It was the surfing trick that broke the internet. A year ago, Australian teenage surf prodigy Hughie Vaughan landed a never-before attempted air at a wave pool in Texas. The praise came quickly. “Insane,” said former world champion Italo Ferreira. “Is this AI?” asked American DJ Diplo. Within hours, the performance was being hailed as the best air ever landed in a pool.
Vaughan’s aerial manoeuvres happen so fast they can be difficult to fully comprehend, even for the likes of surf legend Mick Fanning. “Had to watch it 50 times just to figure out what happened,” he commented at the time.
In a move that skate icon Tony Hawk later named the “stalefish flipper”, Vaughan launched himself into the air and spun a backflip with one-hand on his board before riding out smoothly. Remarkably, Vaughan did not even make a claim – the sometimes-controversial habit of surfers celebrating a wave. Instead, he paddled out and looked at his surfboard. “Fuck yeah,” he exclaimed.
For committed fans, Vaughan’s performance was not unexpected. Barely a month earlier, the Australian had won Stab High, the world’s foremost aerial surfing competition. Vaughan’s older brother Joel competes on the World Surf League (WSL); the Vaughan brothers’ potential has long been known.
But Vaughan’s one-handed backflip sent him mainstream. The clip has been watched 2 million times; Vaughan was suddenly doing interviews on breakfast television and collecting major sponsors.
“It was a pretty crazy moment,” he says, a year on. “Everything happening all at once.” What made Vaughan’s stalefish flipper all the more remarkable was that it came together unplanned. “When I went over there they were asking me if I had any tricks I wanted to try,” he recalls. “I didn’t even think about anything.” But in the pool, Vaughan had an idea: “It took me 10 or so tries, and then I got it.”
Turns and barrels have long been central to surfing. But it was only in the 1980s that the early pioneers of aerial surfing began to go above the wave’s lip. At first, these tricks received hostility rather than encouragement in regular competition, prompting the establishment of breakaway aerial contests called Airshows.
In the 2000s, though, airs became more commonplace on the WSL. A decade later, changes to judging criteria and the arrival of a generation of talented Brazilian surfers transformed aerial surfing into the new normal. Today it is a rare for a WSL event to go by without a surfer taking to the sky.
But the recent proliferation of wave pools has seen aerial surfing go to new heights. With surfers now able to practise on reliable, repeatable waves, tricks that would have once been unimaginable are now entirely conventional.
Enter Vaughan. Growing up on the Central Coast, in the same town as the reigning women’s world champion, Molly Picklum, Vaughan has been surfing for as long as he can remember. “I’ve always been a surfer,” he says. With three older brothers, there was not much choice. “If I didn’t surf, I was left out.”
Barely out of high school, the Australian has now emerged as the undisputed king of aerial surfing. Vaughan won Stab High at a wave pool in Japan last May; his brother Joel won the equivalent event in Sydney a few months later.
The latest Stab High was held in the US in May. In the final, Vaughan landed an upside-down stalefish on the lefthand wave. A perfect score had never been awarded at Stab High, but any other surfer would have been given a flawless mark for such a move. Not Vaughan. The judges knew he had more to give, awarding 49/50.
Moments later, on the righthand wave, the Australian nailed a similar move to his air that had broken the internet, landing a massive lien flip. Vaughan forced the panel’s hand – they could hold back no longer. He was awarded the first perfect 50. “That was the second one I’ve ever landed,” he says. “It’s probably the best air I’ve ever done.”
Talking through exactly what happens in such a rapid sequence, even Vaughan struggles to put the gravity-defying trick into words. “It’s really about connection in the wave pool,” he says. “I wanted to time the section good, go high enough to do that trick, and then land and ride it out.”
Beyond Vaughan’s aerial repertoire, at successive Stab High events he has also shown remarkable poise. Even on the blank canvas of a pool, minor variations in the wave or the wind can influence the ability of a surfer to land an air. But in the moments that matter, Vaughan has repeatedly gone high and ridden out. “Everyone is human,” he says. “You just have to keep yourself level-headed as much as you can.”
Vaughan’s preternatural composure suggests a promising competitive future. But the surfer himself is less sure. A decade ago, surfers like him would be on the fast track to the WSL. Now, Vaughan admits to being uncertain about his next steps (promising aerialist Milla Brown is in a similar position).
Even at the highest level, competitive surfing means grinding out results in hit-and-miss conditions. Vaughan gets to chase swells instead; when speaking to the Guardian at the UrbnSurf wave pool in Sydney, he has just returned from a trip to Chile, and is off to Indonesia next.
“When I was younger I always wanted to be on the world tour,” he says. “I looked up to Mick Fanning, Kelly [Slater], John John [Florence]. It was definitely where I wanted to be. But it’s too much fun doing what I’m doing right now.” Vaughan does not rule out a WSL stint, though. “It’s just a matter of when,” he says.
While wave pool competitions and aerial surfing have created a distinct sub-genre of the sport, the ocean remains king. During Stab High, the broadcasters had Vaughan’s father on FaceTime from New Zealand, where he was supporting Joel at a WSL event. Told that his younger son had just made history with a perfect 50, Ian Vaughan chuckled. “Doesn’t count though, it’s in the pool,” he said.
“It’s a bit of a running joke in the family,” Hughie Vaughan says. “But yeah ocean is definitely number one.”
Pulling off Vaughan’s signature aerial moves in the less-controlled environment of the ocean adds another layer of difficult; doing it in the WSL, with a world title on the line, would be even harder. But having broken the internet and asserted his aerial dominance on the world of surfing before even turning 20, there is no doubt that Vaughan has a lofty future ahead – whatever the wave type. “The ocean is where it’s always going to be at,” he says.
