The comparisons are brutal!
Oh how J-Bay fed our open mouths with tens. Eight of ’em!
You can watch every single ten below (thanks to The Inertia for finding the clip).
But what’s gonna strike you is that not every so-called perfect ride is created equal.
Compare the ecstasy of Filipe’s double-oop, multi-hack wave with the beautiful, if not exactly white-knuckle, surfing of Frederico Morais.
Of course, as was once revealed to me in the judging tower, heats are judged according to the conditions and all that matters is consistency within that heat. i.e. if you’re throwing everything eights, then a markedly better ride is going to steal a ten. Similarly, if nothing makes you dizzy and a surfer’s gotta work like hell to get a six, you might throw out one ten a year.
But it don’t matter. Consistency does.
And, therefore, there can never be any meaningful comparisons of tens throughout an event, as this clip demonstrates.
Just as the entire 36 surfer, four-day format has proven to be utterly unworkable, J-Bay the rarest of exception, a judging format that renders any sort of heat by heat or contest by contest comparison deprives history of markers.
Unless.
As I cribbed from a copy of The New Yorker a year ago after a similar raft of tens, maybe the answer lies with gymnastics.
Gymnastics was all about the perfect 10-pointer, a mix of artistry and athleticism, but then in 2006 they tweaked the game for a system that rewarded difficulty over everything.
Ten pointers? Gone!
Was there a consensus?
Not exactly.
“It’s crazy, terrible, the stupidest thing that ever happened to the sport of gymnastics,” the gymnastics supercoach Bela Karolyi told the New York Times. “How could they take away this beautiful, this most perfect thing from us, the one thing that separated our sport from the others?”
Reeves Wiedeman in The New Yorker explains:
“By the turn of the century the limitations of the ten-point scale had begun to stunt the sport’s growth. To score well, a gymnast simply had to meet a minimum level of difficulty and not screw up. Gold medals were being given to safe routines that limited mistakes, while gymnasts who pushed the sport’s boundaries received no reward… The new system, laid out in the Code of Points, is an open-ended one, in which gymnasts are given two marks: one for execution, worth up to ten points, and another for difficulty, which is theoretically infinite.”
Change gymnast to surfer and you start to feel it, right?
Should there be two scores, each from its own panel of judges, given to a ride?
The first, say, is the usual, best moves in the most critical part of the wave, combos, speed and flow etc. The second, is a score given to the technical difficulty of the moves, of the wave.
Do you say yes?
Why don’t all you guys get off your butts–stop crying and get off the sofa and go catch a real wave and try and remember what surfing is really about– riding your own waves….
I’m all about athletes celebrating in the heat of the moment,but claiming every good score and staring at the judge’s tower is becoming pathetic. Do you see Steph Curry glare at the referee’s or tap dance after a miracle three pointer? Maybe a fist pump and smile, but after that, he carries on and puts his game face back on. Someone should edit a mash up of every claim made this year on the WSL! That would be comedy!
The WSL did a mash up edit. They showed it on the intro of the last two days. They definitely weren’t trying to take the comedy route but that’s how it came across. But not funny ha ha comedy, more silent film with Charlie Medina’s legacy as father of the claim game.
Steph Curry is notorious for his claims.
Bad example. hahaha damn you Merman! lol hrrmmmmmm I guess people claim in just about everything. You gotta do what you gotta do to be, “the boy”.
That’s why I love JJF. He almost never claims his 10s. Humility of a true champion
This change is more overdue than a razor on Flippy’s dayglo chin. Judging needs to move to separating out technical difficulty and artistic execution/expression because surfers are going to always stick more and more difficult tricks (imagine a progressive sport actually progressing…). It may also allow us to weight the women differently in this regard to the men (more emphasis on artistic execution for example).
This also allows us a clear way to not reward poo-stance execution, even though the technical difficulty was high.
Toledo’s was the only real 10 , FFS , Occy never got 10 in his whole career , Elko got x 1 , WSL hands out 10’s like boiled lollies from a trenchcoat !
but think of the excitment it drums up in non surfers!
They screwed the scale way up at J-Bay and it fucks the judging completely. When they start throwing out high 9s and 10s all over the place there’s nowhere to go. Its a constant criticism but they seem to fall into the trap every time the surf is epic – scoring the waves not the surfing.
Frederico’s 10 that won him the heat Vs JJ was the best example. A bunch of good turns (one he almost fell off on) on an awesome wave but they should have had the scale dialed way down so it was only a low 9 at best, and some of the other 9s down in the 8 range. There should have been room at the end of that heat if JJF pulled a miracle wave like Filipe’s to win it, but he couldn’t because he was combo’d because of the 10. He got three 9s and was combo’d.
10’s should be nearly unattainable. Filipe got one. Everyone else just did some nice turns and a barrel here or there on unbelievable waves.
Yeah spot on!!
The problem with an alley oop 10 is that toledo sped raced down the wave missing sections to hit!! a 10 should be almost unattainable as you said, and not a 10 if you basically haven’t milked the absolute shit out of every bit of available wave face
The main question is…did anyone make it through a heat undeservedly? No, the judging system is working, but they did very nearly paint themselves into a corner.
I don’t think the 10 point system is broken. The judges just got the scale wrong in one heat. It happens. It’s no reason for emergency crisis talks and mass hysteria.
JUST CALM THE FK DOWN EVERYBODY!!
I’m perplexed as to how those last two were 10s. The judges blow the scale out way too quickly as soon as the surf is good
Agreed. Morais doesn’t make all of his turns properly. Only his first turn on his 10-wave was impeccable. He is slow at the bottom, and moreover shows NO VARIETY.