Bikini contests, broken trophies – and no prize money: when female surfing was a wipeout

In 1993, the 23-year-old Australian Pauline Menczer was the best in the world at her sport: the newly crowned world surfing champion. But that year there was no prize money for the women’s title (Menczer’s best guess as to the men’s No 1 bonus is $30,000). To add insult to injury, the trophy she was handed on the podium in Honolulu rattled; the metal cup wasn’t fixed properly to the wooden base. “For years I thought they’d just not screwed it on tightly,” says Menczer on a video call from her home in Byron Bay.

One day she took the trophy down from the shelf to fix. “I thought it just needed tightening.” But it was broken. “I couldn’t believe they gave me a trophy like that!” says Menczer. No cash. Broken trophy. This sums up surfing’s attitude to women for decades – as revealed in a new documentary, Girls Can’t Surf. It tells the story of female surfers battling to be taken seriously in their own sport in the 80s and 90s; of rampant institutional sexism, and misogynistic men on the professional circuit (“They just need to look like women. Look feminine, attractive and dress well.”)

The director is film-maker and surfer Christopher Nelius, who had made a couple of films about male stars of the era. “Male surfing is so written about, so mythologised,” he says. “Surfing mythologises its athletes in a way that no other sport does. But it’s been male 99% of the time.” When he started researching women’s surfing of the 80s and 90s, he hit a brick wall. “There wasn’t a book, there wasn’t a film. There was nothing.” So, he picked up the phone to a couple of the women surfers. “They were like” – he pulls a stunned face – “‘What? You want to tell our story?’”

And what stories. If anyone deserved to have been handed a jumbo