DOES success entail ability?

Imagine a great wave is rising and I have dashed into the sea with my surfboard. You know nothing about me: perhaps I am one of the world's great surfers; perhaps I am a fool. What would it tell you about my abilities, if I were ride into the coast on that wave? Would it mean I am able to surf a wave like that? Does success entail ability? Call the principle that it does Success. When we focus on successful action, Success is compelling. Austin said that "it follows merely from the premise that [a golfer sinks a putt], that he has the ability to do it, according to ordinary English". And indeed when someone succeeds in something, like sinking a putt or surfing a wave, one is forced to concede they were able to do that. This what Success would lead us to expect. But when success is not yet assured, the lesson seems different. When said before the fact, the claim that I can surf that wave is strong — it says that surfing that wave is within my control. This intuition, call it the control intuition, drives against Success. Just doing something does not demonstrate it is within my control: flukes do happen. So, if the control intuition is right, success should not demonstrate ability. To resolve this tension, I connect abilities to the Aristotelian notion that while the past is settled, the future is open. What one is able to do, on my account, depends on what will happen, if one performs certain actions; and what will happen, various philosophers and semanticists have argued, depends on what is settled and what open. This connection to the open future yields a plausible diagnosis of Success: on my account, success does not strictly speaking entail ability; but other closely related principles are valid. Here is the plan for the paper. First I try to make the above tension precise. I argue that the appeal of Success is connected to two plausible and related principles: that past success entails past ability, which I call Past Success; and that cannot seems to entail will not, which I call Can't-entails-won't. But, on the other, I show that the control intuition gives rise to counterexample to Success in cases of inexact ability discussed by Kenny. This tension runs deep: no existing account of abilities, even those developed in response to Kenny, makes sense of all three points together.