Surfing Trivia
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49 free Surfing trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
40 free Surfing trivia questions with answers. Surfing has 3,000 years of history behind it, from Peruvian fishermen on reed boats to Sebastian Steudtner's 86-foot ride at Nazaré. This quiz paddles through the whole story: the Polynesian roots, Captain Cook's crew writing the first accounts, Jack London at Waikiki, Duke Kahanamoku's Olympic golds and his 1914 demonstration in Australia, Tom Blake's first fin, the wetsuit and the thruster, Kelly Slater's eleven world titles, Stephanie Gilmore and Layne Beachley, Bethany Hamilton's comeback, tow-in surfing at Jaws, Pipeline, Mavericks and Teahupo'o, and surfing's arrival at the Tokyo and Tahiti Olympics. Pop culture gets a set too: Gidget, The Endless Summer, the Beach Boys and Point Break. Easy questions ask which state modern surfing comes from and how many world titles Kelly Slater has; the hard ones want the dog Mavericks is named after, the year the wetsuit was invented and the meaning of Teahupo'o. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the sport, its surfers, its breaks and its films, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do surfers rub onto the deck of a surfboard to stop their feet slipping?
Wax
Wax is credited to Al Gallant, a California teenager who in 1935 noticed his feet sticking to his mother's freshly waxed floor and took her bottle of floor wax to the beach.
Q 02Fishermen in which country still ride waves ashore on reed boats called caballitos de totora?
Peru
Peru's north-coast fishermen sit astride the bundled reeds like riders, hence the name 'little reed horses'; Moche and Chimú pottery shows the same boats centuries before the Incas.
Q 03The first written descriptions of Hawaiian surfing come from the 1779 journals of which explorer's final voyage?
James Cook
James Cook's officers wrote them at Kealakekua Bay within weeks of his death there: ship's surgeon David Samwell and Lieutenant James King both described islanders riding planks on the swell.
Q 04Which author tried surfing at Waikiki and wrote about it in the 1907 essay 'A Royal Sport'?
Jack London
Jack London stayed out four hours on his second day and burned the backs of his legs so badly that he could not walk; he wrote the essay in bed.
Q 05In which sport did Duke Kahanamoku win his Olympic gold medals?
Swimming
Swimming made his name in 1911, when he beat the 100-yard world record by 4.6 seconds in Honolulu Harbor; disbelieving officials refused to recognise the time for years.
Q 06Which 'King of the Surf Guitar', a keen surfer himself, recorded the Misirlou heard over Pulp Fiction's opening credits?
Dick Dale
Dick Dale played so loud for his crowds of surfers that he kept blowing up amplifiers, so Leo Fender worked with him to build tougher, far louder ones.
Q 07Off which California town did Duke Kahanamoku rescue eight fishermen from a capsized boat in 1925, paddling out on his surfboard?
Newport Beach
Newport Beach, 1925: he paddled out again and again to the capsized Thelma and brought in eight men, and the rescue led lifeguards across the US to adopt surfboards as standard equipment.
Q 08Who is credited with first adding a fin to a surfboard, in 1935?
Tom Blake
Tom Blake took the keel off an abandoned speedboat in Waikiki and fixed it under his board; the wide-tailed boards of the day slid or spun out on steep waves, and the keel held the tail steady.
Q 09Which Australian shaper added a third fin to the twin-fin surfboard in 1980, a design now standard on shortboards?
Simon Anderson
Simon Anderson won two of 1981's biggest contests on his prototype yet never patented it, saying plenty of other shapers were working toward the same idea.
Q 10The wetsuit that opened cold-water surfing was invented in the early 1950s by a physicist whose wartime work was on what?
The Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project's Hugh Bradner designed it at Berkeley with Navy frogmen in mind, never patented it and saw his own wetsuit venture founder, while two California surf firms built an industry on the wetsuit.
Q 11Eleven-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater had a recurring acting role in which TV series in the early 1990s?
Baywatch
Baywatch cast him as Jimmy Slade, a part he says his mother and manager pushed on him; embarrassed, he resolved to win that year's world title to keep his credibility, and did.
Q 12Kelly Slater grew up in which Florida surf town just south of Cape Canaveral?
Cocoa Beach
Cocoa Beach put up a bronze statue of its hometown hero, though not by the sea: he stands on a highway median where the A1A splits, and fans have to cross traffic to reach him.
Q 13Which surfwear brand, its logo drawn from Hokusai's Great Wave, sponsored Kelly Slater from 1990 to 2014?
Quiksilver
Q 21Which German surfer set the Guinness record for the largest wave ever surfed, 86 feet at Nazaré in October 2020?
Sebastian Steudtner
Sebastian Steudtner grew up in Nuremberg, about as far from surf as Germany gets, and left for Hawaii as a teenager to chase big waves.
Q 22What underwater feature makes the waves at Nazaré so enormous?
A submarine canyon
A submarine canyon, Europe's largest at about 230 km long and up to 5 km deep, runs almost to the beach and funnels Atlantic swell onto one short stretch of sand.
Q 23Which Brazilian set the women's big-wave record of 73 feet at Nazaré in 2020?
Maya Gabeira
Quiksilver backed him for 23 years; he left to start the clothing label Outerknown with Kering, the Paris group behind Gucci, which also owned rival surf brand Volcom.
Q 14Which Australian won a record eighth women's world surfing title in 2022?
Stephanie Gilmore
Stephanie Gilmore did it the hard way: seeded fifth and last for finals day, she won five heats in a row, then said she had wanted to prove a surfer could come from the bottom and win.
Q 15Which Australian won six consecutive world surfing titles from 1998 to 2003, a run no other surfer, male or female, has matched?
Layne Beachley
Layne Beachley, born Tania Gardner, learned at eight that she was adopted, and threw herself into surfing to prove her worth; a seventh title followed in 2006.
Q 16Which 18-year-old Californian took Carissa Moore's record as the pro tour's youngest world champion in 2024, by six days?
Caitlin Simmers
Caitlin Simmers was 18 years and 316 days old, Moore 18 years and 322 back in 2011; Simmers even lost the opening heat of the title decider before winning the next two.
Q 17Who won the first-ever Olympic gold medals in surfing at Tokyo 2020?
Ítalo Ferreira and Carissa Moore
Ítalo Ferreira and Carissa Moore took the golds; Ferreira's board snapped minutes into his final, he swapped it and still won, years after first riding waves on the lid of his father's fish cooler.
Q 18Which spot on the Pacific coast east of Tokyo hosted surfing's Olympic debut at the 2020 Games?
Tsurigasaki Beach, Chiba
Tsurigasaki Beach, Chiba was expected to serve up knee-high summer waves; instead Tropical Storm Nepartak sent in a swell, and organisers moved the finals forward a day to catch it.
Q 19Paris 2024's surfing was held at Teahupo'o in Tahiti, roughly how far from Paris?
15,000 km
About 15,000 km: organisers passed over four beaches in mainland France for Tahiti's reef wave, and the surfers slept aboard the Aranui 5, a cruise ship turned athletes' village.
Q 20The name Teahupo'o loosely translates as what?
'Place of skulls'
'Place of skulls' is the popular gloss; other readings give a heap of heads or a wall of skulls, and the name is said to recall a battle fought in the village long before anyone rode the reef.
Maya Gabeira nearly died at the same break in 2013: knocked unconscious with a broken leg, she was brought ashore and revived by CPR, then needed back operations before she could return.
Q 24Which technique did Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox and Darrick Doerner pioneer in 1992 on Hawaii's big winter waves?
Tow-in surfing
Tow-in surfing began that winter with the trio dragging one another into big Hawaiian waves on a rope behind a Zodiac inflatable boat; jet skis replaced the boat later.
Q 25The Banzai Pipeline breaks off which Hawaiian island?
Oahu
Oahu's North Shore break got its name in December 1961, when a visiting board shaper saw pipes being laid beside the Kamehameha Highway and thought the hollow waves looked just like them.
Q 26What is the name of the famous right-hander that peels away opposite Pipeline on a north swell?
Backdoor
Backdoor shares its peak with Pipeline over the same shallow reef, so one surfer can pull in left at Pipe while another takes the very same wave right.
Q 27Mavericks in California is named after what?
A German shepherd dog
A German shepherd dog called Maverick kept following the surfers who first tried the spot in 1967 into the water, so they tied him to their car on shore and named the break for him.
Q 28Which Hawaiian big-wave legend died surfing Mavericks in December 1994?
Mark Foo
Mark Foo had flown in overnight for the swell and fell on a wave far smaller than many he had ridden; he was found over two hours later, still leashed to a piece of his board.
Q 29Eddie Aikau, namesake of 'The Eddie' big-wave contest, was the first lifeguard at which bay?
Waimea Bay
Waimea Bay lost not one swimmer on his watch, through more than 500 rescues in surf that drove everyone else off the beach; the slogan 'Eddie Would Go' remembers him.
Q 30Which 2011 film tells the story of Bethany Hamilton, who lost an arm to a tiger shark at 13 and kept competing?
Soul Surfer
Soul Surfer has Hamilton herself doing the stunt surfing for the scenes set after the attack, while AnnaSophia Robb's left arm was digitally erased from some 450 shots.