Opinion: “The beachbreak contest is dead!”

Goodbye Rio, Portugal, France and Snapper!

At some point this afternoon and tomorrow morning, the world’s best surfers (with the exception of the still-gravely wounded Kelly Slater) will split Lemoore for the four-hour drive or one hour PJ flight to LAX.

From there, it’s fourteen-and-a-half hours via Sao Paulo or Miami to Rio and an hour’s drive to Saquarema for a contest in a wave vastly inferior to the one they’d just travelled six thousand miles from.

Three turns in shifty, shitty beachbreaks will win heats compared to seven hits, an eight-second tube and an upside-down air. Days will go by with no surfing. Some days will run only half a round, others three. Viewers will come and go, mostly the latter.

#goodwavesmatter

Despite the sudden blackouts when the machine, covered by an electric blue shroud, didn’t work, the Founders’ Cup has slaughtered the dragon of these rambling inconsistent events in atrocious waves.

Pro surfing, in beachbreaks, is dead.

How can it be anything else?

I slept through most of the first day of the Founders’ Cup and woke to Filipe’s confected ten. I said so in an email to Matt Warshaw who replied, “And we’ve ruined the tuberide.”

As Longtom said in his piece yesterday, “I thought it not possible to score the tube. How could they? When you know it is coming you are basically scoring people for crouching down. They scored the tube.”

Hardly ringing endorsements from surfing’s sharpest minds.

But I know how easy it is to be on the wrong side of history.

To wit,

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.

“Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.” — Marty Cooper, inventor.

“Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, ‘Probably never.'” — David Pogue, The New York Times.

This was the first public reveal of Surf Ranch. And it was television perfect.

In and out in two days. Energetic. Decisive.

Compare and contrast to the drudgery of two weeks in Rio, in Portugal, in France, even Snapper.

In three years, maybe less, we’ll wonder how we ever persisted with those two-week waiting periods just to see surfers struggle with imperfectly calibrated waves.

Soon, a tour will exist and it will be Pools and Reefs, for nothing can replace the insanity of Teahupoo or Pipeline.

But, beachbreaks? They will be gassed.