Surfing’s Great Debate: Goofy vs Regular

But just why does a born natural footer, all be it a very talented one, surfing against the grain generate so much interest? Is it the sheer unnaturalness? Or the difficulty? As surfers, we know how goddamn strange it is to surf with our “wrong foot” forward. No other action makes you look like more of a kook. Except for carrying your surfboards fins first.  

It’s perhaps why the “reverse” or “switch up” has been a big trend on Instagram over the last couple of years. Filmers like Justin Gane of Pulse Surf and Simon “Shagga” Safigna of @shaggamang, both sitting on a few decades of footage, will often post archive clips of a famous surfer, reverse it, and ask followers to see if they can guess the surfer and location. It never fails to elicit a huge response.

The disorientation is addictive. Even the most obvious and iconic clips, like a recent post of Kelly Slater at J-Bay, make you all house of mirrors woozy when The GOAT is a goofy, and J-Bay is a left. It looks both exactly the same and vastly different. Of course, when Kelly actually got barrelled off his nut switch and scored a 10 in the 2008 Rip Curl Search CT event at Padang, the surfing world shat its nappies and momentarily lost its whole axis.

Meanwhile, over in Fiji, 10 of the 2025 best competitive surfers recently battled it out for the World Title. In the Women’s division, there is just one goofy footer, Caroline Marks. In the Men’s, Brazilians Yago Dora and Italo Ferreira will be surfing frontside. The 30% ratio of goofy to natural sits in the general average of the surfing population.

(Yago Dora and Molly Picklum, who surfs regular foot, won.)

Yet despite 100 years of modern surfing, very few scientific studies have been done on one of the most fundamental aspects of surfing. It’s well established that a person’s dominant foot is the deciding factor. Surf schools all around the world use the push theory for first timers to try and determine their stance. An instructor will gently push the student from behind when they are not expecting it. Whichever foot naturally steps forward to catch yourself is likely your dominant foot. Or imagine you are on a slippery surface, such as a wet floor. Which foot would you instinctively place in front to avoid slipping?

With goofies in the minority, it was often thought there was also a link to left-handedness, but that has been disproved. Only 10 per cent of the world’s population is left-handed. Recent studies have shown that multiple genes, perhaps up to 40, contribute to this trait. Environmental factors don’t seem to play a big part. You can assume, goofy and natural traits are the same.

“I was a goofy footer when I first started learning to surf, but growing up in Coolangatta, my old man forced me to surf natural,” said shaper Darren Handley. “And I thanked him every day for forcing me down the right path.”

Handley, though, seems to be the exception. We are simply born natural or goofy, and it is that simple fact that helps define your surfing state of being. Anecdotal evidence of the implications is abundant. “Goofies will walk two miles past a six-foot right to surf a three-foot left,” said Matt Hoy. We could, and have, debated the style aesthetics of Occy vs Curren, or Marks vs Simmers and Machado vs Slater. Whilst fun, it is purely subjective.

One of the few sources of hard evidence is data compiled from Rip Curl’s Search GPS watches. A recent study they published backed up the accepted ratios, with 36% of users being goofy and regular 64%. They also analysed the respective behaviour in the water. The average sessions per month came out pretty even, but goofies tended to stay in the water longer, averaging 1.13 hours compared to the regular footer’s 1.09 hours. And in what we may call The Italo Protocol, the data showed goofy footers were also the busiest, standing up on 8.6 waves per hour, compared to 8.4. waves per hour for their film negatives. Or maybe natural footers are just plain lazy?

Either way, in surfing, unless you are Kai Lenny, you are born goofy footer or regular. It determines the way you surf, and very probably, who you want to win the World Title. C’mon, Yago, your goofies are depending on you.