The mighty Gabriel Medina, 2018 Teahupoo winner,
running hot etc.
Comment live: Day one, Tahiti Pro Teahupoo
Presented by Hurley!
By Derek Rielly
Much to back and forth on and to discuss…
(Chas Smith note: Derek wrote this wonderful bit just in
case Teahupo’o finally comes to life while he is sleeping. I am out
the door for a day on the high seas. If it runs and I don’t post,
shame. If it don’t run and I do post, shame. Well, as you know, I
love the latter!)
Shortly, the flag will drop and twelve non-elimination
heats will eat up six hours of a four-foot swell at
Teahupoo, with the event anticipated to conclude in
eight-foot seas on Wednesday.
I foresee much to back and forth about on this open thread.
Topics should include,
Is two-time world champ Gabriel Medina the only surfer on tour
who can win a world title in 2019 without an asterix denoting John
John’s absence? And, therefore, if Gabriel loses in the early
rounds, and his chance of winning the title, does that mean the
year is ruined? A dead rubber?
Filipe Toledo must prove he’s more than head-high righthanders.
Do you think, when Teahupoo flicks its switches on Tuesday and
Wednesday, and presuming Filipe swings through the seeding round,
he will answer the call?
Kelly Slater. Better, here, than anyone on tour. What if he
wins? Is it still absurd to
suggest an even dozen titles?
Italo Ferriera. Kanoa Igarashi, Jordy Smith. All of ’em
potential winners.
I think we’ve all been born with a little reverence for the
things that are beautiful and a little love for the things that are
terrible.
Teahupoo, often, is both.
Tahiti Pro Teahupo’o pres. by Hurley Seeding Round
(Round 1)
Heat 1: Gabriel Medina (BRA), Peterson Cristanto (BRA), Soli Bailey
(AUS)
Heat 2: Jordy Smith (ZAF), Adrian Buchan (AUS), Jadson Andre
(BRA)
Heat 3: Kanoa Igarashi (JPN), Caio Ibelli (BRA), Adriano de Souza
(BRA)
Heat 4: Italo Ferreira (BRA), Sebastian Zietz (HAW), Kauli Vaast
(FRA)
Heat 5: Filipe Toledo (BRA), Joan Duru (FRA), Tyler Newtown
(HAW)
Heat 6: Kolohe Andino (USA), Yago Dora (BRA), Matahi Drollet
(PYF)
Heat 7: Kelly Slater (USA), Deivid Silva (BRA), Francisco Morais
(PRT)
Heat 8: Ryan Callinan (AUS), Willian Cardoso (BRA), Ricardo
Christie (NZL)
Heat 9: Julian Wilson (AUS), Michael Rodrigues (BRA), Ezekiel Lau
(HAW)
Heat 10: Michel Bourez (PYF), Jeremy Flores (FRA), Griffin
Colapinto (USA)
Heat 11: Owen Wright (AUS), Wade Carmichael (AUS), Jesse Mendes
(BRA)
Heat 12: Conner Coffin (USA), Seth Moniz (HAW), Jack Freestone
(AUS)
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Inspirational: Professional surfer teaches
professional soccer players how to be better sportsmen!
By Chas Smith
It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world!
And don’t we just live in the topsiest,
turviest of times? Every day there is some wild, almost
unbelievable headline. Some bizarre twisted turn. Like, who could
ever believe that a nice, rich man named Jeffrey Epstein was, in
real life, a sex-trafficker? Or that a tariff war was being waged
by Republicans? Or that a professional surfer was invited to speak
with professional soccer (football) players during training camp to
inspire, teach proper mindset and how to be better sportsmen, in
general?
Oh it’s the craziest and, again, almost unbelievable but
CNN’s
International Edition presents the facts and read with
me.
At first glance big wave surfing and professional football
appear worlds apart. One is contested on grass as scores of limbs
flay about for 90 minutes in front of thousands of passionate
onlookers. The other is a battle for survival as a solitary human
hurtles down a skyscraper of water, riding the boundary between
life and death at mind bending speeds.
But for all their differences, those at the elite level of
each sport understand that failures carries consequences. It was
with that in mind that Liverpool’s manager Jurgen Klopp invited
professional surfer Sebastian Steudtner into the Reds training camp
in Evian, France, ahead of the 2019/20 English Premier League
season’s start.
“I just shared my mindset, how I live my life, how I
approach my sport, how I approach performance,” the 34-year-old
Steudtner told CNN Sport’s Don Riddell. “We discovered there are a
lot of similarities. In football there is a lot of attention and in
extreme situations, which can be dangerous, we can sometimes feel
the same.”
Etc.
The piece goes on to detail Jurgen Klopp’s unconventional
coaching methods and what have you but before we get too far away,
isn’t Sebastian Steudtner the surfer Christian Fletcher introduced
at the XXL Big Wave Awards as, “The German surfer who doesn’t
paddle?”
I think so. I think he is.
I also think Jurgen Klopp should think well outside the box and
invite Christian Fletcher to Liverpool’s training camp.
Which professional surfer do you think could provide the most
inspiration to real athletes?
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Battle Royale: Kelly Slater vs. John John
Florence for final Olympic spot shaping up as “can’t miss
blockbuster!”
By Chas Smith
Who will the fates smile upon?
Now, I’m going to be honest with you here, this
whole Olympic qualification thing confuses me. I know it shouldn’t,
I know that the top two surfers on the World Surf League
Championship Tour, per nation, get to go and that Japan has one
bonus slot and then the surfers also have compete in the ISA
Pyramid Scheme Games but… I’m still confused.
Like, are there only going to be ten surfers competing at the
Olympics including one bonus Japanese?
The only nations I can think with surfers are Brazil, France,
Australia, South Africa and the United States of America. I guess
Portugal too. New Zealand? So fourteen surfers plus one bonus
Japanese?
Also, when does the qualification lock in? I assumed after next
year’s World Surf League Championship Tour but it will not even be
half done when the Olympics swing in to Tokyo plus a comprehensive
interview with John John Florence in ESPN
today makes me think that it’s this year’s rankings.
Would you like to read with me then clarify?
Thanks.
ESPN: How much did the Olympic qualifying
weigh on that decision?
JJF: Luckily enough, I had a lot of points
from doing well in the beginning of the season, so I still have a
good shot at qualifying through the tour for the Olympics — and
that is my dream. It would be so awesome to go to the Olympics. But
I don’t have much control over that right now. I have to sit back
and see what Kelly [Slater] can do.
ESPN: Why is qualifying for the U.S.
Olympic surfing team important to you?
JJF: It’s the Olympics, the top of
sporting, and being a part of it would be awesome. I think it would
be so cool to have a Hawaiian on the team. And since it’s the first
year in the Olympics for surfing, I imagine there is going to be a
lot of conversation about how it can be better next time, and I
would love to be involved in that conversation. To be part of the
first one and growing our sport in the Olympics would be
cool.
ESPN: You recently posted a video on
Instagram showing you back in the water, prone paddling, with the
hashtag #Tokyo2020, and it caused a lot of excitement. Why the
hashtag?
JJF: I thought it was a fun one. And there
is a lot of truth in it. It is still a goal of mine to qualify for
the Olympics, and I wanted to let people know I am working toward
that. It is my goal to get better for Pipeline in case I have to
come back and compete and gain points. That is a short-term goal.
And if Kelly doesn’t gain enough points the rest of the year, it is
a long-term goal to be 150 percent ready at the start of the next
WCT season and have ample time to train for the Olympics next
year.
I still don’t get it. But more importantly, it feels like one of
the greatest subplots during the rest of the 2019 season will be
48-year-old Kelly Slater vs. the specter of John John Florence for
that final Olympic slot. Now, do you think it is bad sportsmanship
for Kelly to try and steal qualification from a cripple? Does this
story-within-a-story change your cheering interests?
Are you Team John John or Team Kelly?
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The centrepiece of Beyond Litmus is devoted to
Derek Hynd's experience of dealing with throat cancer. If ever
there was a reason to quit, that would be it. Hynd says he felt no
desire to get back in the water after chemotherapy, that a simple
bowl of soup was about the highest pleasure imaginable. Jon
Frank/Beyond Litmus
Beyond Litmus Review: Cancer supersedes
surfing!
By Longtom
If you are familiar with Andrew Kidman's work, the
films, the books, the music, this is his best. The most
accomplished. The most beautiful. The most moving.
Be you prime stud, or babe with the world at her feet,
you’re going to get old and die, possibly of cancer.
That sounds about the most depressing statement ever but in
Beyond Litmus, the reprise, twenty-five years on of
Jon Frank and Andrew Kidman’s cult classic
Litmus, that statement of fact becomes filmic
and literary raw material of immense uplift and cheer.
Derek Hynd, the fulcrum of both
films, calls the experience of dealing with throat
cancer “total liberation”.
Litmus kickstarted the rebellion against Slater and the
Momentum Generation.
It marked the signal failure of the pro surfing project up to
and including the present day; that being the catastrophic lack of
cross-over into the mainstream audience with Kelly as the front
man.
Kelly is truly great, but he is ours.
He was never theirs. Theirs being Middle America.
Litmus dragged the fish out of it’s Sunset
Cliffs/Pacific Beach lair and rebirthed it as a global phenomenon,
thus driving the retro movement and hence becoming as significant
as Morning of the Earth in steering Australian surfing culture
(said with a straight face) and maybe more important than anything
since Runman in giving
confidence to the Californian underground which had
heretofore been ignored by its own surf media.
Big calls, yes.
Beyond Litmus is
more than getting the band back together for a sentimental romp
through the old hits. Litmus was a case, according to Kidman, of
“being lucky”.
“We were enthusiastic, but there was no skill in anything. It
was punk rock”.
Twenty-five years later, the development of Kidman and Frank as
filmmakers is obvious. Litmus was a slap in the face with
a cold fish to the front lit, mainstream-Slater vision of
surfing.
An immersive, psychedelic trip of a movie, focussed as much on
the “human-ness of becoming” and the nuances of history than the
performance of riding a wave.
But that does feature, of course. Free-friction surfing isn’t
everyone’s cup of chai, which is part of the reason Hynd embraced
it so enthusiastically – as a mountain top where the herd would not
or could not follow – but you’d need to have a perverse eye to not
make the assessment that the lines he drew were a clear advancement
on what he achieved with rudders.
Terry Fitzgerald, phlegmatic seventies surf star and scion of
the Hot Buttered board-building empire and surf family said,
“What’s he’s done there on the Edge”, referring to Hynd’s J-Bay
free-friction surfing, “is the greatest”
I demur slightly.
I’ve seen Hynd do his thing in person. In the north-west desert
of Australia, where as a fity-four-year-old and blind in one eye,
he took on slabbing lefts sans fins.
We were there as part of a classical music art project – I had
wangled on as an official forecaster. It sounds wank but was
actually insanely good. One night Hynd had too much to drink and
there was a disagreement, a pretty robust one
between him and the director.
It got ugly.
Just talk, but still ugly. A lot of hurt feelings.
I know he won’t be particularly proud of that or even happy the
anecdote is told but what I saw him do the day after with a savage
hangover, in his fifties at a barely surfable slab, taking off wave
after wave and setting an edge into oblivion, was the greatest
display of surfing I’ve ever witnessed.
The centrepiece of Beyond Litmus is devoted to Derek
Hynd’s experience of dealing with throat cancer. If ever there was
a reason to quit, that would be it. Hynd says he felt no desire to
get back in the water after chemotherapy, that a simple bowl of
soup was about the highest pleasure imaginable.
Some of that desert surfing, shot by Jon Frank, makes the
film.
Matt Warshaw made the observation in a recent newsletter that
Australians, by and large, don’t quit surfing.
Ravaged by cancer and its chemical and radioactive treatments he
presents the very image of what the gas station attendant in Grapes
of Wrath thought of the Joads when he saw them, “a hard looking
outfit”.
You’re scared of cancer. We all are. I’m so terrified I wouldn’t
even go to the Doctor to get mine cut out for over a year.
Hearing Hynd describe it as “raw and honest” and that it
“superseded most life experiences”, including surfing was humbling
and shocking. He describes it as an experience almost as pure and
visceral as riding his dragster to the beach with dogs in tow in
the dark hours before sunrise as a fifteen year old.
That seminal desire is turned into a lurid piece of psychedelic
animation by Ben Jarvis. It’s the closest thing to a DMT trip
without taking the trip. A wide awake dream scored by a haunting
piece of post-rock soundscape.
Find that animation and see it. Even if you hate it it’s a trip
worth taking. Believe me.
Were you sad when they wheeled Curren out for the legends heat
with Occy at this years Bells? I felt very sad to see this shambles
of a man being wheeled out for our entertainment. On his skimboard
with his mumbling and his anxiety, there was something cruel about
it. And his surfing looked terrible.
Made up like a clown, his expressions are so much better than
words at bringing the inner Tom Curren to life.
Were you sad when they wheeled Curren out for the legends heat
with Occy at this years Bells? I felt very sad to see this shambles
of a man being wheeled out for our entertainment. On his skimboard
with his mumbling and his anxiety, there was something cruel about
it. And his surfing looked terrible.
What I’m trying to say is, if you are familiar with Kidman’s
work, the films, the books, the music, this is his best one. The
most accomplished. The most beautiful. The most moving.
Apocalypse: Over 300 “Man-eating” Great
Whites force closure of 60 beaches on U.S. eastern seaboard!
By Chas Smith
"Let's go kill some sharks!"
Just over one week ago, you read
here about how my bucolic North County, San Diego
seaside paradise has been transformed into a Great White-infested
hell. Oh, beaches were closed as juvenile sharks circled and jumped
like the waves were their own, shuttering breaks from Carlsbad to
Del Mar.
Del Mar’s chief lifeguard, John Edelbrock, described the sharks’
behavior as docile — “not aggressive in any way.”
Well, those Great Whites swimming on the eastern seaboard must
have taken note and, like the great east vs. west rap battles of
old, threw down an absolute hammer track. Over 300 sharks have
forced the closure of 60 beaches this summer so far.
Are these sharks docile, not aggressive in any way, like their
west coast foils? We must turn to the Brexit’s Daily
Mail for more.
Charles Vansant was the first victim, a strapping
25-year-old stockbroker swimming in water only chest-deep when the
shark struck.
Anxious to encourage a reluctant dog to join him, the young
American hadn’t noticed the dark shadow and tell-tale protruding
fin behind him. The Great White shark shredded his left leg to the
bone, virtually tearing it from his body.
Mr Vansant was helped back to the beach, but bled to death
at a nearby hotel. ‘His death was the most horrible thing I ever
saw,’ said a witness.
That incident was, of course, the first 1916 attack, likely by a
Bull not a White, that lead to many more and a run of shark
paranoia on the east coast, eventually fictionalized by the film
Jaws. Well, the Daily Mail pivots straight from early Jaws folklore
to our modern day.
Between July and early August, some 60 beaches have been
closed because of shark sightings around Cape Cod, the
Massachusetts summer paradise near where Jaws was filmed.
At least 300 Great Whites — sometimes 15ft-long monsters in
just 5ft of water — have been spotted around the Cape. Officials
have responded by putting up new warning signs about Great Whites
and issuing lifeguards with tourniquets to staunch bleeding from
bites. Purple shark-emblazoned warning flags fly at beaches at all
times.
On and on the Daily Mail piece goes, whipping the reader into an
absolute frenzy, pivoting back and forth from yesteryear to modern
times, begging the readers to take up pitchforks, or harpoons, and
go out a stabbin’.
Like… Lifeguards, hearing a bloodcurdling scream, turned to
see what they thought was a red upturned canoe in the water. It was
Charles Bruder, a 28-year-old hotel bellboy, swimming in his own
blood that had pooled around him.
And… ‘Let’s go kill some sharks!’ became a popular rallying
cry. Just as in Jaws, fishermen took to their boats looking for the
shark, while police officers reported blasting away at suspicious
shadows in the water. However, in the midst of the panic, Dr Lucas
and other experts still insisted further attacks would be very
unlikely. They were wrong.
So should we?
Should we take up pitchforks and/or harpoons and/or big ol’
guns?
