WeWork tosses its keys into the wavepool bowl!
Let me ask you something. If you were a phenomenally rich surfer, a billionaire, say, and wave pools were starting to be a thing and you could buy any of ’em you wanted, where would you park your cash?
Surf Ranch?
It ain’t even a question.
I’d send my driver up to Lemoore in my Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II, tell him to kick down the cedar gates, piss in the jacuzzi, toss the WSL a cheque, tell Raimana to stoke up the ski, kick the engine of that train over and get the foil moving and be done with it.
But, as revealed by the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, the company part-owned by the Israeli-born billionaire, and surfer, Adam Neumann, which is called WeWork and makes its cash by renting office space, gussying it all up and sub-letting it, bought a “large stake” in Wavegarden last year.
Wavegarden.
The brave little pool that showed the world it was possible to create an artificial wave that didn’t suck. But had to watch as an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, Adam Fincham, and the greatest-surfer-ever, Kelly Slater, combined to build Surf Ranch.
This?
Or this?
Twice as good? Ten times?
How hard it is to judge such a thing.
As Matt Warshaw posited at the time of the Surf Ranch’s reveal, “The bit at the end of the vid where Kelly parks in the tube, all I could think of was, I’ve never seen anything like that except maybe Barra. And Barra is hot and sticky and crowded, and where’s my passport, and where do you stay, and who’s renting the car, while this wave . . . fuck! I don’t know. Do I want to surf it? I don’t know. Yes. Yes, of course I want to surf it.”
Now, the question here, of course, is whether Neumann bought the tank because of its commercial viability or because he got into the game too early?
And the Webber pool!
Surely, he’s heard of the mythical tank fermenting somewhere in Queensland.
Maybe he just bought in for the land and is going to build an office building he can rent to startups. WeWork serves La Colombe coffee and kombucha. Way more enticing than cold, burgery waves.
Wavegarden is the inertia
Slater pool is the wsl (actual)
Webber pool is beachgrit.com
That Japanese one that closed is waves mag
Occys new one is ASL
We need The Surfer’s Journal…
The Ocean is The Surfer’s Journal
I’m more a fanboy of the Wavegarden and its egalitarian bent than KSWC, it’s kinda like the Snapper to the elitism of Sumba’s Nihiwatu (or what Cloudbreak was) – not entirely happy with the analogy, just intellectually challenged. So many more waves in such a short space of time, more waves for more riders, over KSWC’s perfect, rare wave for the few.
Maybe GW will sweep in and save us all with his mythical beauty.
“gussying”…haven’t heard that since my Grandma died in 2001. Shall try and reuse it over the weekend, ta, Derek.
Easy! Which ever on I could skinny dip in and not come out looking like JJF chin..
For fuck sake. First they ruined the Maldives for me and now wave pools. Do they have no shame? Hopefully he gets stitched up a beauty because Wavegardens technology is about as advanced as pushing a fat bitch in at one end of the pool.
Yeah, but at least you could then make sweet love to her when she washes into the shallows. Consentually of course.
Different tech for different applications. Thinking surf parks to be one tank one tech is very short sighted. Not everyone wants to ride the biggest rollercoasters like I do. And the ride cycles on those are long as well like KSWC. Not to mention, there’s probably people wanting to do the finless standing wave. Lazy river between pools on your board. Water slides all over the place. Themes and stuff like at the Disney parks. Which brings me to another point. If these things aree so great why aren’t the theme parks that already exist buying in or long leasing land for a profit share?
Because they are already too busy trying not to go broke.
While anyone associated with surf is too busy trying to go broke
Except for Hawaii, where every hellman goes for broke.