Injection of government millions guarantees Australia surf gold in Tokyo!
Whatever you think of bureaucracies like Surfing Australia (and I’m looking square at you Maurice Cole), you gotta hand it to ’em: they sure do know how to squeeze shekels out of every tier of government.
Last week, Surfing Australia unveiled the seven-million dollar renovation of its pre-existing facility at Casuarina, half-an-hour or so from Byron Bay. The state government gifted three mill, the federal government two-and-a-half mill and Surfing Australia covered the final five hundred gees.
The joint has more foam pits, trampolines, climbing walls, skate ramps and so on than before, as well as underground parking, a boardroom, 100-seat auditorium etc.
As reported by tabloid The Sunday Telegraph,
And here it is: Australian surfing’s first-ever factory for Olympic gold medals.
The 4000 square metre, state-of-the-art centre for high performance will be used to coach Australia’s current world champions including Stephanie Gilmore and Tyler Wright.
Every day the new home of surfing excellence will be used to motivate the next wave of rookies towards the sport’s Olympic debut at the 2020 Tokyo games.
“We’re one step ahead of the rest of the surfing world, because I don’t know of any other surfing nation with a facility like this,’’ Mark Occhilupo, the 1999 world champion, said.
“If they are, they’re doing it in secret.’’
Australia’s past and present world champions including Joel Parkinson, Pam Burridge, Tom Carroll, Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew, Wendy Botha, Phyllis O’Donnell, Pauline Menczer, Beachley and Occhilupo gathered on Friday.
“This is incredible – the timing of this centre is perfect, with the coaches we have at Surfing Australia, I can’t see why we won’t win an Olympic gold medal,’’ Parkinson said. “To walk in this building and see an Australian Olympic gold medal would be an amazing feat.’’
And yet, despite the rivers of gold, there is sugar in the wound.
As the shaper Maurice Cole pointed out in one of his two opinion pieces on the subject (Read: “Bureaucracy killing Australian surfing!” and “Why (the fuck) is Australia’s Olympic squad training at Surf Ranch?”)
It’s a system that’s broken.
It’s not producing anything except salaries for the people at the top. They’re more interested in having shitty contests every weekend in every part of Australia.
But when do kids learn to surf? To really surf?
Meanwhile, the French kids, the Hawaiian kids, they’re out there charging. Killian Guerin just surfed Waimea. He’s fourteen. These kids can all surf top-to-bottom barrels no matter where. By the time they get to the WQS they’re ready to graduate to the WCT.
Surfing Australia, I feel, is a mediocre bureaucracy that produces mediocrity. We have some of the best free surfers in the world, Ando, Creed, Noa and we have that in bucketloads, but for the competitive kid, all they get prepared for is years and years on the QS.
Right now is the lowest Australian competitive surfing has ever been and the Olympics are coming up. God knows how we’ll go. Normally, I’d say Australia is odds-on for a medal but I fucking doubt it. We don’t have the depth of surfers. But we have all the infrastructure, all the academies, the six-million-dollar high-performance centre, all the bureaucracies.
Why has Brazil produced all these amazing, hungry surfers? Not because they have more talent. They do a few local contests, do the ISA, world pro juniors then they’re straight onto the WQS. We dick around for another two years, hold onto ‘em until they’re twenty. Meanwhile, teenage Brazilians are spending their winters in Hawaii.
Me?
I don’t think you can buy enough curved-screen televisions and inflatable bags and climbing walls. I mean, look at the best surfers in the world: Dane Reynolds, John John Florence, Filipe Toledo. They’re all products of coaching, yes?
Yes?
Concur with you on the first two borned, but Slates a by product of Curren.. he’ll admit it.. in his teens studied ever Curren video relentlessly….. Irons not sure Bruce maybe but Andy seemed to have a mission…and clearly was trianing/working hard to get it. Bruce seem to not give a dam.
So the Australia government is spending millions of dollars to win an Olympic medal which people don’t care about as much as they used to, in a sport that no one outside of surfing even knows is in the olympics. This is maybe the dumbest allocation of tax payer dollars I have ever seen in my life.
what about bus lanes?
Is that you Ray Hadley ? ( joking )
So as a junior surfer what happens if you win a state or national title? Nothing no sponsors around so they don’t knock on the door, no invites from SA for training sessions at the hpc, no invites to anything, no trophy, no contact from the state body acknowledging the result, no recognition other than what the kid generates for themselves via insti, so if a kid did have another sport he was good at there would be plenty of reasons to move on or drink beer
Setting hundreds of young lives up for failure. Good show
Exactly!
Greenie,
You nailed it.
I think everyone here is not see the big picture!
The ruling elite have no borders. The psychopath run Washington DC, Commonwealth, EU and every other country with money they print for free.
They just want us all to fight.
Divide and Concur!
Go surf fukkem
Surfing once a art/life for an individual.
Now it’s a socialized sport to distract the youth from what is really going on. Fukken slavery!
Look at the big brand, all fund owned by billionaires, the same people that run these sold out political government cocks. The ringleaders running the events. Same billionaires.
Don’t care how well you surf, the puppet master will run the entertaining for the masses as they see fit.
Surfing is not surfing any longer it a tool to distract the youth from the burden of the machine…while it grinds and eats them up and there children for dinner!
Games are rigged…all of them!
Consume …….Be Silent ……… Die ?
Okay here’s the Beach Grit peanut gallery plan for training Aussie world champions. Feel free to add because this is not just legally binding but an open source document.
1) Identify 10 newborn baby boys from diverse coastal areas of Australia, each of whom cries a little more than normal, seems to touch his nose reflexively, is favored by the better looking nurses, and just has the general air of being sort of an asshole. Make sure the ones from West Oz have weird names. Mail them and 2 million dollars in a medium-size crate to Bruce Irons on Kauai with no specific instructions.
There, an auspicious start! Now what to do with the remaining 8 mil?
Lots of Hot Nife! And earplugs for everyone! And one GMO shop dog.
Sounds great. Here in fully-legal Washington they’ve made marijuana crack that one smokes with a blow torch. Because apparently pot was previously broken. Who knew?
Anyway for a modest additional fee I can upgrade those hot knives to dabbing. LMK!
that is hilarious PNP…
Bruce as a mentor…. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Oh I think he could make a boy angry and confused enough to never want to get out of the water
All this bullshit that Australia isn’t producing future champions recalls the Mark Twain quote “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
First time I see a guy happy to cut his own fingers. He should pay attention at what he’s doing, especially with scissors…
I suppose it’s better than giving 500k to the greyhound racing / gambling industry.., which the Aus government has just done.
All a distraction…keep the slaves entertained.
Geez..Layne looks good with a little grey
Surf is cool.
yeah Brazil will!!!!
cos everyone knows that pampering makes kids hungry.
As Maurice and Longtom said, really having the facilities has done fuck all!! the extra 6 mill could have been spent on identifying QS/CT surfers who actually want to do it and actually sponsoring them for time in Hawaii, Fiji Ments etc – could be just flights accom – fly Bede with em whatever!!
They should have built a wavepool there to spend coin if they want gold medals – climbing walls foam pits fuck off – climb a fucking tree, skate in a park and go for airs in concrete bowls etc
but why the panic to send a 30 plus contingent to the K_Tub x 2 é years before the event in conditions that have Nothing to do with Chiba/Japan?
And Chiba real estate excellent value post-tsunami etc!
Facility is open to rec surfers DR….get in there.
I plotted Australias results at CT and QS level since the HPC opened in 2012 as part of my commitment to data driven journalism.
We seem to have cracked the code for spending more to do worse.
Ya just gotta hope like hell Bede can knock some sense into their spoiled sponno grom heads.
BUT – another 6 mill spent on fucking climbing walls and foam pits!!! Fuck me they will be even more spoilt. To me this will just breed more entitled little cunts in the water
Yea – I agree but – what I said before.
He’s got a cunt of a job. He’s probably realising that now.
I can’t imagine the reception would be very kind after BeachGrit published Maurice’s, valid I think, criticisms. Bureaucrats are very bad at self-examination. .
They become a law unto themselves , until they totaly fuck up and get reviewed by……bureacrats.
future générations of Australian surfers will bear the brunt of the Failures of the current Administation!
Bureaucrats are whores…and never call a whore a bureaucrat they hate that.
Well here is something else to add to it: the amount of money being spent by surf companies on team recruitment and development. In the past decade, it’s gone into precipitous decline. I suspect that’s a big reason for the fall-off. If you go back and look at SA team results at ISA world level events alone, you’ll see that the big years and big wins came when Steph, Julian etc etc were still representing Oz. At the time they were also benefiting from massive investment in corpo surf teams, complete with generational mentoring, constant trips to excellent surf zones, lots of wildcards at big QS and some CT events, etc etc. All that shit has evaporated in the wake of the post GFC surf industry wind-down. Kids are still getting sponno deals from surf cos but in much lower numbers and with way less support. Surfing Australia may be being cast as the blunderer here but truth is they are trying to pick up where the entire surf industry in Oz has pretty much left off, and I’m not even sure they know it.
Well, they will now, Nick.
That’s as concise and as clear as anybody could ever describe it.
I see a top heavy bureacracy , as a law unto itself , with a history of losing great coaches and producing very little in the way of results in the juniors , which means we are riding on the coat tails of a bygone era , and Australian surfings future never looked grimmer.
All this money has produced nada , and it looks like funds being spent for K_tub Olympic training , is promotion for the K_ tub by Starky using SA funds so he can Promote his new business venture.
Julien went thru the system , then took a couple of years off and went freesurfing at all the CT spots and Q/S picked up the TAB which was great when he signed with Nike……so good point Nick…..so if the Co,s are not helping out anymore and SA now has the responsibility for Australia,s surfing future .
fuck where are we heading as a once proud Surfing Nation as the Brazilian Tsunami keeps relentlessly advancing ?
Are champions made or do these sorts of interferences serve only to further a pointless dream for tour grinders and give administrators jobs? John John? Dane? Filipe? How many “high-performance camps” did they go to?
I think surfing champions are definitely made, but possibly not in the gym, and certainly not by administration.
John John was a hero in France and of the French surfing media when he was 9 . He was supposedly coming from the poorest white family in Hawaii but somehow the three boys and his mum were living it up in one of the more expensive countries on earth . Someone paid ? Like for Kanoa and Leo who went to every CT event from the age of 12 just to check it out because someone paid again . Australians are the first to complain about the tax payers’ money but none of us stood up for anyone who tried to change the system and introduce real change like with the Super Mining Tax ?
¨What we are talking about here is Government spending on the Olympics , where more money is being allocated for surfing gold, than say the whole Winter Olympics team ($6.8m)….so far all the $,s have failed to produce any surfer of signifigance , and now more of the same.
Starky knows how to raise money (paid $300k pa) but is responsible for the decline in Aust ‘s competitive surfing results , so the spiral down continues and the money keeps pouring in , and the bureacracy gets bigger!
One could argue the north shore with that local crew looking out for ya is the ultimate high-performance surf camp.
Problem is that the pecking order is controlled by the corporate interest with money… many of the thugs (not naming but you can guess whom they might be give favors to top with Corp surfers for $$ ..more waves … invited to the best local exclusive spot…hell you get it, if you’ve surfed the globe you know the racket.
absolutely!
First you have the raw talent , its then which pathway you take to develop the talent.
At present there is a clear pathway that does not prepare gifted surfers for a CT career, and that is the SA program for juniors that is all about quantity of events in shitty waves , and no real preperation for surfing better waves.
Once upon a time Australia had the best juniors in all size waves , but SA destroyed that , to where now the phrase ¨high performance Camps¨ actually means, ¨high performance Jobs!
All the money was to produce jobs…. for our leaders…jobs for them and little for the common man.
I’m surprised anyone thinks an Olympic medal still has cache. Say Australia gets lucky, real lucky, at Chiba and they win a gold. Including the new clubhouse, the trips to Surf Ranch and whatever else, it’ll have twenty-million dollar price tags swinging off it.
Lets say Australia doesnt get a medal , there,s a review of why and of of course it will show that SA never had the results/ crediblity, Under Starky to produce champions , and in fact the more $,s spent the results just kept spiralling down , so the 2024 Olymics are we already doomed because of the pathetic junior program?
Even that is kinda interesting. Take a look at the new “niche” Olympic sports and you’ll see a coupla things. The first is that they are very good at helping create a sort of one-off Superperson — Shaun White being the outstanding example. The second is that they rarely seem to benefit the overall culture of the sport or activity or whatever; the snowboard industry is in possibly more shit than the surf industry right now, and shows no sign whatsoever of having been assisted by its Olympic status. The third is that twenty million dollars in this context is laughable. In the decade or so of pro surfing’s Golden Years, the period in which it acted as almost the sole marketing mechanism for the surf industry and possibly the only period in which it made any kind of economic sense — the late 90s to the late Noughties — it helped drive over $100 billion in sales across the board and saw the inexorable rise of everything from surf schools to the vast increase in surf tourism, to the general outsourcing of mass manufacturing to eastern Asia of everything from surfboards to those shitty little plastic waxcombs we all have skittering about in the back of our cars. Indeed your almost-benefactor spent more than twenty million dollars buying your ex-website along with a couple of other media properties only four years ago. That twenty million has long since been flushed away, but who even remembers it? Today, people are busy spending more than twenty million dollars building a single fucken wave pool, hoping against hope that they won’t fall into the classic theme park holes before they sell the thing off to some poor bastard with a Dream. In that context, an Olympic gold looks like pretty good value — at least for the winner.
Nick its voices with knowledge and experience that give Grit the valued plateform to make the surfing experience worth living….and generation to come.
Thanks heaps,
From the Bush
No worries Bushman. Sometimes I think to myself, surfing! what a waste my life has been, but then I think about the strange times we’ve been able to observe and take in and think, no, it’s actually been very interesting
We were very fortunate to grow up in surfing at a time when soceity hadn’t completely tightened down on the individual…..in 30 years from 50’s to 80’s we watched surfing go from a log to a plane. From going straight to redirecting energy in the opposite direction. All because a few men did not want to work 9-5. They hung out on the beach surfed, fished lived in nature… pushed boundaries that few ever dreamed of living a waterman’s life. This era pushed the traveling individual surfer to find new locations to be alone with nature. They were the first buyers of ocean front property when you couldn’t give these locations away… look now most expensive. They wanted nothing to do with thier parents path of life. They new soceity living was a racket.
Now I’d say it’s become a lifestyle Big Corp sees it has to control….and the individual is the enemy they can’t control.
The Machine is the masses!
OK, so pro surfing privatised it’s gains and now the taxpayer is picking up the slack on the loss.
Nicko,
You need to redifine your definition of:
“GFC Surf Industry wind-down”.
It’s the global takeover by the Money Changers. A planned global takedown.
Look at the Surf Industry owners now and 20 years ago….many and now few…all billionaires!
Games is rigged!
So how do you rate $,s spent vs results , or do you have any idea what KPI, are being used if any?
I think those are questions for Andrew Stark to answer.
ha can,t you ask him and while you re down ther ask him did he use Olympic $,s to Promote the WSL/K-tub so he can then squeeze more Govt, $,s to finance his new business?
Ok let’s look at it slightly differently . Noa Deane is getting paid a shit load because he couldn’t beat Matt Banting as a junior and was forced to become a free surfer ? Austrailia surfing industry loses control of professional surfing and Australian surfers are dropped after a bad year or an injury since 2007 ?( Banting, Kennedy , Melling etc while a Nat Young or Brett Simpson lingers on , not to mention Europeans like Aritz or a Duru who spent years on the QS ) The last 2 guys to qualify ( Wade and Connor ) who have gotten results are those paid a lot less than heroes of Instagram and stab and the the once strong Australian Surfing Industry
who sadly failed when they got their very handsomely privately funded chance . So now we are all complaining about a government spending money ? A government is not a business , it’s supposed to spend (or create) money with a vision for future growth or success and bail out those who fucked up like the US Banks and even Australian Surfing ?
Was that supposed to be a justification for govt investment in pro surfing?
More of a pissed rant after a big day out in the sun but if the government wants to spend money on surfing I personally would be the last to complain..
We just st gotta make sure it’s (the money) getting down to the kids, not used for building big buildings that the kids can’t afford to go to
Summer sun. How I miss it.
Fukken chemtrails … everywhere controlled weather the new normal.. don’t look up.
Plenty of other sites to comment on if you want to go down that path Bushman… anti-depressive ultra hard surf candy is the catch phase on the banner here.
Ok…. feel good from here on. Wow
September always comes .
Government gets into anything….it’s to control it.
You think the elite big money and the government are any different?
If so I’ve got some land in Syria to sell you.
Corporate Surf is fully in the hands of the elite.
Who are they…he whom you can not be critical to.
the problem is when money is given to support a sport , with no KPI’s , and you can actually see that there is a detrimental affect on the sport !
the lust for a medal becomes an emotional charged project without any consideration of the cause and affect on future générations , as all the $’s go to supporting the organisation and an Olympic medal ‘ which at this point , Australia does not have the talent on tour to train!
I don’t like trusting numbers. if I did I would have to go on a diet.
Layne’s lookin good.
Ummm, sun smart.
And her doughy-faced banker friend too, now there’s a tall drink of peeled overripe eggplant, meeeeeeooow!
Huntington comp – good prep for the Land of the Rising Sun.