Stab High makes its China debut at Riyue Bay in Wanning on 11 November, with Olympic skateboard medallist Sky Brown among the competitors. The four-day programme begins with domestic qualifying and a warm-up day before the main aerial competition on 13–14 November.
Some of the world’s best aerial surfers will spend four days flying above a Chinese wave pool from Wednesday 11 November.
The stop was agreed on 10 September, when Stab LLC, the Australian surf media and events company, signed an event cooperation agreement, the Wanning tourism bureau.
The China edition runs entirely in the wave pool, starts and finishes on a fixed schedule and scores only aerials: each rider’s best single air decides the result. The first edition was held at Waco, Texas, in 2018, with 16 competitors. Later stops ran in Indonesia, Central America, Japan, Sydney and Virginia Beach, Stab says on its event page. The 2020 to 2022 editions were filmed in the ocean; the contest returned to wave pools in 2024.
Stab’s event page advertises 56 places across four divisions for the China stop: 36 pro men, four pro women, eight under-15 girls and eight under-15 boys. The published roster named 50 riders as of 8 November, including Eithan Osborne, Hughie Vaughan, Julian Wilson and Koa Smith. The women’s roster already lists five names, one more than the advertised places.
The five include Sky Brown, the British-Japanese skateboarder who won Olympic bronze in Tokyo and Paris. She took the Stab High women’s title at Virginia Beach in May, the organiser’s past-winners list shows.
The Wanning bureau set 11 November as a domestic qualifying day for Chinese surfers, and 12 November as a warm-up. At the September announcement, the bureau said it expected more than 100 surfers across the four days. Qualifying runs on Friday 13 November, 8am to 4pm local time. The finals follow on Saturday 14 November, 8am to 2pm. Both days stream live on Stab Premium, the company’s subscription service.
The venue is the CTG Zhulang resort (中旅逐浪度假区, roughly “chase the waves”), known in English as Riyue Bay Surf Resort. It opened on 11 November 2025, so the contest headlines its first-anniversary week.
The pool, built by American Wave Machines of California, produces waves close to 2.7 metres high. That is nearly the height of a basketball hoop. The resort had taken about 338,000 visits by 7 October. Visitors from outside mainland China accounted for about 15 per cent of visits in 2026, the resort’s project head told People’s Daily.
China already counts more than one million surfing and paddle-boarding consumers, the China Daily report said. Industry organisations forecast that the country’s core surfing population could reach three million by 2030.
Related article: China’s First Olympic-Standard Wave Pool Opens in Wanning, Hainan
