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The operations are higher and the competition is more difficult in Surf Girls: InternationalA new Docuseries that is now streamed on Prime video. While Eweleula Wong is a remnant from 2023 Surf Girls: Hawai'iThe new season will also profile surfers from Brazil, Portugal, South Africa and Peru. And no matter where they come from, each of these young women hits the waves with a goal: a coveted place on the 2025 championship tour of the World Surf League. Executive produces by Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Rea near Hello Sunshine, in collaboration with the women's sports media company Tagethxr, all five episodes of Surf Girls: International Beat the Prime immediately.

Opening shot: “I love surfing,” says Eweleula Wong, 19, about action recordings of her on a wave. “It's my life and it's my favorite thing in the world.”

The Gist: Surfing for the first time at the Tokyo Games in 2020 became an Olympic event, and the World Surf League has increased its profile from year to year since the Pro-Level competition has standardized. But for someone like Ewe Wong, who grew up in Oahu, Hawaii, it is a challenge to bring their talents from free surfing to the points and ranking systems of competitive surfing. “I felt good at my surfing,” says Wong about the first two stops in the Challenger series of the WSL. “But the results were not the best and they can only drop two events.”

Episodes of Surf Girls: International The Challenger series follows when you travel from two opening data in Australia to Ballito, South Africa, Huntington Beach in California, for the US Open and further to Ericeira, Portugal and the final in Sazquarema, Brazil. And while everyone who is professionally classified in the documents of professional surfers, none is in the top level of sport. As 22-year-old Jessie van Niekerk from South Africa says, “they lose more than they win.” The challenge is to compensate for skills sets with the mental piece and be ready when the right wave hits.

For this season of Surf girlWong and van Niekerk are also accompanied by Sophia Medina (19), whose older brother Gabriel is a three-goal world champion. (Sophia is a legacy: “I just want to write my own story.”) The 21-year-old Francisca “Kika” Veselko from Portugal won a title at the Women's World Juniors. And sol aguirre, 21, joins Surf girl After taking part in the Olympic Games around Peru.

The pressure is pretty crazy when Ballito's preliminary runs begin. As Wong says, only the four best results of the six stops at Challenger are counted, and in the previous rounds the numbers were not friendly to the surfers. While we catch the competition at Ballito with Surf-Jargon-Audio from WSL announcers on site-“Sophia Medina will simply climb into the lip and turn this score card”-it is clear how difficult the women are profiling. But it is also clear how important these competitions are for their professional development. Who has what it takes to be best when it is most important?

What shows do you remind you of? The Emmy winner 100 foot waveWhich recently brought his third season into the pipe, despite the risks of life and limb, takes deeper stitches in philosophy and all-in nature of surfing. And we thought The ultimate surfer Was pretty cool with his tailor-made wave pool competition, reality styles and the participation of Pro Surfen All-Timer Kelly Slater, but it only took one season. Watch out Surf Girls: International We also compared it to the latest Hulu documentaries Not your first rodeowho profiled a group of women professional bulliders. Whether for the competition on a board or on a bull, some of your sports -specific lateral movement movements look the same!

Our attitude: The processing and the pace are a little chopped off at the beginning Surf Girls: International -Id repeated basic facts about the people profiled by profile, feels staged in certain sections outside of the wave and really exaggerates with the associated music, which in these reality lifestyle evenings with “vague-empowering pop song, which mainly sounds like an A-List artist”. But this stuff can even come out in the course of the series, and we really like the energy and thoughtfulness of Ewefeiula Wong, Sophia Medina and Jessie van Niekerk when they describe their trips to Challenger and the WSL. Surfing looks both lighter and ridiculously difficult for us, so it is cool to hear the perspective of people who are great in it. It is a discipline. We are also interested in this shear panel between free surfing and the structured requirements of the World Surf League competition, and where the profiles of the people are on the international card as a stops for Challenger.

Sex and skin: None. The look here are either neoprene suits and sun houses in the water or in the hoodies and the Brand -t shirts in the sand.

Farewell shot: “Everything in surfing is such a fine line,” says Jessie van Niekerk about scenes from upcoming episodes. “How to rethink, be instinctive. But then you also have to be focused and use your brain.”

Sleeper Star: Like the lonely transmission of Surf Girls: Hawai'iEwe Wong's story is the one we know best and we like how open it is, where she is a professional surfer in her development. “I get performance fear when I follow values,” says Wong. “Surfing is such an individual sport that every decision you make with a lot of pressure. If I have a future in professional surfing, I have to overcome this fear. The biggest challenge with which I stand this year is to get out of my own head.”

Most pilot line: Through Surf Girls: InternationalWong also speaks ōlelo Hawai'i, the endangered mother tongue of the Hawaiian people. “As a Hawaiian, it is part of my identity. I pursue surfing as a cultural practice. My goal is to do the world tour and also represent Hawaii.”

Our call: Stream it. Surf Girls: International carry out Surf Girls: Hawai'i With new faces and a variety of new professional pressure. Surfing already looked crazy. Add the demands to make it a career and the rising waves became more real.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a writer based in Chicago. As the veteran of alternative weekly trenches, his work also performed in Entertainment Weekly, PitchFork, The All Music Guide and The Village Voice.