Shaun Tomson is the 1977 World Champion of the International World Surfing Tour. A native of South Africa, he spent fourteen years on the Tour (1976-1989), nine of which, he placed in the top six. With twelve contest wins, including a record-setting six year winning streak in the prestigious Gunston 500 in Durban, South Africa, he is considered one of the world's finest surfers.

Shaun was born in Durban, South Africa in 1955. He picked up his first surfboard at age 10, and working the steep, powerful walls at The Bay of Plenty on Durban's beachfront, he honed his powerful style to perfection. Traveling to Jeffreys Bay, he encountered some of the finest tubes in the world and those experiences together prepared him for the ground-breaking tube riding and power-surfing he was to blow minds with in the movie Free Ride, filmed on the North Shore of O’ahu. He is still considered the finest tube-rider in the world and has opened the doors of wave riding creativity for each new generation of surfers.

He has been featured in more than forty surf videos, was profiled in an Outdoor Life Network (OLN) documentary series in 1998, and starred as a surf journalist in the Sony/TriStar motion picture, In God's Hands.

Additional honors include nine appearances on the covers of Surfer and Surfing magazines, as well as being an inductee to the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame. He has most recently been listed as one of the 25 most influential surfers of the century by Surfer magazine(1999) and as one of the 16 greatest surfers of all time by Surfing magazine in 2004.

He is currently Chairman of the Advisory Board for The Surfrider Foundation and owns the apparel company Solitude in Santa Barbara, California. He lives with his wife, Carla, in Montecito, California and continues to travel the world, reaching out to surfers of all generations, with his innovative surfing, insightful and inspirational presentations and world renowned tube-riding style.