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Watch the First-Ever Mavericks Surf Awards 2021 Live Streamed on The Inertia
May 13th, 2021 @ 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Join Mavericks pioneer Jeff Clark and host Ivy Miller in celebrating Mavericks and the brave men and women who dared to surf it during one of the best winters in recent memory.
The inaugural Mavericks Awards will be broadcast right here on The Inertia,
Thursday, May 13th at 6 p.m. PST. The first-ever event supports the athletes and photographers who dedicate themselves to surfing one of the world’s most fearsome big waves.
The contest includes video submissions collected throughout the entire season and was judged by a diverse group of big wave surfers.
Equal prize money will be awarded for Male and Female Performers of the Year, with the remaining categories open to all genders.
Mavericks Awards 2021 Finalists
Best Barrel
John Mel
Peter Mel
Hunter Murison
Manny Resano
Biggest Wave
Grant Baker
Matt Bromley
Kai Lenny
Peter Mel
Female Performer of the Year
Justine Dupont
Bianca Valenti
Male Performer of the Year
Kai Lenny
John Mel
Peter Mel
Ride of the Year
Matt Bromley
Kai Lenny
Peter Mel
It’s fair to say Maverick’s played host to a historic big-wave season throughout the 2020/2021 winter.
Maybe it was the frequent XXL swells waking the place up? Maybe it was just the sheer number of monumental sessions we all relived through viral social-media clips? We saw Peter Mel on an unimaginable wave — one that seemed to speak to all of us regarding our own searches for the ride of a lifetime. Or maybe it was just a pandemic-stricken year and no Big Wave World Tour that had us all seeking out competition in some way shape or form?
Only time will tell just where this past winter at Mavs placed in the history books, but there’s no doubt it was a special season. And documenting it all throughout was the first-ever Mavericks Awards, a virtual, winter-long big wave contest. Whereas Mavs has been the site of various single-day big wave events through the years, the new competition, announced in 2019, is part of a new breed of digital surf events.
“The thing about Mavericks is that it’s difficult and incredibly finicky,” contest organizer Chris Cuvelier told The Inertia in 2020. “The reports can change in seconds, up on the hill the Navy outpost has blackout dates when you can’t run contests… to pick one day for the contest to run the stars really had to line up. A video contest is a modern format and what we’re seeing is, more and more, that format is being adopted in the big-wave category.”
With that in mind, the Mavericks Awards set out to award $25,000 in prize money to surfers and photographers after tasking them with chronicling, then submitting, their best waves of the season. The prize money will be given out across five categories: Male Performer of the Year, Female Performer of the Year, Biggest Wave, Best Barrel, and Ride of the Year.
