Superstar status confirmed… 

The two-time world surfing champion, Brazil’s Gabriel Medina, is a surprise addition to the 2021 version of football simulation video game FIFA2021, the biggest-selling vid game in the world.

Medina, who is twenty-seven and who became Brazil’s first-ever world surfing champion in 2014, joins good friend, and rumoured partner, the soccer superstar Neymar Jr in the game.

Readers will remember, one week ago, sopping up their morning fat with the news that media houses in Brazil were speculating wildly about the pair’s relationship. 

Various outlets, including Midiario.com and the country’s version of Time, Istoé, said the pair were spending every available minute together and at least one claimed that both are using models to cover their true feelings.

From Midiario:

The famous Brazilian soccer player Neymar returns with a new controversy and what he has put on his Instagram is a series of photos from which he has been very affectionate with another man.

In the show program, “Chisme No Like”, the journalists Javier Ceriani and Elisa Beristain, said that Medina has a romance with the model Jazmín Brunette, something that supposedly would be to cover her sexuality as well as Neymar with Natalia Barulic , Maluma’s ex (his romance was never confirmed).

Communicators say that they have maintained a friendship since childhood, but it is not “normal” to see that of men here.

You’ll find cartoon Medina, meanwhile, in FIFA2021’s volta mode, which was introduced last year, and where soccer is played in the streets.

Eight other celebs made the cut for FIFA2021 including Brazilian singer Anitta; Batien Schweisteiger, former German soccer player; Hide Nakata, a former Japanese football player; Daniel Ricciardo, Australian Formula 1 driver; Lamar Jackson, NFL football player; Sam Kerr, Australian soccer player; DJ Snake, French music producer; and Winnie Harlow, Jamaican and Canadian model.

The name Anitta will ring bells for those with long-ish memories.

Two years ago, surf fans blamed poon and politics for Medina’s poor showing in Europe that year.

Fans blamed three things: Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, with whom Medina and Neymar had been trading video messages, Neymar himself, and the poon-shaking singer Anitta, famous for her tight miniskirts, sequinned silver halters and precarious heels.

From one: “He wants to be hated as Neymar is. He was never very smart and walking with Neymar and Annita and glorifying the myth. In the end the fans will turn against him, as with Neymar, an arrogant and uncultured person.”

What’s your favourite Anitta song?

Mine was always the sassy fem-anthem Paradinha until last year’s duet with Cardi B, Me Gusta, appeared and became an instant classic.

"Too difficult… I don't think it's going to happen."

Revealed today news that the Japanese government is looking for a “face-saving” way of announcing the 2021 Games, already postponed for one year, will have to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As reported by The Times,

According to a senior member of the ruling coalition, there is agreement that the Games, already postponed a year, are doomed. The aim now is to find a face-saving way of announcing the cancellation that leaves open the possibility of Tokyo playing host at a later date. “No one wants to be the first to say so but the consensus is that it’s too difficult,” the source said. “Personally, I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Publicly, Japan’s prime minister remains bullish and says holding the Games will be “proof of human victory against the coronavirus.”

Were you excited by surfing appearing at an Olympic Games?

Last January, our tour correspondent, Steve “Longtom” Shearer described his feelings,

Tell me, how pumped are you on surfings Olympic debut, on a scale of one to ten where one is you’d rather shoot heroin in the eyeball than watch and ten is cashing in your kids education fund to be there in person?

I’m hovering between a four and a six. Maybe a high seven if Italo surfs it in cut-offs during a typhoon swell.

"Hey, you should go be with all the cool guys..."

Our World Surf League leadership has done an absolutely incredible job mocking the pastime it seeks to promote.

Who could forget the money, and co-Waterperson of the Year Dirk Ziff coined the phrase “grumpy locals,” his co-Waterperson of the Year, and wife, Natasha, calling the same group “grumpy traditionalists.”

Then there was the legendary Beth Greve, the League’s Chief Commercial Officer, who made herself a household name by innovating by somehow inserting her surfboard fins backwards.

Backward Fin Beth, lauded by dairy ranch hands and Pulitzer Prize winners alike.

Now, of course, we have Chief Executive Officer Erik “ELo” Logan who rides a standup paddle board, singlehandedly destroyed the just-re-launched 2020/21 Championship Tour by contracting Covid-19 in Hawaii but also used to put his wetsuit on backwards too.

He was recently a guest on the Health Gig podcast where he said, “Moved to Manhattan Beach (California) and bought a house five blocks away from the beach. Now, go back in time, Chuck the Duck, landlocked kid from Oklahoma who wouldn’t even go into a lake if I couldn’t see my feet. It’s like, ‘If I can’t see the bottom, I’m not going in.’ And so, my wife at the time bought me a wetsuit when I was 41, for my 41st birthday as kind of a joke. It was sort of like, ‘Hey, you should go be with all the cool guys…’ so I put the wetsuit on, put it on backwards of course like most people do, zipper goes in the back, not in the front, it’s a great picture. So I put the wetsuit on and walked into the ocean…”

Fabulous but is it really true that most people put on wetsuits backwards for the first time?

Is this a truism of our little world?

I saw a frustrated younger 20ish boy sitting on the beach, two years ago, with his wetsuit on backwards but this is the only example in-the-wild I can recall.

Are there more at your local?

Most at Manhattan Beach?

Much to ponder.