While watching some recaps of wakesurfing competitions I started to wonder if they truly need independent categories for skim and surf. Nowadays the pros are throwing nearly all of the same tricks regardless of the type of board they're riding. In my eyes, I think they should combine the two together and let the riding speak for itself. By that I mean if your surf style fins prevent you from throwing 540 shuvits then the skim riders have an advantage. Conversely, if your tiny skim fin can't give you enough drive to do high airs then the surf style riders have the advantage. It almost seems akin to having independent categories in a wakeboarding competition for directional and bidirectional boards which seems very out of date. If they combined the prize money from both categories it might also bring out the best riding possible since the purse would be double what they're used to. Also, with the time savings they could extend it to the best of two runs vs one run.
Has anyone else thought about that? Here are a couple examples of the riding I'm referring to:
This is a little over a year old but Parker mixes up both styles in one video:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BIQGWj1j...arkerpaynesurf
Here's a clip of Keenan doing high difficulty level tricks for a skim style board... but he's doing on the on a surf style:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BS18by_g...y=keenanflegel
Here's another video of Parker. I feel like if you could black out the bottom of the screen you couldn't tell what style he was riding:
from Parker Payne on Vimeo.