World tour stop number nine, the Quiksilver Pro
France, officially kicks off tomorrow and the people raise day old
baguettes and chipped glasses of room temperature Louis Latour
Chateau Corton Grancey Grand Cru to the crisp blue sky. Et Voila!
Oui oui bonsoir! Huhuhuhu!
I bought a pair of new Louis Vuitton moccasins to celebrate.
They are the most lovely peach hue and very supple. Perfect for
treading where Cesar Chavez once trod while demanding rights for
the abused migrant grape pickers. Right around the fertile lands of
greater Lemoore, California.
And on this note, I have news to report about the upcoming
People’s Boycott of Final’s
Day France. You remember, of course, that like Cesar
Chavez, I am taking your troubles upon my shoulders. That the
bourgeoisie World Surf League shut you out of Kelly’s Surf Ranch.
That inside the cattle-themed exclusive surf pool the elites
toasted Michelob Ultra and mocked you.
Mocked you.
While you sat at home trying to discern what was happening
through Kanoa Igarashi’s little brother’s Instagram feed.
Kanoa Igarashi’s little brother’s Instagram feed.
The very depths of mockery.
Well, like Cesar Chavez, I am demanding your rights. I am
demanding that you be treated with dignity and respect. I am
demanding that your attention is not to be taken for granted. I am
demanding that the World Surf League bends its ear to you, the
people. Begging for your forgiveness. Offering free “It’s On”
pocket tees on a first come, first served basis and never shutting
you out of a surf event again.
And the only thing power listens to is power. So the surf media
is locking arms and boycotting the final’s day of the Quiksilver
Pro France. Oh how the World Surf League will weep when they
realize that the only people who care about professional surfing
are the surfers themselves. Oh how it will balance the scales and
put you back where you belong.
Stab is for sure in. The most iconic publication in our
world, Surfer, is in too. Surfline sounds like
they are very much in. Marcus Sanders, editorial director and the
most important surf journalist in today’s game, wrote, “You’re a
rascal, Chas Smith. Incorrigible.”
Incorrigible like Cesar Chavez.
And Malcom X.
Oh don’t build a statue for me yet. But if you want to get a
design going I think Damien Hirst would do a very good job.
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WSL Fashion: Dress like a surf champ!
By Chas Smith
Date night? Wear a t-shirt that reads, "It's
on!"
Did you wake up this
morning, go to your closet and feel depressed? Same old
khaki, navy polo, dull pocket tee, charcoal grey fleece that makes
you want to get back into bed forever? That makes you just want to
totally give up?
Oh I get it.
I mean, not really but can imagine
this happens to you and frequently. Clothing today is just
uninspired right? It’s a simple reflection of bland conservative,
play it safe, do enough to get by but not enough to shake anything
up. Right?
Try the Jeffery Tee in heather grey!
It says, “You know… when I’m not in the cube I’m in the
barrel…”
Date night? The Pocket Throwdown Tee
in navy is the only way to go. Your gal will read “It’s on!”
emblazoned over your heart and know that it certainly
is.
Headed out with the boyz? The Quad
Squad Tee will set you just right. Its subtle black WSL logo that
the great David Carson called “positively hideous” is delicately
set on a black and will generate oohs and aaahs from
everyone!
Chilly? The WSL Spray Jacket will
have you feeling just like Pete Mel in no time. Dashing, debonair,
in the mood to get real lewd!
Throwing a summer house party?
Nothing says, “Has anyone seen my lost shaker of salt?” like the
Home Grown Woven Shirt.
I could go on all day here, that’s
how complete the World Surf League clothing offering is, but I must
stop for now because I’m buying matching WSL Men’s Flannels for me
n Nick Carroll. And a Supertubos Tee for Matt Warshaw. And a Dawn
Patrol Tee for Derek Rielly. And a Black Hole Tee for Steve
Shearer. And a Dark Wave Fleece for J.P. (since he lives in
Scotland).
Just call me Santa Chas!
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WSL Head Judge on “Miracle” Nine, Raining
Tens!
By Derek Rielly
The fabulous Rich Porta explains everything.
Two weeks ago, if you’ll remember, there was a
commotion regarding Jordy Smith’s “miracle nine-pointer”
at Trestles. The consensus was, how can a few ordinary turns
surrounding one full-blooded hack on a three-foot wave be an almost
perfect ride?
The people asked, is the fix in? Is Jordy the world champ
almost-elect?
Now I ain’t one for conspiracies.
The Saudis cooked the Towers and the Pentagon; man did indeed
bounce on the moon. White lines in the sky isn’t the government
gassing us. Fluoride, oowee, it makes teeth strong!
As for judging, once you’ve had a taste of life inside the tower
(it’s very serious and from what I can tell unimpeachable), and you
understand the concept of scaling heats and that you can’t just
dive into one score from a day’s play and expect to get why it hit
that number, there becomes very little to surprise.
But why listen to me?
Defending WSL judging feels like coming out as a conservative or
discussing the divisiveness of identity politics. You want to get
peanuts thrown at you by your pals? Tell ‘em you think the judges
nail it.
Yesterday, I spent an instructive hour on the telephone talking
to the WSL’s head judge, Rich Porta. I wanted to know, is it
raining tens more than usual this year in the quest for more
clicks? Should there be a “chicken-skin” score reserved for
once-in-a-year waves like Filipe’s at J-Bay? Is Shane Beschen’s
idea that backhand surfing have a scoring cap if the turns are good
not excellent got merit? Is the “scale” a dumb idea that
artificially inflates good surfing on bad waves? And Jordy’s wave,
how’d it hit nine?
Rich, who has been the men’s head judge for seven years, is
fifty-three years old, lives on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula,
rides either six-o Mayhem Sub-Drivers or thirty-one litre JS Monsta
Boxes, and keeps a stash of guns at Sunset Beach. He loves to surf,
loves to talk surf, and, more than anything, loves to light up on
the nature, and structure, of surf contest judging.
BeachGrit: First, how should a punter approach
lounge-room scoring? How can he up his success rate?
Rich: My advice is don’t get hung up on what you think the score
should be. Judging is a comparison from one wave to the next. I say
to my guys at the start of the day, you can get differences of
opinion, it’s subjective. But whether you think that wave was a
four or a seven, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the very
next wave and the wave after that. Did the person in blue win the
heat or did the person in read win the heat? It’s solely a
comparison between red and blue’s best two waves. It amuses me when
people say, surely that was an eight-five when they got a seven.
Don’t worry about it, what matters is, in comparison to the five,
was it two points and not three points better? And you’re judging
the categories of the scale. That’s what goes through a judge’s
mind. Good surfing in our scale is between six and eight. Low good,
say, is six to six five. A lot of scores on those low end of each
scale, good or excellent, a seven-eight, five-eight, on the screen,
are waves the judges think are not-quite good or not-quite
excellent surfing. So those point-eights, and point-twos and
threes, you’ll hear the numbers and think ‘That’s a weird number to
drop.’ But they’re crucial numbers. It’s demonstrating that it’s
nearly there or not good or not excellent.
BeachGrit: How about the claim you’ll turn a heat on the
final wave if you feel like the surfer got a bum steer earlier in
the heat?
Rich: A lot of the time we’re in soundproof booths. We don’t
know what’s required for a surfer to turn a heat. If the surfer
needs a seven-three to win and he gets a seven-three it’s what the
wave is worth. I get asked by other officials from other sports, if
we get influenced. If you came into the tower you’d realise these
guys don’t get influenced by… anything. That’s why they’re the
best in the world. They can be watching tens going down in the best
waves in the world and there’s no emotion, no smiles, no
exclamation marks, no talking. You could see the best wave come
through at Chopes, ten foot, a wave only a handful of guys in the
world could paddle into, and it’d look like the guys were watching
chess. You don’t get to sit in these chairs without having that
capability of doing the job when all the shit goes down around you.
There’s too much at stake.
BeachGrit: Do you get sad when readers are
unkind?
Rich: When it gets thrown in my face, when it’s vicious, I
think, if you’re that off it, just turn the dial to whatever you
want to watch. I don’t get why people get so upset. It’s that sort
of sport. A best mate of mine on the Goldie heard a world champ
tell a kid that he should stop carrying on about losing heats. He
said, you picked the wrong sport if you hate losing. You’re gonna
lose. Every surfer in the world loses a lot of heats. And if you
lose your mind about it, you might wanna choose a different sport.
Sometimes we get splits with the judges and that’s the subjective
nature of the sport. It’s not a race and it’s not a goal.
BeachGrit: There’s a lot of chatter that tens should be
released only in exceptional cases. That we should remember a ten
for years, like we remember 100-ponters from the X Games. Albee
Layer said, “If one of the lowest-rated surfers on tour can catch
not the best wave of the day and do not his very best surfing
and still get an excellent score, no one has any incentive to learn
anything new.” How do you respond?
Rich: Tens are a cracker, right. Damned if you do, damned if you
don’t. There are exceptions, like Filipe’s wave at J-Bay, but even
then… even then… people didn’t understand the wave
because of what he did. There were people we spoke to he said,
there’s no way that wave was a ten. He didn’t utilise every turn,
didn’t do this, didn’t do that. At J-Bay there was nine, I think,
tens. Then we turned up at Trestles, no tens, Tahiti, one ten, when
it went onshore and Gabriel had a wave that, compared to everything
else, was better. I don’t like to see that many tens. That’s just
me. We joke among ourselves that we have guys who are ten spoilers,
they’re the ones on the nine-eights. But when it’s that much better
than anything else around, where do you go? Twelve? Filipe’s wave
at J-Bay, versus the other tens then that’s a twelve. There was
discussion after J-Bay that there was too many tens. But the surf
was amazing. Go to Trestles, no tens.I’m not going to turn around
to five guys and change a ten. The five best judges in the world.
Everyone gets stuck into us ab out the scoring but this crew,
currently, is superior to any judging panel I’ve seen in the
history of me doing it. We’ll argue sometimes, we’ll analyse scores
and a couple might argue over whether a wave was a seven or a nine,
and we learn from it.
BeachGrit: Talk to me about Jordy’s “miracle
nine-pointer” at Trestles. Was it a case of the television
flattening the size of the wave. Live, was it vastly superior to
any of Filipe’s?
Rich: We got a lot of grief for Jordy’s nine at Trestles. That
was a really strong, well-surfed wave, and you know, a nine, in
real life. It was true because it was such a good wave. On the
first replay, they missed the first turn and everyone watching it
live freaked out. Nine? What? For three turns? Well, there
was…four…turns. That was interesting because out of that contest
that’s what everyone jumped on. One score. You’re all talking about
one score and there’s between 900 and 1000 waves scored in a men’s
CT event. Yeah, it was a score in a final, everyone’s focussed on
it, but don’t lose your shit over it because you think it was an
eight and it was a nine. We only use the replay to check, say, the
nuance of a bottom turn and we don’t get distracted by vision
because the TV’s compress the wave. Waves tend to look the same
size. That’s the thing. If someone’s ripping into me about a score,
I’ll ask: where you there? On the beach? Well don’t worry about it.
What you saw on TV was a distorted reality. The coverage is amazing
but it still doesn’t give you the depth. It can’t. Cloudbreak and
Chopes are a classic example of that. When you watch it on the TV
it doesn’t show you the depth of the playing field. The camera’s so
locked in on the guy, you miss what’s coming at him, you’re not
seeing thirty metres down the wave, what’s wrapping down the reef,
and that’s the difference.
BeachGrit: Has there been any talk about changing the
way waves are scored? With a ten-point ceiling a guy could ride the
greatest wave in history, his back up is, say, a three and he gets
beaten by a couple of dull sixes and a bits. I was thinking about
this with Filipe, is there any mood to add what the Hui called “a
chicken skin” score?
Rich: Let’s say you’re sitting there, and Filipe’s wave is
better than all the other tens and you drop an eleven on it, you
change the game, you change the rules. What if the next wave is
better? Where do you go then? You’re going down a path of greys in
a sport that’s already got enough ambiguity. We’ve had that
discussion with a lot of different people. About having a reset
button and every score drops by a point. Other tens become nines,
nines become eights. As a judge over the years, I wished that
existed. But can you imagine the guy who had a ten and a nine and
we suddenly reset it?
BeachGrit: Short-term pain for long-term gain, no? Your
hand hovering the reset button would be terrifically exciting.
Great tension on a live broadcast.
Rich: All sport has to have parameters. And we live by the
point-one to ten-point scale. But I can feel goosebumps justing
reliving Filipe’s wave in mu mind. I’d never seen a wave surfed
like that at J-Bay. It never seen a wave surfed like that in my
mind, that’s for sure. As a judge you enjoy those game-changing
waves. If you’d been in that room, you would’ve seen five guys
typing tens into their computers then…saying… ah… can
we watch the replay because it was that good.
BeachGrit: Let’s talk about the scale. I know how it
works, and as long as everyone is scored within the heat to that
scale, no one loses. But what about when, within that scale,
someone is scored a nine, say, for a couple of ordinary turns or an
almost ten, Jordy, Trestles, Owen, Rio, doesn’t it render stats,
scores, meaningless? Couldn’t, for example, in shitty waves,
everyone gets threes, in a contest with great waves, nines and
tens? Is that unrealistic?
Rich: We go from heaving slabs at Teahupoo to fluff and bunnies
at Trestles. It’s a whole different sport that’s unfolding. When
Chopes is on, guys have to paddle down the ledge at ten feet and
then they fly to three-foot waves at the softest peak in them
world. What happens at Tahiti has no relation to what happens at
Trestles or Portugal or France. All that stays the same is the
criteria. You compare red’s wave to blue’s wave and that’s it.
BeachGrit: Shane Beschen made a point yesterday saying,
“To further push the level and excitement of surfing within the WSL
there should be a points cap on ‘good’ surfing. A combination of
‘good’ turns should never be rewarded an ‘excellent; score.
If competitors know they can reach an excellent score with good
surfing they will not take unnecessary risk.”
Rich: Well, that’s another thing. Shane’s got his own concepts.
He’s a great surfer, a coach, and those parameters will come in
time, especially with the Wave Ranch. We spoke to Kelly a lot about
it. It was amazing to see the surfers improve after time in the
pool. Then you can move into those parameters like a snowboard
half-pipe contest, height, rotation, all that stuff. But the ocean
doesn’t allow you to do that. If you nail the best five backhand
turns you’ve ever seen, but they’re standard combos, then why
shouldn’t it be an excellent score? It was amazing surfing even if
he didn’t do an air or throw the fins. He still blew that wave to
pieces. But because he didn’t do what is deemed an “excellent”
manoeuvre he can’t get an excellent score? Shane’s method would box
surfers into surfing a certain way. They’d go, here’s this
manoeuvre, now give me an excellent score.
BeachGrit: What’s the dumbest criticism you’ve ever
received?
Rich: That we can conspire a win over and over and create a
world champion. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read.
It’s unfathomable that five guys who don’t talk to each, who don’t
know the score that is required, are going to make so and so the
world champion. That gets me going. All we care about is putting
down the right score for the right surfer. If you look at the
Hurley Pro, for example, how many guys do they have on their team?
Ten, eleven? Odds are a Hurley guy is going to win the contest.
They’ve got a third of the field!
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Jordy Smith: “The best of both
worlds!”
By Chas Smith
Does Surf Snowdonia offer something Kelly's Wave
Ranch does not?
As dutifully reported here last night, current
Jeep Yellow Jersey Leaderboard Leader Jordy Smith surfed in
Snowdonia and, from the looks of it, did not have fun. But looks
can be deceiving. One man’s mash is another man’s banger as they
say so let’s go straight to the Big South African for his unsullied
accounting:
The surf has been quite small in California so it was good
to ride several waves in a short period of time. The wave is very
different to waves in the ocean but it does offer a few fun
sections to do some turns.
It’s a pretty crazy place to be honest. I look around and
it’s just surrounded by mountains and lots of greenery which is
beautiful.
I’m excited to be part of a time when artificial wave
lagoons are launching across the world.
The technology is continually improving and this is just the
beginning. The wave has been really fun.
They’ve been running it at 90 second intervals, so you can
really get a lot of reps which is something rare which you don’t
get in the ocean.
You don’t usually get the opportunity to ride that many
waves on such a consistent basis, and so yes obviously with the
wind swirling around we’ve had some onshore conditions, some
offshore conditions. So yeah, the best of both worlds.
A ringing endorsement! And, as teased in the subhead, yes Surf
Snowdonia does appear to have something that Kelly’s lagoon does
not. Beautiful surroundings. A pastoral dream so complete that I
would imagine Lord Byron himself would prefer the Wave Garden over
the Wave Ranch.
Poets, by all rights, should turn their noses up at the stink
coming from Central California and instead craft their sonnets
underneath fair Wales’ stony sky.
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Watch: Jordy Smith make sad little
turns!
By Chas Smith
It's bangers and mash at Surf Snowdonia!
In the wave pool arms’ race Kelly Slater’s is
like provocatively nuclear powered Donald J. Trump and Surf
Snowdonia in Wales is like the nostalgic Winston Churchill. Do you
even remember? The brave little pool came online maybe five years
ago and wowed us with its potential.
Little did we know that all the technology would turn completely
oppressive.
Well, Surf Snowdonia would like everyone to know that while it
may not barrel and it may not get Shaun Tomson openly weeping that
it is still around and has World Number 1 Jordy Smith doing… doing…
turns!
Let’s watch objectively. Does Jordy look sad?
He seems to look sad.
And the wave?
Well, if I’m going to be totally honest the wave doesn’t look
very good but the picturesque homes in the background along with
the countryside makes me hungry for bangers and mash.
Jordy didn’t really banger or mash the wave though.
But I would personally take Surf Snowdonia over my ex-wife. That
I can tell you honestly.
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros