Women surfers to take part in America's most dangerous big-wave contest for the first time

The window for the Titans of Mavericks event in California opens this week, with six female surfers set to compete

Swells at the Mavericks surf break near San Francisco often rise as high as 60 feet ((Getty Images))

Women are set to compete in America’s most prestigious – and dangerous – “big-wave” surfing competition for the very first time, after organisers of the Titans of Mavericks agreed to introduce a heat for six female surfers at the event in California.

Titans takes place at the Mavericks surf break, half a mile offshore in Half Moon Bay near San Francisco, a spot known as one of the world’s most perilous breaks, where at least two surfers have been killed in the past quarter-century amid vast swells that can rise to 60 feet.

The window for the one-day contest, which has been held nine times since 1998, runs from this Tuesday to 31 March 2017. The competitors are given 24 hours’ notice to take part as soon as the optimum surfing conditions occur.

In the past, the invitation-only event has featured 24 male surfers, but Cartel, the management company that organises Titans, announced last week that the 2016-17 competition would include a one-hour women’s heat with $30,000 in prize money up for grabs.

“This is a great step forward for our sport, women’s athletics and women,” Bianca Valenti, the co-founder of the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing, told the Los Angeles Times, adding: “It’s about human rights.”

The decision to include women in the contest came only after Valenti’s organization lobbied the California Coastal Commission, which provides the permits for Titans to use the Mavericks break in the first place.

When the Commission granted Cartel a one-year permit in 2015, the paperwork stipulated that the organisation must “submit a plan for the inclusion of women surfers as competitors in future Mavericks surf events.”

After agreeing to another one-year permit this year, Commissioner Mark Vargas called the heat “a historic milestone”, but insisted more must be done to include female athletes. “While it’s great that we have a heat, that’s not a plan,” he said.

Among the six surfers selected to take part in the heat are Sarah Gerhardht, who was the first woman to ride Mavericks on a surfboard in 1999. Ms Valenti, also an experienced big-wave surfer, has been picked as an alternate, should one of the six drop out.