished second in the World Surfing Championship in Victoria, Australia.

"I had to go back to high school and live through the 11th and 12th grades not being world champion," she would explain later. "People kept asking, 'What happened? Why didn't you win?' It was all so devastating that I retired.”

The stardom and notoriety was a challenge for Oberg, who got married and stepped away from the sport for the better part of five years. Returning to competition in 1975, Oberg and six other women competed in the men's Smirnoff Pro-AM contest, where she was the highest-placing woman and placed third overall.

The second half of the ‘70s was a heady time for pro surfing and things were seemingly in a constant state of flux. In 1976, the International Professional Surfers (IPS) was founded by Fred Hemmings and Randy Rarick and essentially served as the original world governing body of professional surfing. Australia’s Peter Townend won the first IPS title in ’76, while no woman crowned world champ that year. The following year, Oberg claimed the first women’s IPS world title alongside South Africa’s Shaun Tomson.

Related: 18-Year-Old Caity Simmers Makes History As Youngest Women's World Champ Ever

It’s really at this stage in the timeline that the idea of having a professional world surfing champion begins to solidify. And just as Mark Richards is famously rattling off titles in the late '70s and early ‘80s, so is Oberg, who went on to win two more titles in 1980 and 1981. By 1983, Aussie Ian Cairns had rolled the original IPS concept into the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP), which then became the World Surf League (WSL) in 2015.

So, yes, Oberg was the youngest-ever world champ based on her 1968 ISA result. But then Simmers stands as the youngest-ever world champ based on the ASP/WSL timeline. The WSL doesn’t list Oberg as a world champ, just like they don’t list Farrelly or Hemmings, presumably because those titles were won via a different organization and different competitive format. When it comes to surf history, somethings aren’t mutually exclusive, and sometimes the devil’s in the detail.

Related: Photos: The Best Moments From a Historic WSL Finals Day

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