If you are going to broadcast to the world and call it sport then you need at least the illusion of fairness and transparency. 

After breathing the rarefied air from yesterday’s dizzying climb it was a buzzkill to have go back to basecamp and watch the field of honest journeyman get crushed by boulders they had no hope of summiting with. Three days in and the affair has blended into a quagmire of instantly forgettable rides.

The scoreboard takes an age to update which meant the mind had to loose itself from the previous ride to focus on the current one. That, and the bombardment of advertising between each ride, made for a particular psychological challenge to stay engaged. I mean in a wave by wave fashion which gives the event some meaning as sport.

If there was one thing to be grateful for in the Run Three reset it  was Miggy Poops being able to elevate himself from the muck of mediocre rides. He rode a left and a right gracefully, beautifully. Like other surfers the camera cut to the dewey eyed babe watching nervously on the …..shoreline?…presumably his wife added some kind of emotional intensity to the broadcast.

After three days of having waves of uncommon length and perfection implanted in my brain I feel a curious sense of hunger. The return on investment for the viewer, in terms of memorable moments, is low, even by pro surfing standards.  The prodigality of the ocean has been supplanted by the stinginess of the machine. We’ve seen a lot, but we’ve barely seen anything of substance. Mikey Wright spoke of feeling like he’d had only half a bite of an apple. Judging from the shellshocked and wistful pressers with the losing contestants that must have been a common reaction.

If there was one thing to be grateful for in the Run Three reset it  was Miggy Poops being able to elevate himself from the muck of mediocre rides. He rode a left and a right gracefully, beautifully. Like other surfers the camera cut to the dewey eyed babe watching nervously on the …..shoreline?…presumably his wife added some kind of emotional intensity to the broadcast. 

The tub had, presumably by some common consent, become a “basin”. Pete Mel got assigned the job of pitchman and took to hustling merch with a feverish intensity. Mobile phone cases, WSL merch, a muddy pond with blow-up swans. Pete took to it all with admirable sincerity.

It was becoming hard to separate one rider from another. Style is exposed in the ocean. Heightened. In the basin it is flattened. They surf a little less like themselves. If the ocean is a karma sutra where the range of positions is infinite to the imaginative lovers the basin seems more like jackhammer sex with an unresponsive doll. It gets the job done for the participant no doubt, but to the onlooker it lacks grace. (Editor’s note: Just read Jen See, she says it so much better).

Only Italo made it look like he was having fun. He loosened up the program and dished up a left spiced with a pair of cleanly made airs and a ton of repertoire. This was minutes after Pete Mel almost burst a haemerrhoid telling us judges wanted innovation, progression, risk etc etc. 

Except they didn’t. They just didn’t.

You can create your own walled reality and do what you want with it – from Rockefeller to William Randolph Hearst to Gates, Zuckerberg, Page et al, that’s the American dream – but if you are going to broadcast it to the world and call it sport then you need at least the illusion of fairness and transparency.

Kelly proved that in short order. Riding a left that was, I can’t even describe it, except to say it might have been state of the art in 1998 but it wasn’t in 2018 and was scored a full point and change over Italo. Conveniently, along with his 8.5 from Day 1 Kelly was now rocketed up to second place on the leaderboard. 

You can create your own walled reality and do what you want with it – from Rockefeller to William Randolph Hearst to Gates, Zuckerberg, Page et al, that’s the American dream – but if you are going to broadcast it to the world and call it sport then you need at least the illusion of fairness and transparency. 

Kelly’s overscore made the Surf Ranch look less level playing field for all and more private fiefdom, administered by opaque decrees designed to make the King look clothed in gold. This is a man who has claimed injury has prevented him from surfing all events except those in his private basin, and who will probably be granted the injury wildcard next year in spite of it. Italo’s injured hamstring has been discussed ad naseum, Kelly’s busted hoof carries the mystique of the Turin shroud. As inviolable as the Koran. From any viewing angle, it don’t look right.

Grown-up sports have independent broadcasters and commentary teams and integrity units and judiciaries and other accoutrements aimed at least giving an impression of accountability. That’s how folks believe that it’s at least semi-legit. Pro surfing believes in back slapping and bubbles and magical thinking, as long as someone else picks up the tab. 

This confusion turned to disgruntlement and boiled over in Kolohe’s post heat presser. Kolohe accused the judges of “playing mind tricks” and rewarding safety surfing and sitting in a barrell that carried with it no risk. “I thought they wanted to see risk,” he said.

So did I Brother, so did I. I thought he had legitimate beef to have not made the cut. Certainly, his two wave total should have bested Kelly.

The high point of the day was supplied by Julian Wilson. He greased a rooftop landing on a lofted reverse on the left then exclaimed a static free right with a monster slob grab. His was the counter-factual to Kelly’s insider trading. No pre-trip warm-ups. He settled the nerves by “not watching anything”. A quick skate to warm-up then boom.

The WSL site and app crashed for the final two runs with Medina and Filipe. I clicked to Facebook feed. The Oceania audience rocketed up from 2600 to 2900 which indicated 300 hardy souls were tuned to the WSL webcast. Facey had no scores, no leaderboard and a failed audio sync. Angry face emojis sailed skywards through the screen and made surreal bedfellows with Toledo’s high-as-fuck-but-just-failed flip.

Anyway you measure it the numbers look pitiful. 

The swolled field should have been thinned sooner allowing extra runs for the Final day. Eight man field left, four women. That should be a clear cut demonstration of winner and loser if judges can decide on what is good surfing 2018, not looking into the rearview mirror and pining for a day long gone.

The elevation in performance showed the brutal truth that pro surfing cannot sustain a 34 man Tour. There is much dead wood to be culled. 

Apart from flushing toilets and dentistry I’m not really a gal who gets moist over human engineering marvels. The cosmic fact of a watery planet with solar-driven real waves is enough intellectual and spiritual cud for me to spend a lifetime chewing on.

The last human achievement that really lit me up – in a how the fuck did they do that kind of way – was the lost ruins of Nan Madol on Pohnpei. We sailed out of Ala Moana harbour to the Marshalls, spent weeks surfing perfect waves alone then made landfall on dark at Kolonia. It took one day to find P-Pass, which we dismissed as another garden variety reef pass, before stumbling on the ruins after a fisherman in a local village took us out to the nearest reef pass. A whole city built on the water made from fifty-foot long hexagonal basalt columns in a pre-machine age. And no-one still knows how it was built.

So forgive if a plow running through a pool to create a head-high wave does not elicit an appropriately awestruck response.

So how to cover this Surf Ranch on it’s own terms. If yesterday was an under-risen souffle presented to an unappreciative and largely absent audience today had genuine moments of genius. Primarily Medina’s shock and awe opening run – may as well adopt the terminology. More on that later.

It took twenty surfers enjoying four perfect machine-made waves each before the 21^st in line, Kanoa Igarashi, put the promised progression into high-performance surfing. Kanoa has been my darkhorse pick with his brand of inscrutable pumped-up safety surfing with progressive edge. And he listens to Snake. And those Sharp Eyes look insane under his feet. 

Kanoa attempted and completed the first air out the back, a fin-throw-to-reverse before spinning into the barrel. His insanely well-ridden wave was awarded an 8.93. The spread of .43 to Kellys 8.5 showed the corner the judges painted themselves into yesterday with that egregious over-score. Kelly’s wave should have had a seven in front of it with Kanoa a low eight to allow headroom for what it surely to come. 

Strider said the “crowd is pumped up”. It didn’t look like it. It didn’t sound like it. The hyped stadium vibe was funereal over the broadcast. It made me think of Dane showing up for the first heat of the year in his sophomore year. In early morning high tide three-foot Snapper you couldn’t elbow within a hundred metres through a crowd intent on getting close to the messiah. He lost riding a CI MTF twin fin. Three days later, in pouring rain, a bigger crowd watched him massacre head-high runners against Blake Thornton in round two. Grown men were openly weeping with joy. Not criticism, just putting the hype into recent historical context. 

Surf journalist Nick Carroll said yesterday the event worked better as live spectacle then broadcast event but didn’t say why or how. A curious omission. On the broadcast we got slo-mo replays, angles and most importantly expert surfer commentary. It really worked. Wilko was great, Parko was better. During the much-anticipated Griff run he expressed a frustration the average surf fan was feeling: “He’s got to start going for it”. After choking for a run, Griff put the fins out the back in the same section, just prior to the opening tube, as Kanoa. 

We seemed marooned in a weird place, where weird was nowhere near weird enough. Weird, lame, not weird good. The camera angle with Peter Mel with his back to the pool was surreal beyond belief. The new head of the WSL Kelly Slater Wave Company, Nick Franklin, has a background with the Disney Company. These basic errors in optics must surely grind his gears. The thirty-second inter-heat pressers are so rote and token as to be useless.

Kolohe was brilliant. His opening left surfed at a pace, turn speed and with repertoire that shaded his peers. The spicy attack finally bought audible cheers and whistles from the crowd. American flags hung from the …….side wall. 

The top seeds in three-packs was great. In this crude form a new format is taking place that can and should be adopted in the ocean. A day (or even two) of three-man heats with a leaderboard and all surfing against all. The separation of the wheat from the chaff is undeniable. 

Owen Wright surfed the best left of the event up to that point. The shorter equipment added zest to the rotation. His backside tuberiding, flawless.

Each high seed who surfed made a mockery of what seemed an increasingly pedestrian group of backmarkers yesterday. With few exceptions the elevation in performance came with the increasing seed, showing the relentlessly brutal truth that pro surfing cannot sustain a 34 man Tour. Talent is crucial, talent prevails. There is much dead wood to be culled.

“Each second adds points to the score,” said Pottz.

How? A half-point per second, a quarter? All we know is that judges are scoring “highlights” and maybe as Wilko indicated “the drama of the tube entry”. 

Each high seed who surfed made a mockery of what seemed an increasingly pedestrian group of backmarkers yesterday. With few exceptions the elevation in performance came with the increasing seed, showing the relentlessly brutal truth that pro surfing cannot sustain a 34 man Tour. Talent is crucial, talent prevails. There is much dead wood to be culled. 

Jordy was the first to sacrifice the end tube sections to launch. That looked unbelievably refreshing. Italo was crucially underscored in his opening left but blazed his right for an 8.27. That put Kelly outside the cut, something that would have occurred much sooner if his 8.5 was correctly scored.

In late afternoon light, with what looked like windmill vanes throwing shapes on the faces, Gabe Medina stood next to the chain fence waiting for the opening left. That wave was ridden in a terrifyingly efficient and brutal fashion. The perfect melding of man and machine. A greased Kerrupt flip on the end was like a brick to the head from the future. The game is over. The 9.3 compared to Kelly’s 8.5 was a joke. It should have a been a 15 by that scale.

Finally something like real scoreboard pressure was applied and Toledo choked on it. His last right, the last wave of the day sizzled in the darkening evening. A lofted alley-oop that made the background disappear. 

There was, as Strider said, “ Nowhere to hide”.

Cut to Strider standing alone, on an expanse of fake sand. 

Fade to black.

By my reckoning, the leaderboard looks about right.

PS: Two thousand and change watching Toledo’s incredible surfing on Facebook.