An immodest proposal: Let non-surfers judge
professional surfing on an infinite scale!
By Chas Smith
A perfect solution!
And another professional surf contest is in the
bag, tied shut, stored in a cool, dry place. Margaret River had its
moments no doubt. That day at The Box? I don’t think professional
surfing gets better than that. A John John win? Ballyhooed on a
certain continent but the right man stood alone at the end. Still,
ballyhooed and why? I think it is because the judges have painted
themselves into a corner. We expect perfection on each score and we
also expect the right surfer to win which leads to a heat like John
John v. Caio Ibelli.
Now, it was clear that John John was the better surfer in that
semifinal. His turns had more oomph. More of the undefinable
elements that make us feel and yet the judges are locked in a
garden of numbers and analysis, trying to attach arbitrary points
scientifically. John John was better and barely won, the margin so
slim that it should have been called a draw.
I could sense the judges cracking this contest, coming undone.
That Italo 8.17 on the clearest 10 of the year, acrobatic,
incredible, inhuman. The lowball was shocking but makes sense for
the men in the booth are now too good and can’t see the
forest for the trees. They see numbers and attach them properly but
those numbers aren’t properly reflective of what we’re seeing or,
more importantly, what we’re feeling.
How to fix?
Let non-surfing, never-even-seen-the-ocean folk judge our
contests and give them an infinite scale. These non-surfers will
get the right winner every time because they won’t be fighting
against the numbers. They’ll be free to judge spinners, tacos (what
my six-year-old calls barrels) and big wipeouts however they feel
and honestly without thinking about precedent or wave comparison or
any other arbitrary nonsense.
There was so much talk about leaving headroom in the
damn scale this year but why does it need headroom?
Why not continue to blow through until heats are being scored in
the millions?
We’ve made it all so fussy and complex but better surfing is
easy to spot and easier to understand. It’s the moments that make a
heart beat faster and I wonder if the World Surf League would
attract the masses they want by actually synching winners with
performance.
What do you think about that? Tell me how it won’t work.
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Surfing’s Grand Inflection Point: How
everything you love will soon shine only for the VAL!
By Chas Smith
(If if doesn't already!)
Social scientists and computer scientists
aren’t exactly sure when it happened but both agree that the
Internet is now more fake than real. Fake “people,” fake
algorithmic views/clicks/likes, fake analytics, fake everything and
let’s turn to William Finnegan’s magazine The New Yorker quickly for substance.
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest
that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is
human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy
majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times
reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots
masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an
inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting
fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and
human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the
Inversion.”
This is problematic but doesn’t concern us much here in our
walled garden. OttoBeenThere you’re real. Right? Absolutely no way
a bot could spew Wiggolly’s Paddling Style-esque filth. Right?
But.
We have our own troubles. After much research (surfing and being
a surf journalist), I have concluded that 95% of the surfing public
is now officially VAL which is the highest percentage in recorded
history. What does this mean? I have no idea except that surf
companies will likely up production of wide-brim’d sun hats and cut
production of cool water surf wax. Also, now that we’re so far past
the inflection point we’re going to start seeing “cool” surf
characters being introduced in mainstream film and television.
“Cool” devil may care surf characters in reef booties and surf
sunglasses throwing “shakas” and driving Jeep Wranglers.
Or wait.
That happened years ago but still we’re even further past the
inflection point than we were years ago so I honestly don’t know
except that VALs will now be serving up content and product for
other VALs just like internet bots are serving up content and
product for other internet bots therefore changing the very idea of
“reality.”
Will you accept this inertia or will you rage, rage against the
dying of the light?
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My dream now is that John wraps the Title at
J-Bay and boycotts the tub, maybe releases a few clips sailing in
the Tuamotus. Treats the Tour the way Kelly used to. WSL
Margaret River Pro, Final’s Day: “John John
Florence is both saviour and executioner of the WSL business
model!”
By Longtom
"My dream now is that John wraps the Title at J-Bay
and boycotts the tub, maybe releases a few clips sailing in the
Tuamotus. Treats the Tour the way Kelly used to."
Never feel happier with pro surfing than when John John
is winning in six-to-eight-foot surf. The business model
as of June 2019 is him, and him alone.
For those of you who have never been to Western Australia, the
state of excitement as my mate Diggsy likes to call it, it’s a
windy place. Blow a goat off a chain windy.
I used to sit in the Kalbarri pub with my old skipper, day after
day, watching the smooth white trunk of the Kalbarri eucalypts bent
in half and the bar an impassable washing machine.
“It’s not so easy on the old blue briney,” he’d say.
The other thing: the offshore wind blows weakest just before
dawn, so if you wake up and it’s 20 knots at Cape Naturaliste, the
northern end of the Margaret river prominence, you know it’s only
gunna get stronger. And harder to surf when you’re sitting 500
yards out to sea at Main Break. Great fun on an eight-foot single
fin with a triple-six glass job.
Hard, hard work on a six-0.
Tatiana brushed past Sally Fitzgerald with a wave on the buzzer
but it was the next heat that threatened to be the heat of the day.
Carissa and Lakey went at it with plenty of hustle, not that we
ever hear about it or get an insight into the fierceness.
Moore inexplicably gave a wave to Lakey and Lakey dismantled
it.
All day it was the second turn that paid the biggest dividends,
John proved that later in the event, and Lakey got an incredible
whip through it against the grain of the wind. A late exchange went
unscored for a long period of time, Peterson repeatedly waving her
arms to call for the score.
Dominant win.
When John loses it’s because he falls on the last turn. Ala the
loss to Adriano De Souza in 2015, ala the loss in Keramas. He fell
on the first three waves he caught against Caio Ibelli despite
really connecting with the opening turn of the opening wave.
God, he’s changed. Remember the Machado-like nonchalance? That
would never stoop to engage in something as barbaric as a paddle
battle? I thought the faux-hawk was bad juju at the start of the
year but when he paddled straight over the top of Caio after the
opening exchange it finally seemed fully warranted.
God, he’s changed. Remember the Machado-like nonchalance? That
would never stoop to engage in something as barbaric as a paddle
battle? I thought the faux-hawk was bad juju at the start of the
year but when he paddled straight over the top of Caio after the
opening exchange it finally seemed fully warranted.
It’s not quite a tragedy to see a nervous John John prepared to
win ugly against an opponent with a superior record against him.
Not if he wins in the end.
Which he did. He couldn’t close in a shaky, unconvincing
performance. Caio was a zombie antagonist who would not die and in
the final analysis he’s got grounds to feel a bit ripped.
In the end the judges did the work that John should have done to
dispatch Caio.
What to say about the Julian/Kolohe semi. Not much. Both
struggled to make any sense of an increasingly wind thrashed
lineup. Julian tried to sell a very weak wave as a winning score
with a claim even he didn’t look convinced with. Kolohe fell over
the finish line with a couple of fives.
Tati never really looked capable of taming a steep section and
that very awkward counter rotational upper body style seemed
increasingly discontinous with the actual movement of the board
through the water. Which is what Joel Parkinson correctly
identified as the marker of a good surfboard top turn. Lakey took a
lot of punishment and connected with the middle section to win
easily.
I thought John’s equipment had looked a bit shakey during the
semis. Bald tyres, lack of traction.
Bigger fins needed?
As you know, he elected to ride the same 6’0” Ghost (bee’s dick
under 30 litres) in the Final with the same M fins.
Completes the first wave and he’s won the Final, I
wrote in my notes.
We were three waves ridden in the Final before the broadcast
kicked in.
Kolohe kicked it off with a seven and a four. John calmly
finished for a 7.67.
It’s done, I wrote in my notes.
Andino had been talking a big game since the Gold Coast about a
power attack that no one had seen and that he claimed was the equal
of anyone on Tour. Cruelly, they played the audio grab before the
Final began.
Reality delivered a humiliating riposte.
We were watching an interview with Lakey, the live surfing was
on a small screen.
I wrote “Johns turns a notch below 2017” as he dropped in with
the lip already breaking on his head. His riposte was not just to
Kolohe but to the standard he set in 2017. The searing
rail-buried-to-the-nose carve with extra rotational torque was
there in the middle section of the wave. It was framed with extra
variety in the repertoire with turns one and three.
The crux of the technical advantage of the Ghost is the way it
breaks from the hydrostatic to the hydrodynamic, as seen in that
late take-off. The forwards rocker and rail line engages quicker
and more resolutely which means John was at the lip faster, in
time, and with more speed. It was almost an unfair advantage.
It was about the easiest nine judges have had since 2017.
The crux of the technical advantage of the Ghost is the way it
breaks from the hydrostatic to the hydrodynamic, as seen in that
late take-off. The forwards rocker and rail line engages quicker
and more resolutely which means John was at the lip faster, in
time, and with more speed. It was almost an unfair advantage.
From that point on there were no vital signs left in Kolohe’s
Final. It was time to reflect.
John is both saviour and executioner of the WSL business model.
Their model has become two-pronged with the departure of Paul
Speaker and the failure to find non-endemic sponsorship and
broadcast deals.
On the one branch, WSL is building an entertainment company with
control, manufacture and distribution of content. John is crucial
to that success.
On the other, WSL is balls deep as a licensee and manufacturer
of wave pool technology and IP. That dream looks dead in the
water.
Do you remember the day it died?
Last year, after the most sustained and brilliant marketing
blitz in sporting franchise history the WSL ran the Founders Cup in
May. And John Florence, the best surfer in the World, falling and
falling and looking at the tub like a fifteen-year-old with maths
homework in front of her. It was a wholesale rejection, in body
language if not actual speech. All that marketing brilliance made
irrelevant in a single gesture.
My dream now is that John wraps the Title at J-Bay and boycotts
the tub, maybe releases a few clips sailing in the Tuamotus. Treats
the Tour the way Kelly used to.
But we dream too much.
The Final ended about emphatically as could possibly be
imagined. John duckdived under Kolohe on a feathering set pushing
him out of position and then spun on the next wave and delivered
the best surfing of the event.
I never feel happier with pro surfing than when John John is
winning in six-to-eight-foot surf. It seems a pay-off for the huge
investment in time that pro surfing demands and so rarely delivers
on.
The business model as of June 2019 is him, and him alone.
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Aquaman for the win. | Photo: @parallelsea
It’s (almost) on! Comment live, Margaret
River Pro, Semis, Final!
By Derek Rielly
Pour, yeah, another drink, this time we on…
Yeah, sorry about opening the door to the saloon
yesterday, pouring the drinks and falling asleep, glob of
snot on my cheek, a strong ammonia smell filling the room.
It seemed incomprehensible that, with the town rapidly emptying
and the decorative bunting starting to be pulled down, the Margaret
River Pro wouldn’t be wrapped in whatever the hell was hitting Main
Break.
A dirty temptation, to be sure.
Thank god, I think, for Kieren Perrow, who would never give in
to the devil that easy.
And, so, today, soon, three heats of women, three heats of
men.
Slow, four-foot Margaret River.
I’ve adjusted my focus, slightly, and am now convinced John John
will win a final against Kolohe Andino.
Tatiana, still, for the girls.
Women in the water first; John John and co in one hour.
Margaret River Pro Men’s Semifinal
Matchups:
SF 1: John John Florence (HAW) vs. Caio Ibelli (BRA)
SF 2: Kolohe Andino (USA) vs. Julian Wilson (AUS)
Margaret River Pro Women’s Semifinal
Matchups:
SF 1: Tatiana Weston-Webb (BRA) vs. Sally Fitzgibbons (AUS)
SF 2: Carissa Moore (HAW) vs. Lakey Peterson (USA)
From the Rags-to-Riches Dept: “Surfing and
financial markets are more similar than they may seem!”
By Chas Smith
All you need to ride da bull!
Sometimes things pop up in my surf periphery
and I think, “What?” Like surfing and financial markets being more
similar than they may seem because I think, “How?” And this didn’t
pop up in my surf periphery via The Inertia because that
is not in my surf periphery but, real quick, have you been there
lately? It’s absolutely wild. My jaw was honestly on the ground as
I read through shameless VAL bit after shameless VAL bit realizing
that surfing’s “core” is now so tiny compared to surfing’s VAL as
to be more or less irrelevant.
Incredible and what a time to be alive.
But let’s get back to surfing and financial markets. I read the
title “What can surfing teach us about risk?” And thought,
“Nothing.” But then read.
Surfing and financial markets are more similar than they may
seem. Both have their rewards: the rush of surfing a big wave, or
the financial gains from a stock price jolt. But they can also be
risky: the investor who is wrong-footed by a sudden move in the
market can lose a fortune; the surfer who wipes out on a rogue wave
can lose his or her life.
In recent years, technology, education and government
regulation have helped make both surfing and finance less risky.
That’s encouraged more people to get involved in both arenas.
That’s not a bad thing, but in some cases it’s created the
incentive for participants — both in the water and in the markets —
to take even greater risks.
Today on The Indicator, what surfing can teach us about
risk.
Would you like to listen and utilize your formidable surf skills
to ride da bull market or even da bear market?
