The Australian died at age 77. Legend Kelly Slater paid tribute to him.ordeaux, France | AFP | 01/16/2025 | 329 words
Australian Alan Green, co-founder of the iconic brand Quiksilver, which sponsored the greatest surfers, has died at the age of 77, we learned from the group on Thursday.
“I regret to confirm the death of Alan Green, the founder of Quiksilver,” a spokesperson in France for the Boardriders group, owner of Quiksilver, told AFP.
He died of cancer at his home in Torquay, Australia, according to the Australian press.
It was also in this small coastal town located southwest of Melbourne that Green founded Quiksilver in 1969 with another surfer, John Law. They notably invented the boardshort, swimming shorts suitable for surfers with snap buttons and Velcro fasteners.
The brand will internationalize and establish itself in the United States and Europe, where in the 1980s it set up its headquarters in Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Basque Coast in France, which has become one of the bastions of board sports, with 100,000 surfers every summer on the neo-Aquitaine coast, depending on the region.
-At the same time, it organizes numerous stages of the professional circuit, including several editions of the Quiksilver Pro on the Landes coast, and supports the most famous surfers, starting with the legend Kelly Slater. Their 23-year partnership, which began in the early 1990s, was punctuated by 11 world championship titles, a record.
“I love you Greeny. You were one of a kind, a great friend and mentor to so many. I will never forget you,” the American surfer said on his Instagram account.
The death of Alan Green comes seven years after the disappearance at sea at the age of 54 of Pierre Agnès, former French surfing champion who became boss of Boardriders.
Quiksilver, like the other Boardriders brands (Billabong, Roxy, DC Shoes, Element, RVCA), has belonged to the American Authentic Brands Group since 2023 but their operation in Western Europe came under the control of the Breton ready-to-wear group Beaumanoir (Cache Cache, Bréal, Bonobo, Morgan, Caroll, Sarenza, La Halle).
