Breaking: Gabriel Medina beats Jordy Smith
in semifinals to claim 2018 World Title!
By Chas Smith
Jesse Mendes wins Triple Crown. Obrigado to
all!
Do you know Jordy Smith owns a house on the
North Shore? If you were watching the Pipeline Masters in tender
and loving memory of Andy Irons then you certainly do but Jordy
Smith’s North Shore house did not help him beat Gabriel Medina and
with Gabriel Medina’s semifinal victory gifted him the 2018 World
Title right in front of Julian Wilson and Kelly Slater, who was no
doubt thinking, “Cool. two down, nine to go.”
What an amazing day!
What an amazing heat!
Gabriel and Jordy both traded big barrels, extraordinary
barrels, each weaving, each regrouping, each not getting too ahead
of themselves but… the scoring?
Did you agree with the scoring?
Ross n Ronnie sure didn’t. They thought Jordy got robbed. But…
what did you think?
Oh that’s rude. We can talk about that later. Right now you
should crack a room temperature bottle of cachaça, take a sip and
feel the burn because that burn is going to be in your esophagus
for two/three months.
Gabriel Medina is your 2018 World Champ!
Obrigado to him. Obrigado to Jesse Mendes who won the Triple
Crown. It’s order and progress all the way around!
But, real quick, how sweet do Ross n Ronnie sound together? I’m
going to write a poem or maybe direct an art nouveau film called
Ross et Ronnie but let’s not get distracted.
Brazil for president!
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Pipeline Masters Final’s Day: “Gabriel
Medina has that smell about him!”
By Chas Smith
TUNE IN NOW!
What’s better than a Pipeline Sunday? A
Pipeline Monday where you can be wasting time at work while
watching the world’s best surfers on the world’s best Pipeline! The
current tour leader, Gabriel Medina, is in the water and cranking.
His first wave was in the excellent range, if you can believe.
Ross Williams says that he has a smell about him and no it is
not the smell of Spam Musubi or Hula Pie or Napalm. No, it is the
smell of victory.
Are you watching?
Do you think Gabriel Medina smells like victory?
If he makes it into the final then 2018 officially ends with him
as champion. Julian Wilson still has a prayer.
Gabriel is riding a 6’4 Tokoro.
Ross Williams says Tokoro’s rails are soft like butter and that
is a secret.
Between the soft butter and the smell of Gabriel Medina I’m
feeling hungry.
Are you still not watching?
You’re missing out. Jordy Smith is talking about his end of year
bonuses right now like a regular ol’ salaryman. What do you think
he gets for his end of year bonus? A nice parking spot in Santa
Monica?
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Breaking: With too many big waves on tap,
the WSL calls Mavericks off for the week!
By Chas Smith
Conditions must be just right for the Pretty Big
Wave World Tour.
In between watching stunning Pipeline heats,
you have no doubt had your eyes glued to swell forecasts,
especially if you live in California. Oh there is so much
swell coming, such large swell that the National Weather Service
took the unprecedented step of warning potential ocean goers of
“certain death” if they dared touched toesies to the sand in Sonoma
and Monterey counties up by San Francisco.
Of course we know that California’s iconic big wave is up there
too, Mavericks, catching all that swell. Forming all that swell
into towering waves.
Surfline, the World Surf League’s official wave forecasting
website, describes the morning thusly:
It’s absolutely macking today! XXL WNW swell has filled in
overnight and has good exposures in the 2x-3x overhead real, while
standouts see 3x-4x overhead surf and deepwater magnets go into the
5x-6x OH realm with a few bigger bombs as well. Winds are light SE
now, allowing for clean conditions although the ocean is still a
little mixed up from last night’s weather. Tide is full but
dropping to a 1.4′ LOW at 1PM. Be very careful and use good
judgement, there is tremendous power out there!
And the World Surf League did use judgement, last week while
that swell was getting built, and called the Mavericks Big Wave
World Tour event off for Monday and Tuesday preemptively.
Today, with too many big waves on the horizon, the event was
cancelled for the rest of the week and let us turn to the
San Francisco Chronicle for more:
The Mavericks surf contest — which had already been delayed
a couple times in the past few days — has been postponed for at
least another week.
“We will not be running the Mavericks Challenge this week
and will wait for more optimum conditions,” World Surf League Big
Wave Tour Commissioner Mike Parsons said in a statement Sunday
afternoon. “The wind is good and conditions will be clean, but the
swell will be dropping through the day on Thursday and we won’t
have the consistency we need to run an excellent event.”
The surf near Half Moon Bay is expected to be the biggest of
the year Monday — waves may reach 50 feet — and it was thought at
one point that Tuesday might be an option, but it was ruled out on
Saturday for safety reasons.
A quick perusal of Surfline’s Mavericks
webcam shows many big waves. I am not a big wave
surfer so cannot speak to their quality but maybe you can?
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Toledo goes down throwing punches at Backdoor,
one doggy door away from a ten.
Pipe Masters, Day 2: Filipe Toledo goes
down swinging at ten-foot Pipe on “epic, epic day!”
By Longtom
"Each of Kelly Slater's rides I took as personal
rebuke, as kick in the nuts."
How to make sense of this epic, epic day? Feel
free to riff below, there’ll be lots of meat left on the bone.
The sun was just cresting the mau’ka over Mokule’ia when Toledo
hit the water against Benji Brand in wobbly, glassy six-to-ten-foot
Pipe.
How do you rebuild after a disastrous performance like his round
one showing? Ten minutes passed with no waves ridden. Minutes
composed of seconds and micro-seconds, thousands and thousands of
Pottzian nervous moments piled like bricks on the psyche of Filipe
Toledo.
He scrapped for the inside and took off deep on a legit Pipe
wave, ponying over two foam balls to get an eight. I scribbled
“world title wave”. Brand took the lead and with a minute and
change remaining. Toledo, needing a 3.76, scrapped into a mid-for
for the win.
“Lets talk about pressure,” said Rosie Hodge. Filipe physically
buckled, folded in half. A bodily response that said more than any
words could about the mental state of the second time
challenger.
The dual heat format: Oh please God, can we have that at every
location when the surf is pumping. To see waves being ridden, or at
least attempted, made turning away impossible.
Kieren, I know you are reading. Please, make it happen.
Owen Wright had a 100% make rate in a lineup now being strafed
by end to end close-outs, and with makeable waves at a premium,
still lost. Wildcard Seth Moniz double pumped no hands through an
open cavern and with the joie de vivre of a teenage
shoo-ey at a sunlit beergarden on a Sunday afternoon greased a
lofty punt on the end section.
He moves through the pipe lineup like a young Ali.
Sinuous, smooth and note perfect with his strikes.
I’ve already forgotten who Kelly Slater surfed against in heat
six. He rode a 6’3” round-pin Tokoro four fin.
Wave 1: a clean teepee Pipe wave. Easy make.
Wave 2: Kelly packs a brutal close-out at Backdoor. Extreme
punishment reel getting back out.
In his extended podcast with Joe Rogan Kelly made pains to say
surfing didn’t require that much strength or conditioning training.
He looked gassed. Like Conor McGregor getting mauled by Khabib
Nurmogomedov.
Did you secretly and shamefully smirk behind the safety of a
keyboard like me? Where’s your cardio now eh Kelly?
Wave 3: Pipe wave, no exit.
Wave 4: No exit, big sets feathering through the
line-up.
He can’t take much more of this punishment, surely.
Wave 5: Backdoor bomb, bodysurfed out. No make.
Wave 6: Pipe wave, no hands entry to the tube. No
exit.
He did what he needed to do to beat Willian Cardoso, which
admittedly wasn’t much. But what he did do was an intense sparring
session, with a ton of intentional punishment at the worlds
heaviest wave. How can you comprehend that from a 46-year-old who
spends most of his time sitting in a trailer under a tree hundreds
of miles from the ocean?
Ryan Callinan showed an almost insane level of joyfulness in the
kind of gnarly Pipe line-up that would cripple a working man. Like
a grinning labrador fetching a stick with the aggression of Jake the Muss being asked to cook
eggs. And the stick was a brown snake. He packed
closeouts, he flirted with extreme take-offs under the axe all with
a goofy grin, that, as Ronnie Blakey rightfully noted “you couldn’t
wipe off his face with a cricket bat”. He did to Italo what Italo
does to Medina: come at him with such a super-abundance of
extravagant energy and skill that he makes his opponent effectively
shrink and disappear down a rabbit hole.
To lay a pitch perfect passive-aggressive period on his
performance Kelly Slater when asked by Rosie what he thought of
Ryans bomb quipped straight back “what, the one he didn’t
make?”
It was starting to feel like one of those rare vintage Kelly
days, when that lethal combination of magic and ultra-spiteful
competitiveness drips out of every pore and infuses every second
with possibility.
Wilko finished his career as a CT surfer, most likely; with an
air drop out of a Backdoor bomb that went straight to the beach on
the final buzzer. As a Finale it wasn’t without a certain sad
theatricality.
In the presser afterwards he confessed to feeling “sad and
confused”, then, looked upwards at Rosie Hodge in an
off-the-shoulder Laurel Canyon ’67 blouse and, looking somewhat
heartened, added “but I’m sweet”.
Seabass called his Rnd3, Ht 5 clash with Griffin Colapinto
“psycho” and that is money. Both dropped out of the sky on
unmakeable waves that are fun to be cavalier over but could really
have been “death on a stick”.
Gabe Medina came up against the smiling, boyish assassin Seth
Moniz. Title on the line. Here we go again, as Medina put it. First
wave: outrageous gambit. An insane drop, technically threaded tube
through multiple heaving backdoor sections to a full sand-bar
close-out. Medina sqeaked out the doggy door and got false cracked
by the lip as he did so. It was a 20 if he stayed on his
feet.
Moniz was critically under-scored for a backdoor bomb, coming
out after the spit.
Judges compounded the error by over-scoring Medina for a
technical but manufactured tube-ride. By the heat and the days
standard, the point spread was distorted by a point. Medina
answered a seesawing lead change with a another technical ride with
a Tom Carroll bottom turn to late turn under the lip and that was
the heat. It should have been closer but it was another brutally
efficient win to Medina.
Wilson packed close-outs with the best of the psychos- there
were markers being laid down here that were far more significant
than heat wins. Lines in the sand everywhere as to who would go and
who would go missing. Julian did not go missing. One clean Backdoor
make was enough to dispatch a hapless Miggy Poops.
Last heat of the day. Kelly v Filipe in backlit 10-foot Pipe.
Please allow me to detail the Kings rides as they occurred. It’s
unusual, but the performance deserves a permanent
record.
Wave1: Straight off the bat, cute little snap into tube at Pipe.
Make.
Wave2: Non-make Pipe.
Wave3: Backdoor, non-make.
Wave4: Pipe, non-make.
Wave5: Pipe. Clean make. Up under a pitching section. Vertical
slash. 6.93.
Wave 6: Heavy Pipe wave. Chopes style high-line. Non-make.
Wave 7: Deep tube Pipe. Fell off in tube, regathered board,
stood back up in tube and came out with arms up. Miracle ride.
Non-make by judges.
Wave8: (Final Ride) Perfect Backdoor tube on a bomb. Came out
after spit. Best wave of the day. 8.67.
Filipe, on the wave behind and needing a close to perfect score,
threaded a deep, long Backdoor tube that would have been a ten.
Non-make.
Each of Kelly’s rides I took as personal rebuke, as kick in the
nuts. They made me feel churlish, mean and small and simultaneously
exalted.
Breaking: Filipe Toledo beats local
wildcard Benji Brand in dying seconds, stays alive!
By Chas Smith
"I'm happy to surf real Pipe!"
Pipeline is on and fabulous right now. It is
Sunday, San Francisco is about to disappear from the face of the
earth and Oahu’s North Shore is putting on a fabulous show. Are you
still not watching? Oh, tune in right now and directly but leave
BeachGrit open so we can chat online with babes all day. I
mean with each other and maybe Jen See.
Filipe Toledo, current world no. 2 just beat Hawaiian wildcard
Benji Brand in Round 2 Heat 2 in the dying seconds.
An almost shocker, an almost absolute shocker which would have
gifted countryman Gabriel Medina the 2018 World Title.
I suppose Julian Wilson can still make a move?
Can Julian Wilson still make a move?
Back to Filipe, such a nail biter of a heat. Such stress. The
swell building, coming in from the north northwest according to
Momentum Generation standout Ross Williams. The time, ticking down.
Filipe following Benji Brand in the lineup a little bit lost. A
little confused. Carrying a 3.76 for minutes. Looking, peeking. “He
can go right, he can go left, he just needs to get up under the
hood…” Strider said from the water.
Then Filipe snagged a small one but stayed in the barrel forever
then kicked a little air at the end.
Under the hood.
“Sketchy times for Filipe…” said Ross.
Then he dodged a bullet and won.
Whew.
Filipe Toledo told Rosie in the post-heat interview, “It’s
definitely a new feeling for me. This year it’s more special. For
the situation to be so close and competing against Gabes and Jules…
pressure pressure. I’m happy to surf real Pipe.”