Behind-the-scenes, finals day, Quiksilver Pro, Snapper.
Let’s list the adjectives that immediately spring to mind when we talk finals day at Snapper: rich, gorgeous, warm, illuminating. It was human aspirations at their loftiest! Shadowy angels brushing against earthly ones etc.
Today, the vox pop filmmaker Peter King, who is almost fifty years old, loosed his traditional end-of-contest, two-and-a-half minute short called TourNotes. It is a pedestal for all sorts of moments that are overlooked by the rigid structures of contest reporting: we discover Ricardo Toledo’s secret whistle for telling Filipe to take the second wave.
Mick Fanning and Kelly Sater have an awkward moment when Mick tells Kelly he should’ve “put the pie in the oven” i.e. stall for his barrel.
“What happened to your oven mitt?” asks Mick.”You should’ve put the pie in the oven.”
Kelly is confused (“Say what?”) and Mick seems to darken before our eyes. If it was a bar it is the sort of conversation that leads to a fight where both combatants wake up in the morning with bruised cheeks and painful hands and wonder how the hell that happened.
When Kelly understands Mick’s posit, he says, “All I needed was an eight to make the heat. I didn’t need to get a ten.”
Mick stalks off.
“I’m still in. He’s not,” says Kelly.
A moment: Glen Hall pulls up behind Matt Wilkinson, who’d just been joshing around saying if he won six more Quiksilver Pros he’d buy the penthouse in the Rainbow Bay high-rise he’d been staying, in and whispers, “One more.”
Wilko’s face drops. The edifice switches from comic to serious.
“One more,” says Wilko, looking to the heavens.