For decades, competitive surfing lacked the type of mature data infrastructure that powers modern sports broadcasting. While the other professional sports leagues can track every player’s movement in the contained environment of a stadium, surfing presented unique obstacles. “We had a lot of data that we were looking to leverage,” said Kyle Keough, Manager of AI for North America at AllCloud, AWS Partner and leader of the team that worked on the project with World Surf League. “They just didn’t have the means to be able to do it in a streamlined way.”

To build a solution, the team had to consider these challenges:

• No controlled environment: Competitions happen across different countries, in variable weather, hundreds of yards offshore.
• Infrastructure limitations: No stadiums, no Wi-Fi networks, no ceiling-mounted cameras in the wide-open ocean.
• Data gaps: Historical data from past competitions was only digitally available back to 2008, with decades of competition stats sitting in physical boxes on paper. Data from multiple sources stored is disparate locations, and unable to be correlated.

“These competitions are in really challenging conditions from a broadcast and data perspective,” explained Robert Occhialini, CTO of World Surf League. “We often don’t have a wireless network to leverage. We can’t put up missile tracking cameras on the ceiling. We have to build something on the spot at every event that we can repeatedly collect data on.”

Adding to the complications: water disrupts wireless signals, and competitive surfing is literally made up of walls of moving water.

The breakthrough came from an unexpected source: Apple Watches. Originally deployed to give surfers a small scoreboard on their wrist while competing offshore, the World Surf League realized these wearables could do much more. By collecting data from the watches through AWS infrastructure and combining it with wave data, weather conditions, and historical records, they could build the comprehensive analytics platform surfing had never had.

Here’s how it works:

• Data collection: Surfers wear Apple Watches that capture biometric data (heart rate, respiratory rate), telemetry, and GPS location—approximately 100 data points per second while they’re on the water.
• Real-time processing: Using Amazon Kinesis, data streams from the wearables to AWS Cloud infrastructure. After each heat, log files are pushed to Amazon S3 buckets, processed through sophisticated software that includes anomaly detection, and written to Amazon Timestream for time-series storage.
• Data transformation: AWS Glue transforms and combines wearable data with judging data, wave characteristics, and weather conditions. Everything consolidates in an Amazon Redshift data warehouse, modeled specifically for easy retrieval by running queries using the query editor on the Amazon Redshift console.
• AI-powered insights: Amazon Bedrock enables commentators to query the structured data using natural language. Instead of needing technical expertise, they simply type questions like, “What was the fastest wave speed today?” and get instant, accurate answers grounded in the data.

“By pulling all this data into a unified store, it really just makes everything possible from here on out,” said Keough. The system now captures insights on speed (miles per hour while surfing), wave duration and distance, heart rate and biometric data, GPS positioning and wave selection, and approximately 30 data points per wave across approximately 100,000 waves per season.

Said Keough. “Within a couple of seconds, [commentators] will have the insights they’re asking for, framed in a way that’s easy to then produce a narrative around.”

For the World Surf League, partnering with AllCloud proved essential. “They really tried to understand what we wanted to do, and they also really tried to add their own value to it,” said Occhialini. “As a leaner, focused team, we don’t have a wide breadth of expertise with all the core AWS technologies that they do.”

The impact goes far beyond just having more statistics. The World Surf League will fundamentally change how fans experience competitive surfing while staying true to the sport’s culture.

Commentators will soon be able to share more real-time, data-led insights during the natural lulls in competition, when surfers are waiting for the right wave. “The ability to pull in these narratives that are built on the data we’re collecting is going to allow them a lot more grist for that particular mill,” said Occhialini.

Surfers can analyze their performance with unprecedented detail, understanding how factors like wave selection, speed, and even heart rate correlate with their scores. “As soon as you can convince them that it’s going to help them improve their performance, they will be a convert,” noted Occhialini.

Viewers will get insights they could never see with the naked eye—like the fact that high-9 scoring waves can happen in both 10-second and 72-second durations, or that some surfers consistently take off from different positions than their competitors.

Looking ahead, the World Surf League plans to leverage computer vision and expand their historical data archive, including digitizing records going back to the 1970s using generative AI for data ingestion. The infrastructure is built to scale as the sport evolves.

“I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what can be done with the collection of scientific data about surfing,” said Occhialini. “I am optimistic that data is going to transform the fan experience of surfing, but also athletic performance.”

Perhaps most importantly, the World Surf League found a way to honor the sport’s culture while bringing it into the data age. “We wanted to frame it in a way where they’re getting these insights—especially from the viewer standpoint—more as a story from the commentator rather than flashing a bunch of fancy visualizations,” explained Keough. “How can the commentator take all this information and through generative AI, form it into a story that is impactful for an end user and doesn’t feel like crunching numbers?”

For a sport defined by its connection to nature and freedom, that balance matters. As they prepare for the 50th anniversary of the World Tour in 2026, the World Surf League is proving that even the most unpredictable sports can harness the power of cloud and AI.

You can watch the world’s best surfing and follow the World Surf League’s journey at WorldSurfLeague.com.