INSPIRE: Denmark’s Lucy Small on how a viral surf comp video turned her into gender activist and doco producer

It was an off-the-cuff comment in a moment of frustration that propelled Denmark-raised surfer Lucy Small into national headlines and started her campaign to find a space for female voices in sport. The 31-year-old was on the winners’ podium at the 2021 Curly Maljam surfing competition in Sydney when she looked down at the novelty cheque for $1500 — less than half of the $4000 the winner of the male division received — and decided enough was enough. “I think, like the moment of calling out the Curly Maljam, it really changed so much for me,” she said. “It was such a split-second decision to do that, even though I’d thought about it in the past for years. “It just got to a point where I went, like, if not me, then who? And if not now, when? “I had no idea that it would resonate with so many people and actually be part of like, yeah, just having the reach that it did and the impact that it did.” When video of her comments calling out the organisers went viral, Small spent months rotating through the Australian media circuit, appearing on The Project, Studio Ten, and in a suite of online articles. The professional longboarder decided to use her newfound publicity to make sure the “moment didn’t just pass and I could make a change that actually had a lasting impact”. Teaming up with sports journalist Kate Allman, the pair created the Equal Pay for Equal Play campaign, calling for only sporting peak bodies that offered equal gender prize money to be eligible for government funding — a feat they achieved for NSW in 2023. The campaign has now branched out to fight sporting gender inequality on a federal level. Small moved to Victoria directly after high school to study journalism and anthropology at Deakin University, then to Sydney for her master’s degree in peace and conflict studies. But it was the scarcity of strong female surf role models when learning to handle a longboard in Ocean Beach, Denmark, she remembered when wetsuit brand Project Blank approached her in 2022 about making a short film after her viral moment. “I just decided to do the most complicated thing I could think of, which was to go to Ghana, in West Africa, and make a film with these female surfers and skaters part of a group called Surf Ghana,” she said, “I wanted to using storytelling as a way to advocate for change, and growing up in Denmark before social media, there was not a lot of female surfers around here, and there was never any surf films and rarely surf films with women in them. “I could count them on one hand over my whole teenage years and so I was always hungry for that. “I wanted to be part of changing the kind of male dominance of surf media and surf films by telling stories that focus on women and are told by women, show a surfing identity that is more representative of the actual surfing community, which has so many different people a part of it.” After the success of the short film, named Yama, Small and her director Maddie Meddings decided to try their hands at a feature-length documentary, starring the female activists and stunning landscapes of Ecuador. The resulting film, Ceibo, premiered in Sydney on April 8 before touring the Eastern States and screening in Denmark on April 19, where more than 200 of Small’s friends and family showed up to celebrate her success. “I got tears in my eyes during the Q and A just like reflecting on just what the journey has been,” she said. “Growing up in such a small town and such a tight community that just to have everyone show up like that, I guess, and that people cared and wanted to be there, was just so lovely.” Small will next take the film to the UK before returning to France, where she has been living and training for her surf competitions. She assures more sporting and political activism and documentaries are on the horizon, but intends to let her current work “have a moment to breathe”. “Lots of people say, ‘oh, you know, keep politics out of surfing, I just want to go to the beach and enjoy the surf’,” she said. “I think that’s really interesting because, without anybody actively doing anything, surfing is still political, because there’s so (many) things. “The reason that you have time after work or a weekend available to go surfing is because through the political activity in the past that’s given that workers rights and created the weekend. “Politics has determined how expensive it is to live near the beach, or how accessible it is to get to the beach, or how clean the ocean is. “Everything we do is political so I think that we need to be connecting with each other to kind of build strength and solidarity and be part of good change.”