About the Contest

The "Why"

The Prologue Single Fin Invitational is a new way of doing old school longboard surf contests.

Rather than focusing on the athletics of paddle battle or length of ride, the criteria of the Prologue has been developed to encourage surfers to showcase the best of what they have to offer.

Longboarding is more of a "performance art" than it is a sport. To get the best out of surfers, they need to feel relaxed, like a 'free surf' session at their home break with their friends. In recent years, several events have used a similar criteria with a ton of success, and are currently seeing an increase in the number of competitors willing to participate - events like "Oceanside Hot Dogger", "C Street Singlefin Invitational" and of course, starting the trend was Joel Tudor and the Vans Duct Tape. Although our criteria is a bit different, the concept is the same: a low-stress, free, open environment that reminds us why we all surf in the first place.

As a semi-pro longboarder, I always felt like I was compromising my identity by trying to ride the board the judges wanted to see rather then what I felt suited my style or the conditions of the water. I sometimes feel like I have "Multiple Personalities" like Steve Clevland's surf film, and enjoy riding a variety of boards. But the 2-plus-one, hard rail 'rockered out' performance 9-footers surf and ride completely different from the traditional soft rail, flat, single-fin surfboards. Although traditional boards can still be progressive, pitting the styles against each other always seemed to yield results that were too difficult to quantify because of the two drastically different concepts.

I feel that the 'traditional movement' is truly taking over the sport, and that focusing on a single style makes for clearer decisions by the judges and the competitors, removing the second guessing by each.

- Jeff Belzer, Event Organizer