Eighty is the new thirty; one hundred the new forty
etc.
The organisers of a surfing contest in New Zealand have
been forced to add a new age-group after an eighty-year-old
kneeboarder signed up for this year’s event.
The Fisher and Paykel Easter Masters’ Surfing Championships has
been a fixture of Taranaki, a pretty little stretch of towns built
around a volcano on the west coast of New Zealand’s north island,
for the past three decades.
To accommodate older surfers, those aged seventy-five to
seventy-nine, there exists the division, “Immortals”.
But, now, Adrian Pickering, who has surfed in the contest for
twenty-four years, has grown out of the division and into his own
specially created age-group, eighty-to-one hundred, called
“Improbables”.
After his heat, Pickering
told RNZ,
“It was a beautiful heat and I was out with four other very
talented surfers and they were getting some amazing rides. I was
getting some pathetic ones, but I got the rides that’s the main
thing. The hardest part was getting across those rocks and then
getting back when you’re exhausted. That was very slow and
painful.”
Pickering, who didn’t get into surfing until he was into his
fifties, says, yeah, it’s wonderful he’s surfing but admits, “It’s
getting near the end of my surfing life I can tell you.”
I always figured mid-sixties was going to be the cut-off date
for my career of throwaway airs and three-stage cutbacks.
Have now revised to mid-seventies.
You?
