Obvious question: who did it better?

In 2010, the filmmaker Kai Neville was shooting for what would become his, and the epoch’s, defining masterwork, Lost Atlas. 

That golden period. All collaborative artists have ’em.

It’s only years later, upon reflection, that we can trawl through their work and call it.

Kai Neville, the now thirty-seven-year-old filmmaker and sunglass company co-owner had grabbed the performance surf film space after his debut Modern Collective.

But for Kai, it was his second film, Lost Atlas, that built his reputation into a profitable exercise.

A decade later it’s still his masterwork. It came at a time when he had John John Florence, Jordy Smith, Dusty Payne and Dane Reynolds in his pocket.

And, in the middle of 2010, Kai joined your ol pal DR and the Stab gang to shoot Oakley teamriders Julian Wilson, Kolohe Andino, Adam Melling and Evan Geiselman in a Canary Islands wavepool, with lighting and stills by master technician Richard Freeman. 

The clip, which starts twenty-eight minutes into Lost Atlas, is most surreal, an ethereal interlude in a most prosaic film.

Recently, the German motorcar company Audi, employed the surfers Stephanie Gilmore, Coco Ho and Leah Dawson to, and one must suppose here, recreate the Lost Atlas sequence, and which you can watch below.

The obvious question is who did it better?

Do bear in mind that Kai shot and edited his sequence solo, and using a seven-hundred dollar Canon 7D camera, while the Audi team hired the noted Australian filmmaker and artist Daniel Askill (Chanel, with Kristen Stewart, Dior, with Jude Law, BMW, Air France) and a cast of many.

(Watch the behind-the-scenes clip of Audi film here.)

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.