Julian Wilson is known to the non-surfing public for his part in 2015 as the best supporting actor in Mick Fanning’s famous real-life drama. When his fellow Australian had an unwelcome confrontation with a shark, Wilson swam heroically to his aid. “It was pretty gnarly,” Wilson says with characteristic understatement.
But within his sport Wilson is known for other reasons too: the world championship contender is among those pushing the boundaries of surfing, bringing techniques that take a leaf out of the playbooks of skateboarders and BMX riders to elevate it to new, airborne heights.
Sport, and surfing is no exception, is malleable, shifting in shape as times change and when individuals like Wilson introduce new ideas. “It’s great to be a part of that movement,” he says. “I feel like I’m part of the group that is pushing to innovate and progress and look outside the box.
“I really enjoy that space and I want to keep working on things and keep stimulating that thought. I definitely think about [innovation] and try and apply it to the ocean, to the waves. I feel like there’s still room to grow, there’s room left there to land first manoeuvres of some sort.”
The Australian, widely regarded as one of the best surfers in the world, talks to the Guardian while perching on a stool in the clubroom of the North Steyne Surf Life Saving Club. He’s at Sydney’s northern beaches to compete in the Australian Open of Surfing, a prestigious qualifying event before this week’s World Surf League Championship Tour opener at Snapper Rocks.
We discuss his penchant to take to the air – and how what he does once airborne above the waves puts him at the centre of the latest competitive surfing trend. “Surfing’s a very traditional sport, barrel riding and surfing on the face of the wave,” he says. “There’s not really much room to grow in those aspects, except for mastering it. With the aerials there’s still progression to be made and different stuff to be landed.”
He describes his style as “somewhat aggressive” but “not too predictable”. The way he surfs now is born out of a youth spent on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, where he and his mates would alternate their time between ocean and skate park, surfing, skateboarding and BMXing. Now 28, Wilson says the aerial aspect of all three sports appealed to him from a young age.
“I love jumping, I love being able to go to the skatepark and fly over the ramps and get in the air. In surfing, any opportunity I had I would try and do an air. There’s been quite a change in the last four years towards the progression of aerials and introducing that into competitive surfing. It’s been really fun to be a part of it. I love the challenge of trying to stay at the forefront of it and be creative and go higher, go further, rotate more.”
The ocean is where Wilson is best able to allow his creative juices to flow, although he stops short of describing himself as a showman. If he’s trying to avoid the label, though, he hardly does himself any favours when a few days later, in his opening heat at Manly, he soars clear of the water, salmon-like, not once but twice on the same wave, executing two stunning, gravity-defying manoeuvres, the second coming even as the wave begins to fade. Collective jaws are dropped on the beach and the judges are in complete agreement: five 10s across the board and the first perfect score of the competition.
Wilson, somewhat typically, refuses to get carried away and plays it down afterwards. He tells the television interviewer he’ll try his best to serve up another dose of perfection during the competition, and although he doesn’t manage to, he does end up reaching the final, where he’s edged out by a like-minded Brazilian, Jesse Mendes.
The Wilsonian theory of surfing evolution may involve pushing the envelope in certain areas, but he is professional enough to know there is a time and a place for experimentation. The heats of a pre-season qualifier may be well suited to unorthodoxy, but a degree of convention is required when it matters. And when it matters for Wilson this year is on the world tour.
His aim is clear: he dreams of becoming world champion. He has been in contention a few times previously, but by his own admission has lacked the requisite consistency over the course of a season to emulate the likes of his good friend Mick Fanning, the last Australian to win the world title, in 2013.
“I feel like [this year] I’m a bit older and a bit wiser, I’ve learnt more lessons and I feel like it’s just about applying time and time again and being in the mix when Pipeline [the Hawaiian Tour event] rolls around, the last event,” he says.
Since his ninth-placed debut season on the world stage in 2011, Wilson has finished ninth again a year later, then sixth, 14th, sixth and eighth last season. And during his six years on the tour, he has picked up just two event titles – the 2012 Rip Curl Pro Portugal and the 2014 Billabong Pipe Masters, held at Pipeline.
The latter statistic would be somewhat surprising, were it not for a quirk of Championship Tour surfing that means a competitor can be crowned world champion without actually winning a single event during the season. Rather, consistency at every event throughout the season is rewarded. Such is the points system, and it’s why Wilson can still genuinely be regarded as one of the world’s best surfers.
Certainly, he doesn’t allow a lack of individual titles to bother him. “Chasing goals of holding up trophies is an uncomfortable space to work in,” he says. “There’s a lot of trial and error and hard lessons and a lot of emotion in it.
“If a bit of talent is there, you plant the seed with the talent, then it gets recognised. It’s what you do with that and what you work in that space, [that is important]. It’s totally up to the athlete, if they enjoy that uncomfortable growth space. I feel that’s where the champions are made. It’s about embracing that challenge.”
Wilson, of course, launched himself into the consciousness of the wider public back in 2015, when his bravery during Fanning’s run-in with a great white shark at Jeffrey’s Bay in South Africa made headlines across the world.
Two years on, there is a lot of water under bridge. Indeed, it seems slightly retrogressive to bring it up amid so much talk of the future, but then again, the incident – compellingly and disturbingly captured on live television – left such an indelible mark, not just on those there but on so many across the world, it’s nigh on impossible to ignore.
At the time, Wilson himself described the incident as life-changing. Yet despite the heroism that later brought him a nomination for a bravery award, when he now thinks about it, it is with a degree more circumspection. “I don’t feel like the incident was about me,” he says. “I played a support role in a dramatic situation where a friend was wrestling a great white shark.”
Fear of something similar – or worse – happening plays on every surfer’s mind, Wilson says, especially at certain times of day, when out in the water early in the morning or at dusk. “It doesn’t matter age you are or where you are, I think everybody gets an inkling that you’re not out there on your own,” he says before adding, “It’s just a part of playing in their back yard.”
It’s a sentiment shared by many, if not all, surfers. But that’s not to say some would prefer the threat be removed entirely. Culls and nets are “solutions” already on the table, but the problematic aspects associated with each have proved divisive within the sport and wider beach communities.
If only there was an environment in which there was no risk of a shark attack or any threat to the animals themselves. Even better, if that same environment could also regularly produce perfect barrels, consistently, one after another at any time of day. Surely that would be some kind of surfing nirvana?
Enter Kelly Slater, the 11-time world champion and godfather of surfing, and his artificial wave pools. The American has been working with a team of scientists and engineers for 10 years to design a machine – basically a hydrofoil that moves through the water at a certain angle – that is capable of producing the kind of waves surfers dream about, on demand. They may not be universally popular – critics say it’s not challenging enough, unnatural and far removed from the essence of surfing, and point to its development as being akin to playing god – but, perhaps unsurprisingly, Wilson is a fan, even if he knows it will never replace the real thing.
“The wave pools could be great,” he says. “To have a consistent platform that is run by a machine at a certain time on a certain day introduces a lot more opportunity for people to view what we’re doing but also as a competitor to perform on a consistent platform as well.
“It will always be a pretty small piece of surfing, just because it is in a pool and it is controlled, and that’s the beautiful thing about surfing – every day is different, every swell is different.”
Wilson senses the opportunities pools like the one championed by Slater – in which the WSL bought a majority stake last year – offer in his quest to take surfing to never-seen-before places.
“We will be going a lot closer to skateboarding, there will be a lot more technical tricks,” he says. “You could add things into the pool where you’re rail sliding. There are all sorts of ideas and opportunity that will come with that stage and platform and that’s an exciting place for surfing to go.”
Julian Wilson, always the innovator. And, just maybe, Australia’s next surfing world champion.
