For 20 years, Johanne Defay has been a professional surfer. She's also now a mother — and starting in 2027, she won't have to choose between the two. The World Surf League has announced a dedicated Maternity Wildcard for female athletes who take time off from competition due to pregnancy. Defay, who is French, will be the first to use it. Tatiana Weston-Webb of Brazil, who also stepped away from the circuit, receives a separate WSL Season Wildcard. Both return to the elite Championship Tour in 2027.
The wildcard gives eligible athletes a protected re-entry point: rather than re-qualifying through the rankings system after giving birth, they get a guaranteed place back in the field. Elite surfing, like most individual sports, has historically offered female athletes little formal protection around pregnancy — this is a structural fix to a structureless problem. The WSL joins a small but growing cohort of sporting bodies making motherhood compatible with elite competition. FIFA introduced minimum maternity protections for women's soccer players in 2021, and the WTA followed in March 2025 with a fund offering up to 12 months of paid leave.
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Professional sports have long treated the tension between athletic careers and motherhood as a personal problem for athletes to solve. A 2017 FIFPRO report found that 47% of female soccer players had retired early from the game to start a family — not a lifestyle choice, but a policy failure. As women's sports attract bigger audiences and more investment, governing bodies face pressure to professionalize not just the competition but the conditions.
The WSL's Maternity Wildcard is also smart brand strategy: in an era when fans and sponsors are paying close attention to how organizations treat their athletes, policies like this one don't stay internal for long. What makes the approach practical is that it works within the existing logic of the sport — no salary negotiations, no collective bargaining, just a guaranteed seat at the table.