Greatest athlete ever Kelly Slater wins world’s most prestigious surfing contest, one week before his fiftieth birthday! “This is a sporting miracle!”

🐑 🐐.. …. . …

Here’s how I saw things…

We saw Medinaesque performances in and out of the water: Slater suckered Miggy Pupo into an interference call, ended up in tears after the Final, even teasing retirement from the podium, which is another classic Slater trope when he is on top, saying, “I might not show up to Sunset – I have to have a talk with myself”.

He’ll be there. Once again, he dominated the sport. Total ownership. His tactics were superb, his performances superior. Courage, decision making, composure all running at a level above. Even the spiritualism and tears at the end had a tactical edge. “I’ve committed my life to this,” he said through the tears, “All the winning, all the losing, all the crap. I’ve hated lots of it”.

Slater’s dominance was shadowed by an elephant of unrealised equality. A subject that, in Oscar Wilde’s words, “dare not speak its name”.

Head of Competition Jessi Miley-Dyer was as cheery as a chipmunk in clover this morning when she announced Finals Day, “I’m here to let you know that today will be Finals Day,” she said with a huge grin. “We’ll be starting with Men’s Quarter-Finals and then moving into Women’s Semis”.

‘Finally’, thought a million surf fans, ‘we get to see the Women at proper Pipe’. Huge crowd. Chunky gnarly Pipe. Minimum of $25,000 US Dollars for paddling out. $80,000 for the winner.
But as Men’s QF 4 ticked down a pall of silence fell over the webcast. It was like someone had died suddenly, but we didn’t know who, or how. Well, we knew who – it was the Women’s Semi-Finals.

Nothing from Jessi. Nothing from the booth. Not a word of explanation to the audience. For a broadcast team that can’t manage to catch all the live action and keep pace with what is happening on screen it was a remarkable level of co-ordination. It was like an invading force was massed outside the WSL citadel and any mention of the Women’s comp would have given the enemy an excuse to sack the fortress.

Back to the Men’s Quarters. The gulf in class between the Pipe experts and the surfers who had ridden a run of luck to the Finals was massive. Kelly was completely dominant over Kanoa, as was Miggy Pupo over Mesinas. Ibelli had an easy run over Sammy Pupo.

Only JJF and Moniz was a true contest. It was far from perfect Pipe. The dreamy E or SE wind of the first couple days had been replaced by north-quarter winds, corroding the faces with raggedy chips of water coming at right angles across the face of the lefts. The rights were slightly cleaner, and unspeakably heavy with the west angle. Moniz found an entry into a right. Eight, ten feet..? It was one of those rides that put a metallic taste of fear and andrenalin in the mouth. His fins skipped out, he sketchily regained edge control, already under the lip, and managed to get inside a cave which looked to sending collapsing stalactites into the path of the Hawaiian. Clean make. 9.60.

John John responded with a deep, deep tube ride on a smaller Backdoor wave. Then a classic, behind the peak Pipe ride for a 7.67 and a 9.00. He had control of the heat with six minutes to g

As Marcellus Wallace noted in Pulp Fiction, pride can fuck with you. And it fucked with John when he got detonated on an unmakeable Backdoor wave. No need for him to catch it. No need for him to try and out-do Moniz when it came to charging. There was nothing to prove. His board snapped. He wasted minutes on the go around and paddle-out. And then had to watch Moniz getting blown out of a decompression chamber for the winning score.

Had it been five minutes later, John would have been on a ski and possibly back in position. Two days of ten foot Pipe had been wrangled sans impeller and exhaust, but now the skis were called. It could only mean the Women were warming up. An inducement. We have to infer this because the commentary – paid handsomely for the job of identifying and analysing the sport in real-time for fans – had gone as mute as Easter Island statues.

The ski assist was not a sufficient inducement. Money was not, as Rochelle Ballard so astutely noted on Day One, a sufficient inducement. Nor was the crowd on the beach, the chance of having the lineup divested of sausage-wielders, equality, broadcast eyeballs, an historical day for Womens surfing etc etc.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not disrespect fear. Fear is the most disrespected commodity in action sports and popular culture. Contrary to the therapy speak that “nothing” lies on the other side of fear, in this case it’s very much a something. That something includes death, permanent injury, humiliation, career suicide etc etc.

At a certain level though, someone has to be courageous enough to be honest about the fear. It could have been Tyler, maybe Carissa. At the least JMD should have protected her athletes and carried the can for them.

Instead of making a statement such as, ‘we’ve decided conditions are too unsafe and in the interests of our athletes have decided not to hold competition’ or words to that effect, JMD threw her girls under the bus. Making it clear that “after discussions with the women” they’d decided not to run due to the wind. It was a disgraceful display of corporate cowardice and JMD should on the next plane home looking for a new job. But she won’t. People fail upwards in the WSL, until they get disappeared and never mentioned again.

In the most bitter irony possible, while JMD was telling us the surf wasn’t good enough for the Women to run, Kelly Slater was threading a wide open tube at Backdoor. A lifetime ride for anyone.

It leaves us with a series of questions about holding a Womens comp in conjunction with Men at Pipe.

To wit: What did they think was going to happen?

Pipe gets ten foot and gnarly, what did they think was going to happen?

If the elite end of the field was not prepared to paddle out, should that small matter not have been dealt with in advance?

Or do they think they can get away with treating a global sporting audience like idiots and pretend it’s not happening?

We watch Pipe because it defies corpo-speak and the made up reality that woke capitalism likes to smother us in.

ELO was ashen-faced and grim on the stage as Kelly basked in his moment of glory. Even a smoke and mirrors flim flam man like him couldn’t escape the fact that the credibility of his organisation was bleeding out on the sand.

Let’s finish on a high.

What can you say about Kelly’s Finals performance? There was so much in it. The outrageous Backdoor waves, the tippy toes pull-in with the lip gracing his dome like a swinging death club, so finely honed even he was “glad it didn’t kill me.” He put Moniz on the ropes early, accepting his challenge to send it and charge and then taunting him and teasing him into closeout after closeout. Moniz had reason to feel aggrieved after being robbed of the normal rest period between Semi and Final but he didn’t complain. Kelly stalked him and showed him lots of different looks, making sure he was constantly in his grill

Halfway through they both had four waves. Moniz, four non-makes. Kelly two brilliant rides and had him combo-ed. From there it was control and pressure. Moniz caught a bomb on the buzzer, maybe the biggest, heaviest wave of the day. Only shaded by Kelly’s deeper tube on the wave before.

We have to find a way to bury our epidemiological differences and get him to Aus

Bex Vidina reporting.