Elo looks solid, on the right side of cancel culture and a ballsy decision that, even within the space of a twelve-hour day, looks to have shown the wisdom of Solomon.

May have been no surprise but it’s still one of the ballsiest moves in World Sport to cancel the opening event of the 2020 CT season.

A very, very bold move from Elo, considering the backing at the highest levels of the Australian Government, which is a major under-writer of the Pro Tour in Australia. The chief reason Australia can sustain three coastal CT events and the USA cannot sustain a single oceanic event.

Crazy, crazy day.

This article has had to be rewritten three times to keep up with this horrendous black swan which carried away Snapper and possibly the entire year.

As of last night Australian time, our Prime Minister was still urging Aussie (surf) fans to whip out and attend major sporting events.

Nothing to see, go about your business as usual.

At approx 9.45 AEST WSL dropped the statement on its website cancelling the March events, an event which according to John Shimooka commentating the Sydney Pro immediately went “global and viral.”

According to Shmoo, “Every stakeholder would have known about it”.

A phone call to the QLD Tourism Minister’s office, one of the main stakeholders of the Gold Coast event at 10.42am revealed that they had no knowledge the WSL had pulled the pin on one of the Gold Coast’s premier sporting events.

Fatal comms fail?

Of course, the dominoes have fallen and are falling quickly.

Formula One cancelled as fans were lining up to enter.

Like the WSL, the taxpayer is a major under-writer of the event, to the tune of around 60 million. Unlike the WSL, sports like Formula One also have serious revenue streams from gate receipts (over a hundred thousand people expected to attend), huge broadcast deals, food and bev, merch etc etc. They are legitimate global sports, not “enablement platforms”.

Wozzle is much more dependent on government underwriting, as we learned from the Fijian event, which was deemed unviable by then CEO Sophie Goldschmidt due to a lack of support from Fiji’s Government, despite a three-year deal with Kelly Slater’s OuterKnown clothing company.

Those deals, deemed valuable by Australian tourism promotion authorities in three states are now shredded, at least for this year.

At three pm AEST Australia’s nominal head of state, Scott Morrison, or ScoMo, effectively killed the Australian leg by banning all public gatherings over five hundred people.

Chances of events running minus spectators defeat all principles of government tourism funding and will result in contract terms being reneged on all over the shop.

A twenty-million dollar deal with Facebook does not keep the deep fryers going at Rainbow Bay. Who pays for dishonoured contract terms in an act of God is yet to be determined.

Calls to Tourism and Events QLD, who administer the funding for the Gold Coast event, were not answered.

Money has gone down the drain big-time and the whole year may yet be written off.

It’s not all bad news of course.

The WSL is likely to keep its pledge to be Carbon Neutral by 2019 now, a year later, and in a canter, if the 2020 calendar is voided.

Organisers of the Tokyo Olympics are putting on a brave face and staring down the virus.

The country’s Olympics minister, Seiko Hashimoto, said Tokyo 2020 organisers would continue to plan for a “safe and secure” Games, due to open on 24 July.

That was an hour ago.

If a truncated tour does go ahead comparisons will be made with CJ Hopgood’s 2001 Title, cut short by the Sep 11 attacks in NYC, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

It’s a very different world now and those comparisons will be largely meaningless.

Webcasts were in their infancy; we largely consumed surf contests via heavily curated surf media content. A savvy, web-educated fan base, as minuscule as it is (1200 people watching the Sydney Surf Pro live on Facebook) will not tolerate an uncredible champ if the Tour haemmorhages contests due to pandemic.

Biggest losers?

Well, me of course.

And other hacks.

Can’t write about a comp that don’t run.

Plus, I’m down a face mask invested in in case I rubbed shoulders with virus carriers in the steamy Snapper cauldron.

Dirk Ziff will take a massive bath, billions of paper money wiped off due to the market crash.

Owen Wright and his wife, pop singer, Kita Alexander both lose big. Owen a minimum of ten grand, which is the purse for a last place finish at a CT event. Kita, who was booked to play the Drop Festival, run concurrently with the Aussie leg, also loses gigs as they get cancelled.

Owen’s extensive real estate book, focussed on Air BnB and boutique hotel development will take a haircut, at best. At worst, assets will need to be liquidated.

The days of windfall gains from real estate speculation are probably over, at least for now.

Elo looks solid, on the right side of cancel culture and a ballsy decision that, even within the space of a twelve-hour day, looks to have shown the wisdom of Solomon.

Pro surfing itself?

That depends on the largesse of its two greatest benefactors, Dirk Ziff and the taxpayer. Both show no signs of blinking, as yet, in this highly fluid scenario.

Me, I’m prepped to the eyeballs.

How’s about you?

Deep water drilling six hundred clicks closer to Bells than failed Equinor proposal…

Remember the mass protests by surfers over a proposal by Norwegian energy company Equinor to bite into the Great Australian Bight in the hunt for black gold?

Longtom wrote poetically of the Byron paddle-out,

Representatives of every little sub-tribe out in the hot sunshine and howling onshore wind. Gurfers, murfers with their stock-broker and hedge fund husbands, rockstars, movie stars, slightly anorexic goddesses with logs, hipsters with finless foamies, sinewy old sea dogs, spanish-speaking Euro babes, sultry tattooed Peruvian, Argentinian and Brazilian studs, ageing local shredders on nineties thrusters and their progeny, kiddies, cops, magistrates, bankers, dentists, doctors, ex-pros, “soul” pros, scumbags and every other flavour of surfer. Surf witches were there, no doubt, but likely the blue bands were left behind.

You know how it played out.

If Australians weren’t going to be nice, Equinor was out. No social license to drill etc.

But while that was going down, Texas-based ExxonMobil, was given approval to drill to a depth of 2300 metres (2500 yards) in Bass Straight, deeper even than the proposed Equinor Stromlo-1 well.

ExxonMobil is a name familiar to those who were around in 1989 when its tanker the Exxon Valdez hit a reef in Alaska and bled 37,000 metric tonnes of crude. Worst oil spill in history. Otters, the cutest animal in any ecosystem, very badly hit. Poor optics although no social media back then meant many opportunities lost.

In a piece published today in Spectator Australia, Fred Pawle writes,

The protesters’ victory is small beer in the grander scheme of things in Australia. While the protesters were preoccupied with Equinor throughout last year, ExxonMobil managed to submit an application for an even deeper offshore well, have it approved and has already started drilling. That well is about 600km closer than Equinor’s proposed well would have been to Damien Cole’s home surf break at Bells.

Smart surfers will be secretly relieved that ExxonMobil dodged the protest gauntlet and has quietly got to work. It means surfboard makers will still have the raw materials for surfboards and airlines will still be able to fly keen surfers for their annual trip to Indonesia, where the waves are even better than at Bells.

Fred also rips into the frankly infallible Nick Carroll who, he says, “falsely claimed that ‘a worst-case spill would put oil on every surfable coast of Australia south of 30 degrees S.’ ”

Read here. 

Here’s what happens next…

A recap of the last twenty-four hours. 

The NBA’s on ice, F1’s got cramps, school’s out, toilet paper is being stockpiled in outer suburban silos, jets are being wheeled into hangers, and every old person is chewing their bottom lip, tears on the brink, as they wait for death’s scythe to come down on their necks. 

And, now, thanks to the WSL’s decision to postpone the first event of the season, BeachGrit’s new Survivor League, which you can read about here and which promised to put the fun back into round one, is also in a holding pattern. 

So what’s that mean for your twenty American shekels? 

You got three choices.

1. Do nothing. We’re still open for biz but the close-off date for the season will be the first day of the Bells waiting period, that is if that event isn’t put to the sword.
2. Want a refund? Email and it’s yours. ([email protected])
3. If you decide to stay and the tour is cancelled, which ain’t beyond the realm of possibility, everyone gets refunded.

Capiche?

All events in March cancelled, more to follow…

Had to happen didn’t it? NBA evaporated, Formula 1 shuttered, talk show hosts playing to empty studios and cranked up laugh tracks. Old people shoved into death ghettoes by thrill-kill millennials. Planes grounded. School children sent home to mediate on the apocalypse in front of television sets.

So it don’t come as any sorta surprise that the comically named Corona Open, Gold Coast, meant to start March 26, has been put on ice, with all surfers being sent a text this morning letting ’em know that all remaining events in March, including Snapper and the Piha event, have been cancelled.

From the WSL,

“Coronavirus is having massive consequences for sporting events and gatherings of all kinds around the world, and we are no different,” said WSL CEO Erik Logan. “We did not take this decision lightly as we are aware that it has a significant impact on the surfing community. However, the health and safety of our athletes, fans, and staff are paramount. From the standpoint of social responsibility, we also take very seriously the role our events might play in accelerating the spread of the virus. We’ve been in close contact with our athletes and we feel strongly that this is the right thing to do right now.”

“The fluid nature of this situation is forcing us to evaluate things day-by-day, and even hour-by-hour,” Logan said. “As this continues to evolve, we’ll continue to adapt, endeavoring to make the next right decision each day.”

Based on the information we have at this time, we are not currently canceling any additional events beyond this time frame. That said, the situation continues to evolve, and we are closely monitoring and evaluating the status of our upcoming events, including our next CT event at Bells Beach in Victoria, Australia.

More from tour correspondent, Longtom, soon.