Nat Young

Australian surfer and author who won the 1966 World Surfing Championship and later helped pioneer the shortboard revolution, becoming a four-time longboard world champion in the 1980s.

Born Robert Harold Young in Sydney on 14 November 1947, Nat Young grew up in the coastal suburb of Collaroy and began surfing at age 10. He won the Australian Open Surfing Championship at Bondi Beach as a junior in 1963 and finished runner-up at the 1965 World Championships behind fellow Sydney surfer Midget Farrelly, a rivalry that turned lifelong. Young's defining moment came at the 1966 World Championships in San Diego, where he rode a thin, square-tailed board he called 'Magic Sam' to a near-unchallenged victory, becoming the first world champion from outside the host country. His powerful, low-line 'involvement' style, based on aggressive turns rather than nose-riding, helped ignite the shortboard revolution when he and Bob McTavish travelled to Hawaii's Honolua Bay in 1967 on radically shorter, thinner boards. Young also won three Australian titles (1966, 1967, 1969), the Bells Beach Surf Classic multiple times, and the 1970 Smirnoff World Pro-Am at Hawaii's Makaha. When longboarding experienced a revival in the 1980s, Young returned to competition and won four world longboard titles, in 1986, 1988, 1989 and 1990. Beyond competition, Young has had a prolific career as a writer and filmmaker, authoring several books including The History of Surfing and his autobiography Nat's Nat and That's That, and producing surf documentaries. He has been inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame, the International Surfing Hall of Fame, and the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame.

Powerful, involvement-based turns that redefined performance surfing in the 1960s

One of the most influential figures in surfing history, both as a competitor and as a writer and filmmaker