Staying ‘stoked’: Surfing, ageing and post-youth identities

Abstract

Surfing has consistently been framed as a youth focused, male-dominated sport and culture. Despite surfing’s ageing demographic, neither the ways in which age impacts on surfing identities and mobilities, nor older surfer’s experiences and subjectivities, has been given scholarly attention. In this paper, I discuss research exploring the experiences and identities of middle-aged and older recreational male and female surfers in the south and south-west of England. The research illustrates that participation in surfing as a sport and lifestyle remains highly significant for some men and women through middle-age and into retirement. I consider the cultural barriers and challenges in dealing with a loss in physical performance through ageing, such as adaptations to their equipment, performance, and style, and the implications for how individuals negotiate bodily capital, space and identity. Nonetheless, older surfers also embrace different ways of being a surfer which challenge some of the more exclusionary aspects of surfing identities. Theoretically the paper develops an intersectional approach to sporting identity that explicitly recognises and accounts for the contribution of age to social identity. The research also contributes to the growing literature on physically active ‘post-youth’ leisure lifestyles, illustrating how shifting definitions of ageing have given ‘rise to new expectations, priorities and understandings’ of sporting lifestyles amongst those in middle age, and beyond.