It’s pretty much impossible to contemplate a world in which even average recreational skateboarders and snowboarders didn’t or couldn’t ride switch, let alone professionals. Switch-stance is such an integral part of proving your skills as a skateboarder or snowboarder, but high performance surfing (i.e. not seniors longboard contests) simply does not worship the same cult of the backward. Why?

There is a seemingly obvious answer to this question. Surfing is much more difficult to master than skateboarding or snowboarding. Even on a pulsing south pacific reef break no two waves are the same, whereas you can ride the same bit of concrete or hit the same kicker time and time again – honing your skills to the point where they are hard-coded into your motor neurons. So you could say that surfing switch is just too damn hard, but I’m not convinced.

I admit to having a particular interest in this topic. In a slightly freakish way, I learned to surf natural, but have always been more comfortable on any other sideways implement if I ride goofy. The reason why (I think) lies in the fact that my local break was a right hander, so it just felt more comfortable to be facing the wave when I was learning. But in skate, snow, wakeboard, shoes on first, walking down steps… or any other test you can devise, I am goofy.

So, I basically always surf switch. And if a kook like me can ride the wrong way round, the “difficulty” argument can’t be the reason for pro surfers not making switch an integral part of their points-scoring armoury… and surely, if it was considered really difficult that would be a reason to do it. More technical, more critical surfing = higher points.

So why don’t we see Slater dropping in switch more often?

Although the tide feels like it might have changed in recent times - with aerials just going off the scale - for a long time “tricks” and respectable surfing haven’t really been happy bedfellows. Power surfing: speed, full blooded carves and all-round wave-bashing manliness has long been considered the performance nirvana. Switch riding could simply be just too nerdy, too much of a trainspotting exercise in the context of someone charging a heavy Tavaruan barrel.

Then there’s the aesthetics. Why would people want to watch you ride a wave slightly less well than you actually could? It doesn’t really stack up as a spectacle. I’d much rather see someone in harmony with the wave, dancing with it, wielding the rapier to the best of their physical ability… than doing it switch, but a bit worse.

And we already have backside riding. You could argue that this is surfing’s own version of switch. Obviously – in a literal sense – it isn’t, but it does pose its own set of reverse challenges, different angles, different manoeuvres.

But back to the original point; that every wave is different. A wave is something of a gift. The struggle you have to go through to find yourself actually riding a plank of foam along a pulse of ephemeral energy means that you need to treat it like a once in a lifetime experience – which is exactly what it is. So to waste that experience in the pursuit of switch riding – which doesn’t actually feel any better – seems pointless.

In a world where guys are busting 10 feet out of waves, flipping, alley-ooping it would seem inevitable that switch riding will one day have a bigger role to play; but it would seem that surfing’s unique sensibilities mean that we can all be happy to stick to going forwards for a good while yet.