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Welcome to the 25th Edition of The Bodyboard Report! 🤙

Sintra wrapped up on Sunday with 30 editions in the history books, 2 champions crowned, and arguably one of the most unique semis in the history of any sport.

Before anyone had time to unpack a boardbag, the entire women's world title show jumped the pond to a Brazilian fishing village this morning.

There's also a Portuguese company arguing that the stringer, the most basic piece of engineering in your board, has been the wrong answer for decades.

Busy bees everywhere! 👇

The first proper world tour was set up by the GOB in 1994. The IBA took over in 2003. The APB arrived in 2014. The IBC has been running things since 2020.

4 organizations in 32 years… Call it 8 years each.

Now count the Sintra Pro… Celebrating 30 years at the same beach and still going. What I find interesting is that Sintra didn't survive because the world tour protected it.

It survived because it didn't really need the world tour. A local association and a town council kept putting the thing on. Year after year. Tour or no tour. Governing body or no governing body.

While the organizations above them changed names, structures and logos, Sintra just kept blowing the horn, and this week we get another pretty good example of that tenacity.

The event that starts today (Thursday) that will crown the 2026 women's world champion wasn't created by a governing body either. It was created by a charity.

Neymara Carvalho started the Instituto Neymara Carvalho in 2005 in Barra do Jucu, Vila Velha, putting bodyboards into the hands of kids who couldn't afford them.

Not a clever sponsorship activation or a brand campaign, but a real community project, in her own backyard. Then, in 2021, the institute started an event called the Wahine Bodyboarding Pro.

A year later, it became an official world tour stop, and in 2023 it was voted the best event on the calendar. Once more in 2024! That’s pretty awesome, if you ask me.

This year a whopping $45,000 in prize money and the women's world title on the line. Things are certainly on the up and up.

A community charity created by a rider has, in 5 years, built one of the most important events in the sport. The Wahine isn't just another contest with a gazebo and a few flags. It has divisions you don't see anywhere else in wave riding. ParaAthletes for amputees, mastectomy and visually impaired riders. Even a Mothers & Daughters division.

And then there's Neymara herself… Last year, still wrecked after her own quarterfinal, this iron lady got out of the water without any rust and went straight into a beach cleanup at Solemar.

If you want to know the makings of a true champion in the water and in life, this is it. She organizes the event. She competes in the event. And then she's picking rubbish up off the beach.

There's a “problem” hiding in all of this greatness. These stories are inspiring. They're also telling us something we probably shouldn't ignore. Some of the most important events in professional bodyboarding exist because someone cared enough to keep doing them, and that is as admirable as it is necessary.

But it's not much of a “secure” business model…

What happens when the person who built it eventually retires? What happens when a town council changes or politics get in the way? What happens when budgets move somewhere else? What happens when the next person simply doesn't have the passion, energy, or time? Never mind the resources… 🤔

We have some remarkably durable events. We don't necessarily have equally durable institutions underneath them. And then there's one other sentence we probably shouldn't avoid. The event deciding this year's women's world title is organized by the mom of the rider who won it last year, and who is still hanging on by a thin thread to be crowned world champ. (more details to follow…)

Of course the IBC judges the heats, but put that story into tennis, golf or Formula 1 and somebody would probably be booking a governance meeting before lunch.

Why doesn't it raise the same eyebrows here? I think because everybody knows the other side of the equation. Without Neymara, there might not be a Wahine. I think the answer to the longevity and prosperity of our sport on the world stage is to build something underneath these events.

Something that can outlive the founder. Something that gives the next Neymara a succession plan. Something that means a local association doesn't have to carry an entire international event forever. What that is, I’m not sure…

But, strong foundations, passion, and things like this are a great start! 👇

Praia Grande turned it on for the last day. Proper waves, and 2 winners nobody could have written better. Start with the men, because Pierre Louis Costes has now won the Sintra Pro 6 times.

The quarterfinal against Brazil's Eder Luciano was the closest he came to losing it. He shut the heat down with a 7.25 invert for a 14.25 total against 13.60. Then he took out 2024 world champ Armide Soliveres in the semi, and reigning world champ Uri Valadão in the final.

Which is a story on its own. Valadão is a 4 x Sintra winner himself. On the event's 30th birthday, the final was a battle between 2 of the most successful riders in its entire history. Then PLC got on the mic.

Pierre is of course French, but he's lived in Portugal for around 15 years, married there, had a son there. He talked about arriving at Praia Grande as a kid and being shocked by the level. He talked about his first podium here in 2008, the year Ben Player and Manuel Centeno made the final.

And then he talked about 2012. The only event his late mother ever watched him win. The first and last time.

"This victory is for Portugal, it's a Portuguese victory," he said.

PLC now holds 62 career podiums. He tied Guilherme Tamega, broke the record in the Maldives, and has just gone and added another. The undisputed heavyweight podium champion of the world! 💪

Now the women's draw, which produced something I don't think bodyboarding, or any other sport for that matter, has ever produced. Semifinal 2 at a Prime Series event:

Neymara Carvalho, 50 years old, 5 x world champion, against Luna Hardman, 20 years old, 2 x pro junior world champion. Mother against daughter for a place in the final.

Luna won! Then she lost the final to Japan's Namika Yamashita by 0.75 of a point. 13.85 to 13.10. The Japanese rider is hot off her win in the Maldives, and she now needs about as much to seal the world title as Tristan Roberts does. Which is to say, almost nothing. Both of them pretty much just have to show up. 👀

The podiums 👇

🏆 Men
🥇 Pierre Louis Costes 🇫🇷
🥈 Uri Valadão 🇧🇷
🥉 Armide Soliveres 🇪🇸 and Francisco Ferreira 🇵🇹

🏆 Women
🥇 Namika Yamashita 🇯🇵
🥈 Luna Hardman 🇧🇷
🥉 Yuka Nishimura 🇯🇵 and Neymara Carvalho 🇧🇷

Portugal's best day in years, by the way. Francisco Ferreira's 3rd is his career best on the world tour, and both Luana Dourado and Filipa Broeiro made 5th. Francisco and Luana both walked away with special trophies from the organizers.

👉 Finals Day Highlights on IBC YouTube

Today the best women in the world paddle out at Praia do Solemar in Jacaraípe, a fishing town in the municipality of Serra, about 25 km from Vitória airport in Espírito Santo, Brazil.

The ArcelorMittal Wahine Bodyboarding Pro runs from today, the 10th, to 20 September. When it's over, the sport has a new world champion.

As noted before, $45,000 is on the table. This is the 5th edition. Titles decided in Professional, Pro Junior and Master. The math is brutal and simple! 👇

Namika Yamashita is top of the leaderboard after winning the Maldives and Sintra. She needs a 5th place in Brazil, and the world title is hers.

Whats Japanese for Dip a toe..? 🤔

Luna Hardman sits 2nd after her Miss Quebramar win. She needs to win the event outright, and she needs Namika to finish 9th or worse.

Behind them, Neymara sits in 4th, level with Filipa Broeiro.

2024 world champ Maíra Viana comes in at 6th place.

4 of the world's top 10 women come from one Brazilian state.

I said it before…

Something in the water down there... 🤔

👉 @wahinebbpro

👉 Finals Day 2025 Highlights

Diving back into our custom boards and technology journey that started with 👇

Let's talk about the inside of our boards. For decades the answer to "how do we stop a bodyboard folding in half" has been the stringer. A rod of carbon or fiberglass, buried down the middle of the core. Stiffness in a straight line. Cheap, proven, and honestly a bit crude and basic, when you explore it properly.

A Portuguese outfit called PTworks decided to throw it out entirely. Their brand is Hexaboards, and their tagline is "no stringers, no limits". Instead of a rod, they run an internal honeycomb lattice made from 2 different composite materials through the core like a skeleton. They call it Hexaflex. 👇

A stringer concentrates load. Every bottom turn, every landing, every close out that arrives on your ribs travels through one line down the middle of the board. Which is exactly why boards crease alongside the stringer, and why a snapped stringer usually means a dead board.

A hexagonal lattice does the opposite. Force applied at any single point gets pushed sideways through the whole structure instead of being carried by one member. Hexagons tile with zero gaps, and every wall is shared by 2 cells, so you get an enormous amount of structure out of very little material.

That isn't marketing. That's why aircraft floors, F1 crash structures and satellite panels are full of honeycomb cores. And now the rabbit hole...

In 36 BC, a Roman scholar named Marcus Terentius Varro looked at a beehive and made a guess. He reckoned the hexagon is the most efficient way to divide a surface into equal areas using the least total wall.

Nobody could prove it. Not for just over 2,000 years. The proof finally landed in 1999, from an American mathematician called Thomas Hales. So when Hexaboards tell you the honeycomb is the optimal internal structure, they're standing on a Roman's hunch that took 2 millennia to confirm. I love that.

What it's meant to do in the water: 3 things, according to the brand. More usable flex, because a lattice bends more naturally than a rigid rod. Faster recoil, so the board snaps back to shape quicker and hands that energy back to you off the bottom. And better impact resistance, because the load spreads instead of concentrating.

Isabela Sousa, 5 x world champion, joined their team in January. She calls Hexaflex "the future", and says the impact protection has given her extra confidence this season. Hexaboards were also on the sponsor board at Sintra last week, which is a decent signal for a company that only hit the global market in 2023.

Everything above is the manufacturer's claim. I went looking for independent flex or recoil testing on bodyboards and found nothing. Not from Hexaboards, not from the stringer brands, not from anyone. The whole industry runs on rider feel and marketing copy, and that's worth saying out loud.

One of the ultimate no bullshit Hexaboards test pilots?

👉 Josh Gardner at Mandurah Wedge

Then… there's also a real question for the custom crowd.

A stringer is a tuning knob. Single or double, carbon or glass, full length or partial, placed to suit a rider's weight and the waves they ride. Even adapt to conditions and the water temperature, like a golfer with a bag of clubs, with the ISS system.

Choice and adjustability is a big part of what a custom board actually is. I personally have 3 x carbon stringers in my 60 mm thick custom Rossi Board by Marc Rossouw.

A built in lattice is a system, not a knob. It might well be a better system. But it's the same system for everybody.

For most riders buying production boards, that's likely an upgrade. For the custom world we've been digging into, it's an unfortunate, perhaps even a sad trade off.

👉 Hexaflex vs stringer, in their own words

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