Portugal turns on adopted surf hero Kanoa Igarashi: “(He’s) Shitting on everything!”

World number six has car tyres slashed, warnings of beat-downs etc..

Portuguese surfers, including at least one of its noted pros, have turned on the Japan-born, US-raised, Dior Homme sponsored Kanoa Igarashi, a resident of Portugal since he was eighteen.

Kanoa, who is twenty-two, has lived, on and off, in a beachfront mansion at Ericeria, on Portugal’s west coast and just north of its capital, Lisbon, ever since he “felt a really positive energy” after a junior contest there.

As he told a local magazine, “The food is amazing; the people are so welcoming, so happy, I think the quality of life is really good. I travel all year, I really know these things, when a place is good or bad, there is something special here, whenever I leave Portugal I leave with more energy.”

Well, as we all know, that energy ain’t always of the happy sort.

Now, and as reported by Paul Evans for Wavelength magazine, locals have turned on Igarashi for surfing outside his postcode, despite a clever, although perhaps accidental, red herring on his Instagram account.

From Wavelength,

There has been much less of a debate as to whether anybody should be driving up and down the coast in the hunt for a wave, an apparent area of consensus among surfers.

So when world no.6 Kanoa Igarashi felt the ire of Peniche locals earlier this month, driving to the area’s more secluded breaks to surf and getting all 4 tyres slashed while in the water, you might have expected the Lisbon-based Japanese surfer to stick closer to home.

And yet apparently undeterred by the incident, reports came through this week that Igarashi drove the 400km from his home in Cascais to surf in the Algarve, where he was met with further disapproval from members of the local surfing community.

Former CT surfer Marlon Lipke reposted a video on his IG showing Kanoa surfing a 2ft onshore right while being heckled from the cliff by a local.

The chorus of disapproval translates as, “(If you) Live in Lagos? Can’t surf. I can’t surf, but the American can come and surf anyway.”

Marlon wrote: “I don’t even believe in all the media but I have respect for all the people going through hard times and I’m staying at home”

“And then you have idiots driving from Lisbon to the Algarve surfing our home spots and shitting on everything #norespect”

Other disapproving Algarve locals wasted little time in letting Kanoa know their feelings through an exchange of DM’s in which Kanoa made lengthy, reasoned explanations as to why he’d made the journey to surf, as well as explaining his vision of the new reality we’re set to be living in for the forseable future.

Unsurprisingly, his arguments were given very short shrift. “Next time you come here, you better hope you don’t run into me, etc etc.”

Read the rest of it here.