Australia’s Hughie Vaughan scores first 50/50 score at Stab High event
with a never seen lien flip and 2x Olympic medalist Sky Brown sealed the deal with a stylish frontside air.
This past weekend, Atlantic Park Surf in Virginia Beach hosted Stab High, one of surfing’s most anticipated events of the season. With fifty six surfers and 440 air sections, the surf world will be talking about what happened here for years to come.
For two days, Virginia Beach stopped being a beach town and became the loudest corner of the surf world. By Finals Day, the pool deck was packed before the first heat had even begun.
Australia’s 17-year-old Hughie Vaughan was undoubtedly the standout of the championship. With a massive lien flip that earned the first-ever Stab High perfect 50/50 score for a single maneuver, backed up by a near-perfect 49 on a reverse, he secured both the Pro Men’s title and the Monster Air trophy.
A Bespoke Wave Setting, Dialed in Specifically for the Event
In the lead-up to the event, Wavegarden worked closely with elite surfers & the Atlantic Park Surf team to design a fully custom air wave, engineered specifically for Stab High.
The brief was clear: deliver a consistent, powerful, and creative section that would allow the world’s best aerialists to push their limits, wave after wave, across two full days of competition.
The Stab High ramp was engineered with an easy takeoff into a steeper wall, giving surfers more control over their speed and timing, while the air section allows for maximum pop with a forgiving landing and is launchable every 70 seconds.
“ We put a lot of engineering into this wave, but the real fine-tuning happened with the surfers. When you have athletes of that level telling you exactly what the ramp needs to do, you get to a level of precision that would be impossible to achieve otherwise. Seeing that translate into a perfect score was deeply satisfying.” – Josema Odriozola, Wavegarden CEO & Founder.
The result spoke for itself on Finals Day. Surfers could approach the ramp knowing exactly what they were going to get, the kind of certainty that unlocks creativity and makes record-breaking performances possible. Head judge Nathan Fletcher put it plainly:
“The airs we saw people win with a few years ago are now standard airs in this one. It’s definitely altered the progression of the sport.”
When a judge of Fletcher’s calibre says the baseline has shifted, it’s worth asking what shifted it. The answer, at least in part, is the wave.
“One of our goals is to pull the future of surfing forward, and Stab High was the perfect embodiment of that. The performance level at this event was unprecedented for a surf competition, and it couldn’t have happened without the perfect air wave designed by Wavegarden.” — Brendan Buckley, Stab Member
The champion echoed that sentiment:
“It’s so sick to have such a good air section to hit over and over again. It allows you to get creative and try so many different things. Thanks to Wavegarden for designing such a perfect ramp.” — Hughie Vaughan, 2026 Stab High champion
The 2026 edition featured four divisions: Pro Men’s, Vans Pro Women’s, Vans Ladybirds (girls 15-and-under), and Yeti Bottle Rockets (boys 15-and-under). Sky Brown took the Vans Pro Women’s title, Isla Hardy claimed the Ladybirds, and King Nicol won the Bottle Rockets in his debut Stab High appearance. The $60,000 prize purse was split across divisions, with an additional Monster Air award going to the most impactful single aerial of the entire event — also won by Vaughan.
