LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS

Words Nick Carroll

Recently our colleagues at Swellnet put forth some fascinating research into the online viewership of the first three ASP WCT events of the year. Using a YouTube interface, they tracked the final of each event and came up with some tweaky figures.

I think we were all supposed to be a bit shocked at how low those figures appeared to be. Just 40,000 computers signed on to the final at Bells? What the hell?? Aren’t there supposed to be millions of us glued to our screens?

Well maybe. Or maybe we’ve all been quietly kidding ourselves.

It could be worse? Photo: Andrew Shield

The fact is that when it comes to sheer numbers, surfing has a rich tradition of what you might call excessive optimism. Surf organisations the world over, perhaps sensitive to the sport’s original underdog status, have spent years, possibly even generations, steadily inflating the planet’s surfing population to extraordinary imaginative heights.

For instance, it’s commonly held by the International Surfing Association that there’s some 23 million surfers in the world, up from the organisation’s previous estimate of 17 million in 2000. 3.5 million of these surfers are said to live in Australia.

This number, 3.5 million, is also used by Surfing Australia, National Surfing Reserves, and various other interest groups in order to demonstrate surfing’s vital importance in the general scheme of things.

You don’t have to think very hard about it to realise that the figure is a fantasy. I mean, just do a flat-line comparison. Three and a half million people is 15% of the entire population of Australia. Extrapolate that to Sydney with its 4-million-odd population and you’re talking about 600,000 surfers in that city alone, or about 15,000 surfers per beach. Yeah, we know Bondi gets crowded, but come on.

It’s understandable why these organisations might want to believe in the big numbers. In a world where pretty much everybody from Prime Ministers on down tell porkies as a matter of course, that’s how you talk governments and big businesses into supporting your programs. That, in short, is how you get shit done.

Except they are all busy ignoring the elephant in the room, the Australian Bureau of Statistics – the federal body which, along with conducting the decadal Census, conducts regular surveys of all Australians about a wide range of subjects, including our sports and recreational habits.

According to the ABS in its most recent data release, for the years 2011-12, just 226,000 Australians participate in surf sports of any kind - surfing, bodyboarding, SUPing, the lot. (This by the way lines up a lot closer with other real-world data, things like surfboard sales etc, than does the 3.5 megasurfer estimate.)

You can feel the air rushing out of that fantasy, can’t ya - especially when the ABS breaks down its figures into ages. Which shows grimly enough that not only has the participation in surfing DROPPED in the past 12 years, but the participation among young people has HALVED.

According to the ABS, the biggest single group of Australian surfers today exists between the ages of 35 and 44, and the 15-to-17 year age group shows the lowest surfing participation rate by percentage of any age group, INCLUDING the over 55s.

And it’s not because the kids are sitting around playing computer games either; on the contrary, kids are out there doing all sorts of shit. The 15-to-17 year age group shows the highest overall participation in sports and recreation of all age groups. They’re just not surfing that much.

So surfing in Australia is (a) about 1/12th as popular as all these organisations seem to think and (b) the kids aren’t that interested any more.

Gnarly.

Compare. Contrast. Photo: Andrew Shield

The number isn’t that bad, by the way. It only covers active surfers, not people who surfed twice at a surf school 10 years ago and then stopped or whatever. In other words, it doesn’t cover all the people who sorta think of themselves on some level as “surfers”. It’s ahead of many other sports that you might call “recreational” – that is, not requiring some sort of field, court, coach or referee – though it does seem to be nudged by fishing (just over 247,000).

And it doesn’t cover a critical group: the kids under 15, the targets of Surfing Australia’s Vegemite SurfGroms program. If the sport’s gonna grow again, that’s where the real numbers will come from.

But it does make you wonder how many surfers there really are in the world. 23 million? If only 226,000 of ‘em are from Australia, where do the other 22.74 million live? Russia?

Regarding the WCT, no doubt the ASP will set us all straight at some point with a blizzard of information drawn from their own data banks. It’ll be detailed and bloody accurate, and it’ll probably show us that a shitload more than 40,000 people watched Bells.

But I bet it doesn’t say anything about 23 million.