Men's Championship Tour · 2024 and 2025
How the numbers are made.
This site holds every heat of the Men's Championship Tour seasons named above, as the World Surf League published them, and adds two measures of its own: Datum, what a round is worth, and Trim, how far a surfer beats it. Results are reproduced; Datum and Trim are derived, and this page is where the derivation is opened up rather than asserted.
Read this first
Three limits
Every figure on this site is true to a row, but a figure being correct is not the same as a figure being strong. These three shape what any Trim number can honestly be taken to mean.
One · coverage
2024 and 2025 only
The database holds 2 seasons and nothing else. Earlier Championship Tour years are not loaded, so nothing here should be read as a career record or an all-time standing. Where the site names its coverage it lists the seasons one by one rather than as a range, because a range implies the years between it are held.
How this is computed
seasons table, which is itself the coverage statement: 22 events, 801 heats and 73 surfers across them.Two · the threshold
16 heats, filtered by default
The leaderboard shows 38 of 73 rated surfers by default, hiding those below 16 heats. That is a filter you can switch off, not a silent cut: the underlying view applies no threshold, the count of what is hidden is always on screen, and every table that shows a Trim figure shows its heat count and prior weight beside it. Prior weight is never hidden to make a ranking look cleaner.
How this is computed
v_trim_current. At 16 heats the starting prior is still 0.477 of the rating — the first count at which a surfer's own record outweighs it. The threshold is a presentation choice and is not signed off.Three · the prior
Everyone starts identically
Every surfer's Trim begins at zero and moves from there. The prior does not vary by entry status: a wildcard at their first event and a returning world champion start from exactly the same place, and the rating cannot tell you which is which. A surfer with four heats is 83% starting prior, so their Trim says almost nothing about them yet.
How this is computed
trim_model_runs — one run, prior 0.00, applied to every surfer alike. A prior that varies by entry status was specified, deferred, and is not in this version.The honest part
How thin this is
A rating wants a long record. This one has a mean of 25.3 heats per surfer, and 29 of 73 rated surfers sit below ten. At that size the starting prior and the threshold matter more, not less — which is why both are shown on every table rather than folded away into a methodology note.
The recency weighting earns nothing measurable at this size, and the site says so rather than implying otherwise. Trim decays older heats with a half-life of 15 heats; an undecayed shrunk mean of the same residuals is indistinguishable from it (2.9098 against 2.9123, paired t = 0.560). Nearly all of Trim's skill is the prior.
How this is computed
trim_model_runs run ewma_residual_hl15, computed 2026-10-17 over 1,845 rated heat entries and 73 surfers, of which 1,772 were scored in the walk-forward test. Against predicting zero for everyone, RMSE 2.9688. The mean above is over the 1,845 heats Trim actually rests on, not over all 1,854 heat entries.The measures
Datum and Trim
Datum
What a heat is worth before anyone surfs it — the score expected of the round being surfed. A quarter-final is not a seeding round, and comparing raw heat totals across them flatters whoever surfed the easier draw. Datum is the baseline that difference is measured from.
It was specified to account for break, round, wave type and field. On measurement it earned only the round: the other terms did not improve it on two seasons, so they are not in it. The specification was corrected to match the measurement rather than the other way round.
How this is computed
datum_model_runs run round, computed 2026-08-28 over 1,843 entries across 22 events. Leave-one-event-out RMSE 3.0415 against an intercept-only 3.1691, R² 0.0789 against that intercept.Trim
How far a surfer beats their Datum, accumulated heat by heat, with recent heats weighted more heavily. The unit is points per heat on the 0–20 scale: a Trim of 1.00 means roughly one point per heat better than the round expected. It is a rating, not a prediction, and it is not a ranking — the world title is decided by the WSL's own rules, which this site reproduces and never recomputes.
Trim is append-only: each heat adds a row rather than overwriting one, so a surfer's rating can be read as it stood at any point rather than only as it stands now.
How this is computed
Coverage
What is missing
Not every heat carries every field. Where a figure is absent the site shows an em-dash rather than a zero, because an unmeasured heat and a scoreless one are different things. These are the populations behind the site's main figures.
How this is computed
heats, heat_entries and waves at render time. Venue is a property of the heat rather than the event, because three events ran at two breaks.Provenance
Where the numbers come from
- One source. Results, points and placings are as published on worldsurfleague.com. Where the published figure and a derived one disagree, the published figure wins and the disagreement is recorded rather than smoothed over.
- Published, never inferred. Season points are the published points with the published throwaway left out, never reconstructed from finishing positions. A winner is named only where WSL publishes first place: the event placing for regular events, and the finishing position for the WSL Finals. No winner is worked out from the final heat.
- Every row keeps its receipt. Each row records the retrieved page it came from, and those pages are kept, so any figure here can be traced back to the bytes it was read from.
- Ties are not broken. Where two surfers finish a season on the same points the site shows a shared rank. The WSL's tiebreak is not in the database and is not guessed at.
Scope
What this is not
- Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the World Surf League. An independent project.
- Not a prediction. Trim describes heats that have been surfed; it forecasts nothing.
- Not the Women's Championship Tour, and not the Challenger Series — the Men's Championship Tour only, for the seasons named above.
- Not a replacement for the official rankings. For the standings of record, see the WSL.
Authorship
Who made this, and how to correct it
Swell Analytics is built and maintained by Taryn Hawtrey-Collier, a physics graduate (University of Bath) working in data analysis. The data collection, the checks against the published results and the choice of what to claim are mine, and so is any error.
Updates. Results are added once an event is final, and Datum and Trim are recomputed after that, never mid-event.
Found something wrong? Open an issue on the project's public repository. Every confirmed correction is listed below with its date.
Corrections
- 31 Oct 2026 — The ± beside each Trim now allows for the starting prior as well as heat-to-heat noise. Before, short records showed a range that was too narrow (one heat showed ± 0.26; it is now about ± 1.6). Trim figures themselves did not change. Headline Trim now shows two decimals.
- 20 Oct 2026 — Added the missing second heat of the 2024 Title Match (John John Florence beat Italo Ferreira 2–0). Their Trim moved (Florence 1.653 to 1.790, Ferreira 1.206 to 1.219); no one else's changed.