Bitchin: Uruguay elects “rebellious” surfer as president!

Are surfers really the best people? Uruguay experiments with shredder as prez.

For the first time, anywhere, a surfer, not a VAL, not a SUPer or a bodysurfer, has been elected to a country’s highest office, in this case president of Uruguay.

Luis Lacalle Pou, who is forty-six, learned to surf on a trip to Florianopolis, Brazil, when he was twelve, and grew up vacationing in La Barra de Maldonado, a resort town with a pretty little inlet that delivers some of the better waves in Uruguay.

Does he shred?

When Luis finished his law degree in ’98 he stole off to Hawaii, California and Costa Rica, and has hit Indo, Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, California, Mexico and Panama.

When he was asked where else he wanted to surf he said, “Everywhere. I want to live three more lives.”

If you’re wondering which side of the divide he swings, Luis is centre-right, tighten spending, more cops, but says he’ll deliver austerity measures to bring down the cost of living.

His opponent, Daniel Martinez, a sixty-two-year-old cycling enthusiast, represented the  and centre-left wing of the Broad Front, which is a coalition of social democrats, communists, Christian democrats and former guerrilla members.

Are surfers the best sort of people, as is often suggested in that hoary old chestnut that if the world surfed there’d be no war etc?

Does the water dance, gasping for breath after a two-wave holdown and duck-dive an angel make?

More, as they say, as the story develops.