Bye-Bye Gabby, Bye-Bye Owen.
I clicked on this morning and got a nappy commercial. I think they are called Diapers in the US of A.
That was the first of many cognitive dissonances for the day. Cloudbreak was serving up another confusing mixed grill of over-cooked and under-cooked ingredients. Short-period waves that went nowhere, mid-period, west swell waves that closed out the lineup and the odd wide open one that steam-rolled the reef.
Not an easy read for anyone. The kind of surf that would see a boatload of aging alpha male dentists from Manhattan Beach back in the boat after one set to surf waist-high Restaurants. As a rec surfer you’d watch the boatmen deep-throat a few juicy peaches while copping donuts all day long.
Ace inexplicably dropped his bundle against the Italian Stallion, paddling around like a headless chook in the last ten minutes when he was well ahead. A series of blunders gave Fioravanti priority and he duly iced the heat for his first heat win of the year. It was a heat Ace should have won all day, every day.
Rosie spent most of the next heat between Kelly and Ethan Ewing bigging up Ewing, continually comparing him to AI. That hype eventually took on the dimensions of an entirely separate reality – Rosie’s World? – as Ewing surfed a heat I could’ve smashed him in. Kelly was just solid, without being amazing. It was a walk through for him. How did that idea that Ethan Ewing surfs like AI take hold?
And why did Volcom, flush with cash after the sale to Kering group, “let go” the Fiji comp after two of the most successful surf comps in history? Two thousand and twelve’s big-wave guerilla insurrection in twenty-foot tubes and Kellys 2013 masterclass back to back.
You’re flush with fashion cash and you let that go? Why?
Richard “Wooly” Woolcott, I spend the day trying to track you down without success. I know you are reading, so why did the Stone hit the eject button on Fiji?
Web journalism is a derelict little cubby hole to crawl down into. Web surf journalism might be the nadir of human creative endeavour. It could easily be. I feel like a turd for insinuating that Joey Turpel might shuffle off and be a coach and spare us the verbal treacle. And he did. But his absence got me thinking: about the lack of a distinct lexicon related to pro surfing. Joey was inventing that for us. For good or ill. The sled reset euphemism for shark attacks, the high-line wraps and other linguistic treats he laid down for us. For a sport supposedly rich with it’s own inpenetrable jargon the cupboard can seem bare for commentators supplying colour.
As Owen got obliterated on the shish-kebabs section going for broke on a final manoeuvre needing a nine, Rosie came up with this piece of gold. “There is a little poof of spit as he finds the doggy door.” No further comment.
But I’m overjoyed to report that Rosie Hodge has made an incredible contribution to the pro surfing dictionary of phrases. Sometime during the Ian Gouveia/O-Dog heat, a heat that supplied genuine drama as Owen got obliterated on the shish-kebabs section going for broke on a final manoeuvre needing a nine, Rosie came up with this piece of gold. “There is a little poof of spit as he finds the doggy door.” No further comment.
Excuse while I clean up this little poof of spit on my computer screen.
Ian Gouveia looked like Italo did a couple of years ago when he beat Kelly. Totally at ease, frothing. He beat Owen easily, really. Owen carried on the Aussie goofyfoot meltdown that Ace had started. He fell when he should have been standing and ended up pasted and bleeding. More cognitive dissonance.
It took the last couple heats of the day, with a few goofy foots led by Matt Wilko to really crack the day open. Wilko….sizzled.Then Italo stayed down the reef from Gabe Medina, destroying his tactical advantage and threading high tide shish-kebabs tubes all day.
Bye-Bye Gabby, Bye-Bye Owen. Weird though.
Barton asked Kelly about World Ocean Day, about what the ocean meant to him.
“Everything,” he said. But it didn’t ring true.
Not when you put Nick Carroll’s summation of the next moves for the WSL into the equation.
“This chunk of the main game is all about Kelly’s wave pool, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and the doors that the WSL board thinks will then open up to wave pools and associated events in both traditional and ‘new’ surf markets. By ‘new’ read places where there isn’t a surf culture yet – Korea, China and the like.”
So the ocean isn’t “everything” at all.
Even a day in Fiji at Cloudbreak now carries this haunting shadow with it.
What is the main game, if this ain’t it?
Outerknown Fiji Men’s Pro Remaining Round 2 Results:
Heat 2: Joel Parkinson (AUS) 10.66 def. Yago Dora (BRA) 10.33
Heat 3: Sebastian Zietz (HAW) 18.43 def. Bino Lopes (BRA) 9.53
Heat 4: Leonardo Fioravanti (ITA) 12.26 def. Adrian Buchan (AUS) 11.87
Heat 5: Kelly Slater (USA) 12.90 def. Ethan Ewing (AUS) 4.27
Heat 6: Joan Duru (FRA) 13.00 def. Conner Coffin (USA) 10.30
Heat 7: Wiggolly Dantas (BRA) 14.77 def. Jadson Andre (BRA) 12.27
Heat 8: Jeremy Flores (FRA) 17.57 def. Nat Young (USA) 11.10
Heat 9: Stuart Kennedy (AUS) 10.74 def. Ezekiel Lau (HAW) 9.10
Heat 10: Ian Gouveia (BRA) 15.10 def. Kanoa Igarashi (USA) 7.13
Heat 11: Miguel Pupo (BRA) 12.00 def. Jack Freestone (AUS) 9.23
Heat 12: Bede Durbidge (AUS) 13.10 def. Josh Kerr (AUS) 9.90
Outerknown Fiji Men’s Pro Round 3 Results:
Heat 1: Ian Gouveia (BRA) 15.66 def. Owen Wright (AUS) 15.26
Heat 2: Julian Wilson (AUS) 15.04 def. Frederico Morais (PRT) 10.20
Heat 3: Matt Wilkinson (AUS) 16.84 def. Miguel Pupo (BRA) 5.67
Heat 4: Italo Ferreira (BRA) 15.83 def. Gabriel Medina (BRA) 15.47
Upcoming Outerknown Fiji Men’s Pro Round 3 Match-Ups:
Heat 5: Mick Fanning (AUS) vs. Michel Bourez (PYF)
Heat 6: John John Florence (HAW) vs. Leonardo Fioravanti (ITA)
Heat 7: Jordy Smith (ZAF) vs. Joan Duru (FRA)
Heat 8: Kelly Slater (USA) vs. Connor O’Leary (AUS)
Heat 9: Joel Parkinson (AUS) vs. Jeremy Flores (FRA)
Heat 10: Kolohe Andino (USA) vs. Bede Durbidge (AUS)
Heat 11: Sebastian Zietz (HAW) vs. Wiggolly Dantas (BRA)
Heat 12: Adriano de Souza (BRA) vs. Stuart Kennedy (AUS
The 5 minutes it took me to read this nice write up and comment section was absolutely better than watching paint dry (aka the WSL). Nicely done Tom.
This is great, thanks Longtom. More please…
“Web surf journalism might be the nadir of human creative endeavour”
thats because everyone lips are sealed in this industry. the andy irons issue, the buyouts, the lawsuits. and kelly bought the rights to that to “indo-thai stick surf movie”- where is that? did he bury it? and chas prob had his sack on the line with his book and all the rest of the writers from kampion, george ,etc..
wooly aint talking
i’ll talk for him. it’s not his call. ever since WSL stopped companies from being able to host the contest feed on their own site, the marketing departments have had a tough time seeing the ROI on this shit. fuck, i’m looking at these condensed heats on youtube and can’t find one with more than 1000 views. by definition, in the web era, that is not compelling content.
Dell wrote the headline. An acceptable paraphrase if you ask me.
possible max, but she said it more than once. I have a black belt in South African I tune you bru
Huh. Now my brain is kinda broken because I’m tryna decide how these two words differ in meaning. I think I’m not smart enough for this today. Or maybe any day!
The term ‘Poof’ is a slang term for homosexual men in the UK / Australia, As is ‘puff’, depending on regional dialects.
Ah, right. I’d forgotten that bit! Thanks!
yeah, its kinda critical. and how bad was that women’s final? think women were watching?
That fucking final, man. I don’t know. I have all kinds of opinions about that thing. The lineup looked fucking impossible — many of the men weren’t totally mastering it either. I liked that they went for it, you know? There was not a lot of safety surfing going on there. There was not always the smartest decisions either? But I liked that they didn’t hold back.
Mostly, I felt much the same about that final as I did about much of the rest of the women’s comp at Cloudbreak. They’re plainly capable of it. Several of the women have some pretty legit clips to prove it. But the lack of experience with waves like Cloudbreak shows. They’re not on the boat trips to Indo or whatever. Progression doesn’t happen in heats, it happens on the free surf trips — and that’s one place where there remains a deep structural inequality in pro surfing between the men and women. I kinda want to send all the women to Indo for a month. You’re going left, and you and you and you. Dry reefs for all.
Also, this is dumb as fuck but Tati’s hair situation. Girl, that bunhead thing is fine for chill longboarding sessions but it’s not going to work in real surf. Idk, I should pitch a fucking service thing on this maybe. Just braid it already. Fuck.
i like you, Jen. and yeah, Sally always charges. they seem to do fine with Honolua. you send em to P-pass for 6 weeks, they’ll come back hardened reef chargers.
Ha ha yeah, if I win the lottery I’ll send ’em all on over there and assign myself to go along. 😀
I believe the word is correct, even allowing for the accent; if that is what you mean?
me love you long tom
Julian is going to win. In pumping surf.
Pottz said “niggling” injuries instead of “nagging”. That was rich. I also wondered if any other eagle eyed Grit readers noticed that in the clips of winners and heats in previous years read “Outerknown Pro, 2016”? Like they are scrubbing the Volcom event out of the history books? Kinda reminded me of when Dane Reynolds was on the invitee list for the Titanic at Mavericks.
I am not a big fan of Potts or Gigs, but I will let the word police due this real justice if needed, but “niggling” could have been the right word depending on where Potts was going with his thought. See what Merriam thinks below.
Niggling | Definition of Niggling by Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster…
Definition of niggling. : bothersome or persistent especially in a petty or tiresome way niggling injuries.
Well now I look racist! haha nice thanks Gary
Opps – sorry …. I did not take it that way, but now that you say it….
It’s perfectly acceptable English. Not widely used in North America due to (abusive use, and) the common misunderstanding of its Northern European linguistic origins rather than the similar sounding Latin (Mediterranean) roots of the well-known offensive racial slur.
See the Wikipedia entry for ‘Niggardly’ in the same light: similarly nothing to do with racial abuse, but understandably mistakenly taken as such.
yeah, in North America we don’t even touch words that start with “nig”, in fact, i’m not sure there are any left in our dialect at this point.
Are we allowed to ‘snigger’ at the comments left here?
“Deep throat a few juicy peaches”?! I know I should prefer this a million times to “doughnuts all day” but it just sounds really painful.
it was also very painful to read
I thought that Joe was having a baby and that’s why he was skipping Fiji? Or did I miss something?
I thought it was that his dad had died.
Maybe both?
The Kering Group backs Outerknown, thus have not really given up Fiji as a promotional project.
Yep, Volcom is on a down trend since joining the upper tier with QUIK, BONG, HURLEY, RC, and VANS. Possibly a bone for Kelly joining in. Or simply trying to build a brand where one is now spread out to way more things than just surfing.
Good read again!!
The end game reading between the lines is a pseudo wavepool tour for sure – just when they get the wave rate/ commercial viability right.
They wont push it unless they can sell the shit out of it – we will just get the appetite whet with little snippets of the next wave/pool.
The next frontier will be China, Korea, Russia maybe India even Middle East, and that frontier will be needing them to learn in a pool following with whole surf scene behind it.
Will be pools everywhere, with WSL tapping into the tech they think gonna make em the coin.
they should get you in these meetings, how are you with Power Point?
i am awesome, also really good with those little drawing pens that pottz used on screen the other day!!!
fuck yes, donuts on donuts
Longtom, a bit of a heads up, not all English speaking regions voice vowels in the same way.
yeeeeesssss…..and your point is?
rosy is doing good: “tik-takking across the lip”
I am going to start tick-takking hehe
Tiki-takka? Leo Messi, is that you?
I’m liking Rosy’s commentary. Describing what she’s seeing and articulating well it in terms a surfer might use. Nice match with Ronny too
Rosie can do no wrong, though I do think her accent has got a bit thicker after her hiatus. She was talking about Owen “Raaht”[Vs Ronnie’s “Wroyt”].
I don’t find the accent a problem
Never forget Turpel’s “He’ll hop on the sled and reset”
Agreed that Rosy can do no wrong, and I think it is a smart move to have her commentating for both womens and mens events… Joey will be back for JBay (I ping’d him on Instagram and heard it direct), which I think is great news.
Nothing against the guy, besides his robotic commentary, but that’s not great news. Maybe he needs to take some shrooms and expand his mind and vocabulary?
I like Turpel’s commentary, and he is playing the straight role against the more inconsistent and often grammatically-challenged commentators like Pottz. I also like to think that more JT means less Gigs, ;).
this “thousand and twelve’s big-wave guerilla insurrection in twenty-foot tubes”
whoops and clapping.
As for Kering Group – they know this whole show is dead money. The WSL need them. They do not need the WSL. Therein lies the problem.
Anyway, it is more profitable not to pay taxes and hide your money in tax havens. MONACO IS THE MAIN GAME.
The ocean has literally provided “everything” for Kelly. From Baywatch, hot chicks to World Titles and millions of dollars in between. I don’t think it’s difficult to translate what he was saying. I think it would be a pretty common umbrella answer if you asked any dude or girl who is lucky enough to make a living from it. That being said, people need to get over the whole “it’s not real surfing thing” with wave pools. Yes it is. Is snowboarding a park or halfpipe not snowboarding because there’s no backcountry and powder runs? Super Cross not real dirt biking cause it’s done on an artificial track indoors and not in the mountains or desert dunes? And if you’re never gonna visit or ride a wave pool out of your “commitment to the core” then who gives a fuck what you think? You rather have inland kooks in a pool or in your local lineup?
there’s a better analogy with snowboarding/skiing: indoor ski hills. They were massive once as post-war America wanted to emulate Europe and embrace snow skiiing.
I will visit and ride a wavepool student and I will be paid handsomely for the privilege, believe me.
paid to ride a wavepool student. where do you get these gigs?
comma comma comma comma comma chameleon…
i LOVE culture club!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love punctuating grammar properly, when I can be arsed.
You mean comma or was your love of grammar in a coma?
yeah I fucked up.
Despite my love of punctuation, sometimes I done gots spellinglexia.
dark web
Is that where paul speaker went?
you know what I am quietly desperately hoping to see one day? a wave pool, pumping, with nobody out. how fucking surreal would that be
damn LT , you want to ride a wavepool student , and be paid ???
R U just a gigolo , who wants paid sex in a wavepool , and life will……??
its definitely not real surfing. building jumps on a hill or bondoing a crack to make a spot skateable is just practical rigging. in this case, the whole goddamn hill is fake. the wave won’t change unless some tech nerd programs it to change, and then we gotta wonder if Kelly is getting back channel info on the next set. total nightmare. luckily they make as much economic sense as a roller coaster that only one person can ride at a time.
I’m not about to get into a science argument about how fast or slow snow melts and alters a slope style course or halfpipe. But those are COMPLETELY man made and FAKE. So are you saying that half pipe and slope style is not REAL snowboarding? What about Street League Skateboarding on 100% man made obstacles in arenas? Is that not real street skateboarding because there are no cops to chase you off private property? It’s not NATURAL surfing with waves created by nature. But to say it’s not surfing or even real surfing couldn’t be further from the truth. You paddle into a wave, stand up and ride on a moving wave. What would you REALLY call it if it’s not surfing? Wavepooling? Slatering? You can’t have it both ways calling both park and pipe snowboarding and skating – “snowboarding” and “skating” and saying surfing in a wavepool is not surfing.
no skater would say that street league is real skateboarding, and no Nyjah and Dyrdek’s opinions don’t count, same way Slater’s opinion on wave pools doesn’t
gotcha. So all those kids skating at the community skateparks that the state and city made for them are not real skateboarders? Tony Hawk skating on a man made half pipe is not a real skater? What are they participating in? Ramping? Parking? Give me a name.
they call it skating tranny and its ok to have up to 30% of your video part in areas where some guy tried to build what they thought neighborhood kids want to skate, and yet pretty much every heroic trick still happens at a rail or set of stairs from one of about a dozen high schools
ok strawman. So if kelly makes a video with 30% wave pool action but he has a couple heroic pipe waves, that still qualifies him as a real surfer? Lol. Stop bro. Just stop. Those 30% “tranny skaters” are skaters. Nyjah is a skater no matter how many SL titles he has. Pool surfing is surfing. You’re just too cool to acknowledge it. You can’t participate in “fake skating” and be a real skater. You point is moot.
its fine. Danny Way, Burnquist, and those stunt guys are skaters too, but in more of a Robbie Madison vein. my favorite wavepool surfer will remain Rick Kane though.
Agreed. Rick Kane is the boss.
this is still skating, but absolute max tranny ratio for a part
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Another good report Long Tom. Fiji is one of the best locations on tour because wave pools can’t beat raw ocean surf. Its so enjoyable to watch which of the pros best decipher and make the most of mixed swells and power-packed tubular waves along extended sections of shallow reef. Even the world’s best athlete’s decisions can look silly sometimes in these sorts of testing conditions, as you highlighted. Such is the nature of our ‘sport’. I think WCT events are kind of like Test cricket – grueling five day sporting spectacles with lots of sleepy periods occasionally punctuated with some riveting action.For those who don’t understand and appreciate cricket the protracted Test format can be tough viewing. Mostly for fans only. But the final question you pose could well be the future of the blue planet. If we last that long.
test cricket is a good analogy
Gabriel Medina seems off his game since his world title – unlucky, outmatched, other factors, all the above you think?
End of 2014 it seemed like he was just going to keep outcompeting everyone and keep winning titles