Longboarder and filmmaker, Lucy Small on the fight for gender equality in sport

She's figuring out her power

After calling out the unequal prize money of the Curly Maljam surfing competition in 2021, the long-boarder and filmmaker reflects on life on the pro tour and finding the courage to speak up.

You were raised in Denmark, on the Western Australian coastline. Growing up in such a remote town, when did you decide you wanted to pursue a professional career in surfing?

Denmark is remote, that’s how I always describe it. The surf community there was pretty small. There are some really good surfers from Denmark and there are starting to be more, but growing up there were definitely surfers around but there was also not a whole lot to do there. Going to the beach was one of the main activities you could do. When I was a kid, I would always see the surfers out there and want to try but it was all these men and I was too scared to go out and even try when I was really young. 

When I became a teenager, I got the courage and finally took the step and did it. I just got hooked and couldn’t stop. There weren’t many women surfing then, though. There were girls around my age who were my friends and we surfed together, but there weren’t older women who surfed all the time - no-one competing that we could look at for guidance. 

The Denmark coastline is really rugged and wild and there’s some big wave surf spots which is like towing in with the jetski. There’s lots of people around here who do that so when I was young, I thought that was just what you did. Thankfully, there were a couple of longboarders at Ocean Beach, my home beach, so I started to longboard and then one of Western Australia’s state championship events came to Denmark one year. The event was on and I was free surfing nearby but I could just see the contest running and they had the perfect peak, the best waves coming through, Daft Punk was playing on the beach and there was a beam of sunlight shining down on that spot and I felt like I was on the outside of a shop window just thinking, ‘Oh my god, I want that.’ That was the year I entered and how I started competing. 

You began competing on the WSL Longboard Tour at the age of 17. What were some of the challenges you faced on your way to becoming a professional surfer? 

Longboarding is the poor cousin of shortboarding. It’s the discipline no-one’s heard of, despite it being the original type of surfing with a heritage behind it. It’s a really special sport; there’s so much deep history and culture associated with longboarding, it has a really amazing global community and story but it doesn’t have the same publicity that shortboarding has. Even in surfing, it’s so difficult to get recognition for longboarding. Even to get the governing body to recognise the achievements of longboarders over shortboarders is a big challenge. So, it’s not just for me but everyone involved and in Australia it’s particularly bad that it’s so hard to get any support to do the sport. I have spent every dollar I’ve ever earned on travelling to compete and that is through all kinds of jobs, like working in cafes. 

Everything is self-funded, even when I represented Australia at the World Championships in 2023 at El Salvador, that was completely self-funded. Surfing Australia has started putting some money behind the longboard team but it typically doesn’t get much support or funding. I’m one of the few that made the jump from being a junior to actually keep competing because all of the younger people go through this threshold where they are travelling with their parents who help them pay for things, then they leave school or move out of home and there’s no sponsorship support or any pathway to help people make the jump into actually pursuing a professional career. It’s been so bad in the past. 

Chelsea Williams is Australia’s only female longboard world champion that we’ve ever had and she did it without one sponsor. She self-funded the entire thing; she’s never been put into the hall of fame or anything like that. Her achievement is barely even acknowledged or recognised. Longboarding to me is, in a lot of ways, where shortboarding was in the ‘90s - for women, anyway. So, that’s a big challenge trying to find the money. You have to work in a job to fund your travel and you’re competing, but because you’re spending all this time working, you don’t have the time to dedicate to the sport. It’s always been worse for women, in longboarding it’s quite bad for everyone, but that’s still a challenge now and was an even bigger challenge when I was 17 and trying to pursue that pathway. 

The thing people miss is that shortboarding might get this huge platform and all the hype, but the majority of people who surf, the average joe out there, they ride longboards. Image: @saltwaterpilgrim on Instagram

In terms of sponsorship and funding, where should that money be coming from? Is it on sponsors to get behind longboarding or Surfing Australia?

I think it’s a combination of both. In some places there are longboarders who get a lot more sponsorship support. Here in France there are longboarders who have actual careers out of sponsorship. France also has a government scholarship program with longboarders on that program who get assistance for their travel. That’s at the very top level, but from the government body perspective, there could definitely be support for those pathways like training programs that can come from the government.

And then sponsorship companies can get behind longboarding and see there are opportunities. The thing people miss is that shortboarding might get this huge platform and all the hype, but the majority of people who surf, the average joe out there, they ride longboards. Not everyone is able to go and shred like Molly Picklum on this little board. The accessible form of surfing is longboarding, and to me that’s a huge marketer and huge opportunity for people. It would be cool to see more companies get behind it and grow the sport. 

In 2021, you called out the unequal prize money after winning the Curly Maljam surfing competition where you were awarded $1,500 to the men’s prize of $4,000. What gave you the courage to speak up and how did you protect your own mental space as the story went viral? 

I don’t know where the courage came from, I was shitting myself. I was shaking, I was very nervous. I think it just came from a place of all the years, all the hard slog of trying to get to these events and be committed to the sport, so much goes into it and I was like, ‘I’ve been going to these events since I was 17 years old and here I am at 28 and you’re trying to tell me my contribution is not even worth half of what a man has received.’ I think it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I thought, ‘everyone’s probably going to hate me at this moment, but I just don’t care.’ All I had was this hope that if I do this now, then maybe next year they will fix it and that was all I thought. 

It’s so funny, when I think about it now I just had no idea what I was doing in the sense that anyone would care. I went home, caught up with a friend and told her what happened, and she said, “Do you think you’ll get any media out of this?” And I went, “Oh nah, no-one cares about this sort of stuff.” I just didn’t think people would find it interesting because that was the response I’d had for so many years in trying to talk about this stuff. I just thought people know this happens and no-one cares, so for this to blow-up and get all this media attention, it was surreal. 

I just rolled with it. I have been talking about this stuff for so long, talking about it, complaining about it, trying to bring it up with people, and it never felt like I got anywhere. It just felt that people were going, ‘Well, that’s just the way it is.’ Discrimination against women in surfing, whether it’s equal prize money, resources, entry places in competition - it’s always been worse for women and everyone is so used to it that it feels so normal and it’s only when you have that perspective from outside of surfing that people are able to go, ‘No, that’s really wrong. It’s gender discrimination.’ The three attitudes I always knew was: “We know it’s wrong and there’s nothing we can do”, “we know it’s wrong and we don’t care”, or “It’s not wrong.” 

Suddenly I had this huge national platform and I didn’t want to talk about this little competition I had won that had done the wrong thing. I wanted to talk about the fact that this was  a symptom of a huge industry-wide issue that women all over the world of surfing and all over the world of sport are dealing with, and it’s so bad that competitions think they can just hand out novelty checks with unequal prize money on them and nothing will happen to them because it never has in the past. They ran that even with unequal prize money for 11 years before I called them out and when I did they were so shocked. 

Following the event, you launched the groundbreaking Equal Pay for Equal Play campaign, calling for gender equality in sport. What has been the biggest highlight since launching this campaign? 

In 2023, we secured some changes to NSW Government policy that meant that for sporting peak bodies all across NSW to apply for funding from the NSW Government under a particular funding scheme, they had to show that they have equal prize money and equal gender representation on their board. That came in on July 1 last year, which was a really big step forward. It made me really appreciate just what activists and advocates do. That was a huge victory for us but when you say it, it sounds so small but change is so hard to make happen. Those moments that you see of activists and advocates that have secured some kind of victory, you see the glory moments but don’t see the years and years of nitty gritty behind the scenes.

You have a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies from University of Sydney. How did that degree help inform your activism? 

It actually helped so much and I’m so glad I had that behind me when I went viral and launched the campaign and everything. I did my masters dissertation on women on the frontlines in revolution movements, so it was a pretty heavy topic but I learnt so much about gender and it gave me a really different and useful lens to apply to sport and how gender works in that context. In that course, you also do learn a lot about activism and how change can happen so that was also really useful. 

When I called out Curly, at that time I was planning to do a PhD on women in surfing and had already done a research proposal already. So, I had a really useful academic underpinning for what I was saying, I wasn’t just making it up. I combined that with the experience of existing in the world and being discriminated against, and that was a handy combination for sure. 

Your entry to the 2025 Noosa Festival of Surfing was denied due to your previous comments about equal pay. How do you overcome the personal challenges that go along with advocacy and stay connected to joy in a sport you love? 

When Noosa Festival told me that I was not eligible to enter and the reason was due to something I’d said in the past, I felt really isolated. I felt like all the people who have benefits from the changes that have happened through my advocacy, where are they right now to stand with me? So many people say, ‘we’re supporting you from the background’ which I appreciate, but sometimes I wish it was from the foreground. 

I’ve definitely had to have some lessons in realising that you can’t make every single change right now and if I’m going to have some longevity in what I’m doing, I need to be able to have my own time and my own space and be able to focus on my surfing. Advocating added an element of pressure. I started to not get good results in my surfing for a while because I had this added pressure at every contest that I showed up to that I had something to prove because I felt like my voice was only valid the better I was at my sport. If you’re a world champion calling out something, then no-one can argue with you. So, I had this pressure that I needed to perform for my voice to stay valid. If I’m losing first-round in every contest, then people are going to say, ‘Well, who is she to say anything?’ 

And that is a criticism that did get levelled at me a lot from random people, but they’d say, ‘You’re not even good’. It affected my mindset going into competing. Surfing is like going out onto a tennis court but every time you go onto the tennis court, the tennis court is different. And not only is it different when you get out there, it changes while you’re out there. That’s what it’s like, you’ve got this changing playing field and with longboarding which is about style and control and timing, it all comes from a calm mindset. And that’s hard when you’ve got pressure and voices in the back of your head saying you’re not good enough to be out here. 

So, I’ve just had to go, ‘Ok, you’re a surfer first’ and focus on that. And just create some space between myself and that world where there’s lots of emotions involved. That’s been a big journey in learning how to deal with that.

Surfing has long been dominated by men, with women’s surfing at Pipeline only becoming an official part of the WSL Championship Tour in 2022 after long being seen as “too dangerous”. What would a truly equal, inclusive surf culture look like to you - and how far are we from it? 

We’re definitely getting a lot closer at the very top level. The most exciting surfers in the world right now are women - in a media sense and a brand sense. But to me it’s pretty simple what we need: equal prize money, equal opportunity, equal support, equal resources. That would be amazing. We have so much coverage of surfing beyond the pro-circuit which is still very male-dominated. There are so many stories within this global surfing community from all over the world, but there’s only a select few of people from particular places - mainly Australia, Hawaii, and the US - who get any attention or coverage of what they’re doing. 

To me it would be so cool to see the big narrative and big story of surfing have more of those people who are relegated to the sidelines brought to the foreground, and not for that to be the exception but the norm. There’s never been an Asian-born woman on the championship tour, and there’s never been a Black African woman on the championship tour. That says a lot about the accessibility of surfing, and I’d love to see all that change. I honestly don’t think it’s that far away. Surfing in the Olympics, it’s changed a lot because there’s more resources available and a concerted effort to include people from everywhere to give them an opportunity to surf. 

As you said, you are a surfer first. Are you able to compartmentalise that part of surfing that needs to change in order to see equal pay and opportunities, or is every surf one that sees it come to the surface? 

There have definitely been times where surfing has felt like a source of stress rather than the release it normally is. But the beautiful thing about surfing that’s different from other sports is that it’s in nature. So, even when you’re in your worst state and even if it’s around surfing itself, you can’t help but have your little chemical releases in your brain when you’re out there. Surfing is really a place where I can process everything without the stress that, if I was home thinking about it, I’d be stressed thinking about stuff. But being out in the water, I’m able to get a fresh perspective on it. I’ve started making films and always have these beautiful opportunities to travel and meet people and over time doing that, it makes all the negative stuff disappear. 

I’ve been touring for our Ceibo film recently where somebody asked about the Noose Surf Festival and how they tried to ban me in the Q+A. I just totally forgot about that. I don’t know, the good just pushed all that bad out of the way. I think my relationship with surfing has changed a lot in that it’s this source of joy I hold onto now in this world where things feel so crazy on the shore. I can go out there and finally get some peace and find community. There are the negative parts for sure, but as someone said to me, for every one negative comment there are five hundred people who support me. There are so many people out there who are so supportive; women and men paddle up to me in the surf to say ‘thank you’ for the work that I’m doing, and that happens all the time, all over the world. I’m just so glad that that’s how people feel about what I’m doing because it’s just wanting to be the voice that I wish I had speaking when I was young. 

Your work as a surf journalist has seen you cover everything from Saudi Arabia’s fledgling surf scene to India’s first female surfer. Is there an event or moment you’ve covered that stands out as the most memorable? Why?

In the last year I’ve done so many amazing interviews. The very first article I got published was with Chelsea Williams, the 2014 Longboard World Champion which was the first commission I received. That was amazing because she’d been trying to win a world title and had come second four years in a row. She was so undervalued as a surfer and as a person in the world of surfing. I wrote a 10-page feature on her and she won her title that year and it was so amazing to witness. More recently, a person I loved building a relationship with and writing an article about is a woman called Amber Hamer who is the founder of Naru Surf Gathering and an Aboriginal surfer, one of the first female Aboriginal surfers on the Australian East Coast. She started Naru Surf Gathering in 2017 with her brother in commemoration of their dad who was one of Australia’s first Aboriginal surfers and he unfortunately died by suicide in the ‘90s, so they started this surf festial that brings Aboriginal surfers from all over Australia together to compete. I learnt so much from chatting with her. 

For your recent film Ceibo, you travelled to Ecuador where you shone a spotlight on women in leadership and environmental protection. How does your connection to the ocean influence the way you approach climate action? 

I always wanted to make films. I’m a writer and a storyteller and always wanted to make surf films but didn’t know how to start. I got the opportunity to make a short film back in 2022 called Yama where I went to Ghana and filmed with female surfers and skaters over there, and Ceibo is the new one set in Ecuador. Equal Pay for Equal Play and me calling stuff out is me trying to shatter the status quo that exists now. The filmmaking is trying to nurture something new. It’s one thing to be talking about the issue and another thing to be doing what’s missing, so I’m trying to do both in that way. 

If I had the chance to make films, I wanted to tell stories that weren’t being told enough because that’s what I felt like when I was young. I always wanted to watch surf films with women in them and one of them was Blue Crush, which I loved and watched a lot. But I was reading magazines and there were rarely women in them, and rarely represented in a way that made sense to me. So, as soon as I had an opportunity to start writing, I wanted to start writing articles for magazines on women’s surf stories and when I had the opportunity to make films, I hadn’t seen anything on women surfers in Africa. 

To me, I feel that being a surfer means you automatically have to be an environmentalist because in a completely self-serving way, your sport relies on a healthy environment and not enough surfers understand the gravity of that. I wanted to do something more environmental that focused on women. I had heard the statement that ‘women are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis but they also hold the key to its solutions,’ and thought, ‘What does that even mean? What’s a story we can find that explores that?’

I teamed up with Ecuadorian Australian surfer Pacha Light who was really stoked about sharing some stories from Ecuador and it all came together really well, learning about women’s rights and the climate crisis and how it’s all inter-linked. We tackle that in a surf film that’s quite an ambitious move to make within that kind of genre because typically surf films usually see you go to a foreign place, surf, and leave. That’s the opposite of what we’ve done. We bring everyone into a cinema to watch a surf film but it goes way further than that. 

To me, I’ve learnt a lot about finding out what my power is to make change in the last four years. I wanted to create something that inspires people to find that in themselves, too and that’s what Ceibo is. It’s five different stories of activism and leadership in Ecuador and how it can take many different forms and mean many different things to people depending on who you are and what your contest is. It’s wanting people to do that search in their own lives and find out what they can influence, and hopefully to start doing it. 

Lucy will be touring her film, Ceibo, across Australia with screenings nation-wide. For updates and ticket details, check out the website. 

You’ve recently moved to Southwest France. What do you miss most about home?

The surf at home is a bit more consistent, and I miss the cafe culture a bit. In Australia, cafes are quite standardised in that they always have fresh sandwich options, some yummy treats, and really good coffee. Here, it’s a bit harder to find that. It’s more like, stand up and drink an espresso. Obviously, I miss my friends. 

Originally published as Longboarder and filmmaker, Lucy Small on the fight for gender equality in sport