This is a preview. As of Saturday night, the finals have not been surfed.
The Lexus US Open of Surfing concludes on Sunday, August 2, at the Huntington Beach Pier. The World Surf League has set the next call for 7:30 a.m. Pacific, with a possible 8:05 a.m. start. Surfing runs on conditions, so those times move.
Who is left
The WSL names four men through to Finals Day, and three of them are from within an hour's drive of the pier.
Kanoa Igarashi grew up in Huntington Beach and the WSL describes him as a back-to-back US Open champion. Winning this event in this town is the thing his career is partly built on.
Griffin Colapinto is from San Clemente. Jake Marshall is from Encinitas. Both are Championship Tour surfers.
The fourth is Mateus Herdy of Brazil, who was runner-up at this event in 2025.
In the women's draw, the WSL confirms Sierra Kerr against Johanne Defay. Kerr is the 2023 World Junior Champion. Also through are Isla Huppatz, another World Junior Champion, and Sophie McCulloch, a former Championship Tour surfer from Australia.
The full bracket and remaining heat pairings had not been published when we wrote this. We are not going to guess at matchups.
What a Challenger Series event is
Professional surfing has two tiers. The Championship Tour is the top one, a small field of the best surfers in the world competing for a world title. The Challenger Series sits beneath it and functions as the promotion route: surfers accumulate points across the season, and the leading finishers earn Championship Tour slots for the following year.
This is the second Challenger Series stop of 2026. That is why a field mixing established Championship Tour names like Igarashi, Colapinto and Marshall with junior world champions like Kerr and Huppatz is normal here. Established surfers drop into these events to bank points or defend position; the younger ones are trying to get out.
Watching it
The event is free at the Huntington Beach Pier, and the WSL streams it on its site and app.
If you go, go early. The call is for 7:30 a.m., parking near the pier on a summer Sunday is its own competitive event, and the finals of a Challenger Series stop tend to run quickly once conditions are judged good enough to start.
The one thing this story cannot tell you
Who wins.
We held this piece on Friday rather than run a mid-event story reporting quarterfinal results that would have been wrong by Saturday. It runs now as a preview because the finals genuinely are tomorrow morning, and it will be superseded by an actual result by lunchtime Sunday.
