Ten Nominations, One Address
The 2026 Big Wave Challenge released its nominee list on August 19, and the pattern in this year's field is hard to miss: ten separate nominations, spread across four categories, all trace back to a single stretch of Portuguese coastline. Praia do Norte, the lighthouse-side slab at Nazaré that has produced the sport's largest measured waves for over a decade, now dominates the Men's Biggest Wave, Women's Biggest Wave, Men's Biggest Paddle, and Wipeout of the Year categories. No other break in this year's field comes close to that spread. The Big Wave Challenge — presented by Aquamar Seafood and now in its 26th year running under one name or another — will hand out its awards, along with more than $100,000 in prize money, at a ceremony on Saturday, September 19, at the Lido Theater in Newport Beach, California.
What the nominee list does not show is a single dominant wave pool for the night's marquee prize. In the Ride of the Year category, the one every surfer in the field actually wants, Nazaré is nowhere. Every nominee, men's and women's divisions combined, rode either Teahupo'o in Tahiti or Mullaghmore Head on Ireland's northwest coast. Traditional big-wave proving grounds — Peahi, Waimea, Mavericks, Todos Santos, Dungeons — did not produce a single Ride of the Year nomination this cycle, a fact the organizers themselves flagged when the list went public.
Unlike a contest tour with fixed heats and a single venue, the Big Wave Challenge is a season-long awards show: surfers and their filmers submit footage from any big-wave venue on the planet, and a judging panel narrows the field to nominees by category once the swell season effectively ends. That format is why the nominee list functions as something closer to a state-of-the-sport report than a single contest result — it captures wherever the year's most consequential waves actually broke, rather than wherever a tour happened to schedule an event.
Nazaré: The Wave That Eats Every Other Category
Nazaré's Praia do Norte works differently from the reef and point breaks that produce most Ride of the Year footage. An underwater canyon roughly three miles deep funnels open-ocean swell energy directly at the beach, and the wave that results is measured in vertical feet rather than judged on shape. That is precisely why it wins the categories built around raw size and consequence rather than style: the Men's Biggest Wave nominees this year are Lucas "Chumbo" Chianca, Rodrigo Koxa, and Clément Roseyro, each nominated for a separate tow-in ride at Praia do Norte during the 2025–26 winter swell season. The same beach supplies the entire Wipeout of the Year shortlist, with Chianca appearing a second time alongside Alberto Truncer for falls that, by the nature of the category, ended badly enough to be memorable.
Chianca is not a newcomer to this stage. He has won the Big Wave Challenge before, and his double nomination this year — one for a wave he made, one for a wave that made him — says something about how thin the margin is at Nazaré between the ride that wins an award and the one that ends a season. Rodrigo Koxa still holds one of the sport's benchmark measured rides from Nazaré, and his return to the Biggest Wave shortlist eight years later is as much a statement about the wave's staying power as his own.
Some of this year's Nazaré nominees have already been rewarded once this season. The TUDOR Nazaré Big Wave Challenge — a separate, locally judged contest run at Praia do Norte itself rather than the video-submission format that decides the September 19 ceremony — crowned Nic von Rupp, Clément Roseyro, Justine Dupont, and Lucas Chianca as its winners earlier in the 2025–26 season. That overlap is not a coincidence so much as a reflection of how small the pool of surfers willing to tow into Nazaré's biggest days has stayed, even as the wave's reputation has grown. Roseyro and Chianca both carried that local recognition straight into a global nomination; Dupont did the same, though her Big Wave Challenge nomination this year comes from Mullaghmore rather than Nazaré.
Teahupo'o and Mullaghmore: The Technical Half of the Field
Size alone does not win Ride of the Year, and this year's shortlist makes that explicit. Matahi Drollet, Izzi Gomez, and Aelan Vaast are nominated for waves ridden at Teahupo'o's Hava'e Pass, a shallow coral-reef break where the challenge is less about wave height than about a takeoff zone that gives a falling surfer almost no room before the lip lands on exposed reef. Drollet grew up on that wave and has built a career reading a break that has killed five surfers since the 2000s; his nomination this year sits alongside Gomez and Vaast, both riding waves shot by local videographers who know the pass as well as the surfers do.
The other three Ride of the Year nominees — Natxo Gonzalez, Tom Lowe, and Justine Dupont — were all nominated for rides at Mullaghmore Head, the cold-water slab off County Sligo that has quietly become one of the North Atlantic's most consequential big-wave venues over the past decade. Dupont, like Chianca, has won a Big Wave Challenge award before; she is also nominated in the men's-and-women's-combined Ride of the Year field this year for a wave at Mullaghmore rather than for a paddle or tow effort at one of the Pacific spots she has ridden in past seasons. Lowe has surfed Mullaghmore since the break first drew international attention, and his repeat presence on the shortlist reflects a wave that keeps producing award-caliber rides even as the spotlight elsewhere has shifted toward tow-assisted giants.
What the Split Says About Risk
The category breakdown maps almost exactly onto three distinct risk profiles the sport has spent the last decade arguing about. A tow-in wave at Nazaré is a size-and-consequence bet: the swell either produces a record-scale face or it doesn't, and the danger is largely a function of how much water lands on the surfer during the wipeout. A reef break like Teahupo'o is a precision bet — the wave itself might only be 15 to 20 feet, but the margin for a wrong read on the takeoff is measured in inches of exposed coral, not feet of whitewater. Mullaghmore sits somewhere between the two: a cold-water slab with enough size to rival Nazaré on a big day, but with a rock shelf and a notoriously complex channel system that punishes bad positioning almost as harshly as Teahupo'o's reef does.
None of the Ride of the Year nominees rode a wave that would place in the Biggest Wave category by height alone. That is the point of running the categories separately, and it is also why this year's split has drawn attention inside the sport: judges are effectively confirming that the era of "biggest wave automatically wins" ended some time ago, even as Nazaré's raw scale keeps it locked into every category that rewards size on its own terms.
The Paddle Category and What It Left Out
Men's Biggest Paddle broke from the Nazaré pattern, with Zoe Chait and Nic Lamb both nominated for waves paddled into at Todos Santos, off Mexico's Baja peninsula — a spot that, along with Peahi, Waimea, Mavericks, and Dungeons, was shut out of the Ride of the Year category entirely this cycle. Todos Santos has produced Big Wave Challenge nominees in most recent years, and its continued presence in the paddle-specific category, even as it disappears from the marquee award, points to a divide the sport has been navigating for years: tow-in surfing at Nazaré and reef-riding at Teahupo'o generate the footage that wins the biggest prizes, while paddle-in surfing at spots like Todos Santos keeps its own dedicated lane rather than competing directly for Ride of the Year against wave-runner-assisted rides.
Organizers have not released the full nominee list for every category, and the Women's Biggest Wave field — also tied entirely to Praia do Norte, according to the announcement — has not yet been broken out by name in public reporting. The September 19 ceremony will settle all of it; until then, the ten Nazaré nominations and the Teahupo'o–Mullaghmore split in Ride of the Year stand as the clearest signal yet of where the sport's center of gravity sat over the past twelve months.