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Fan favorite Sally Fitzgibbons has gained a World Surf League reprieve, gaining a wildcard to compete in 2023.
The Australian Olympian was essentially the most high-profile casualty of the brand new WSL format, which noticed the ladies’s discipline reduce to only 10 after final week’s Margaret River Professional.
A 3-time runner-up within the total world title race, Fitzgibbons was ranked fifteenth after being eradicated within the spherical of 16 in Western Australia.
The WSL introduced two wildcards on Tuesday with American Caroline Marks incomes one to compete in all tour occasions for the rest of the 2022 season and the primary half of 2023.
Marks is presently ranked nineteenth however the 20-year-old solely competed within the Billabong Professional Pipeline in February, the place she was an early elimination earlier than taking private go away.
Fitzgibbons, 31, was granted the 2023 WSL season wildcard, which implies she’s going to surf the primary half of the following Champions Tour season and would be the first substitute for the remainder of this 12 months.
Fitzgibbons is presently browsing on the Gold Coast Professional, with surfers reduce from the championship tour relegated to second-tier challenger tour.
Within the males’s, three-time world champion Gabriel Medina will take the 2022 wildcard whereas fellow Brazilian Yago Dora is a shock choice for 2023.
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