WSL in bullish mood as it claims record crowds for Rip Curl Portugal Pro but fans ask, record crowds or record chutzpah?
You and I know, well, we know that crowd estimates are at best a chimera and at worst a bold as brass lie.
If you’ve ever been at a stadium that holds fifty-thousand people you know the immenseness of that number, columns and columns of human beings sitting shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye can see.
But, still, wild crowd numbers are regularly thrown out by event organisers.
In Sydney, organisers of the the annual Mardi Gras parade would claim the fruity float show was viewed by a quarter-of-a-million spectators jamming the streets or five percent of the entire city’s population, a declaration never tested, for obvious reasons.
The NPS got out of the crowd counting game soon after.
During the 2011 Egyptian revolution Al Jazeera claimed two million protesters packed Tahrir Square calling for the removal of prez Hosni Mubarak. An expert later estimated it was close to 35k.
You get the picture.
So when the WSL’s CEO Erik Logan quoted 51,000 spectators at Supertubos for the Rip Curl contest, and that number was repeated by commentators Kaipo Guerrero and Petey Mel (1:47:58) , well, a little counting using a drone shot and the sample method where you take a portion of the crowd, count how many are in it and multiply it across the beach, was in order.
See this drone shot?
Finals Day.
Two thousand people? Max?
How many souls you count?
Maybe the weekend was busier but two thousand percent busier?
The obvious question is
Record crowds or record chutzpah?
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Um…isnt non alcoholic cider……cider?
Erik Logan is a well known pillow-biter.
I have never even gave one ounce of shit about the ASP, whoops I mean the WSL.
now i lay me down to sleep…
Did you ‘know’ the Mod can take ‘your’ comment and ‘add’ or ‘delete’ to ‘your’ comment—depending on his mood??
Ya, kinda creepy, huh?
‘You’ may be ‘next’.
Who knows how many comments ‘he’ has changed when ‘you’ were ‘not’ looking..
It doesn’t even show up on your disgus as being edited I believe.
‘Crowd Estimates’ are the dodgiest set of numbers you will every find outside of Wall Street.
Logan polishes turds like a seasoned Politician with a Hollywood grin.
Looks like he must be done filming the Jerry Garcia movie as he looks thinner!
he can tickle the shit out of both…at the same time!
jon barely corn must die!
My first guess was 4000 peeps max. WSL is counting on someone else not counting.
Like reporting that a 45′ boat was trapped on the reef at Honolua and exaggerating that the boat was 90′.
No wonder they are so successful that they can “fete” themselves instead of run one of 11 contests.
According to DLNR it was 94 feet and 120 tons
Looked much smaller to me. I wasn’t there with a tape measure, but I taken charters on smaller boats that looked bigger. But I will look it up.
I don’t understand the crowd count in the modern era of streaming these events. Who cares how many people are on the beach? They need hundreds of thousands on the webcast, not 20 thousand on the beach. Besides, seeking crowds leads to waves like Huntington and three days of shit Supertubos with only a hand full of heats run in decent Supertubos. The potential hundreds of thousands online would way prefer to see comps in perfect surf from remote Indo, for example, than in locations with bad waves and big crowds.
Classic WSL “look over here” so I can distract from the real issue, which is wave quality matters.
Erik “E-Tool” Logan
Typical lefty ass corpo BS.
Thank you for speaking truth to the powers of monopoly—-without this article creepy yiddish “record chutzpah” would win again—we know why—>rare to find anyone calling out the liars.
Been in fully packed 80k stadiums plenty of times. That’s a lot of humans. 2k is a good estimate, maybe be a little generous and give 2.5k. It’s likely less than that during early rounds.
I seen a few people on the beach during the contest but heard mostly barking dogs on the broadcast. Although it sounds better than the comm box.
So, he’s claiming that if you took the total amount of people who watched from the beach/stands on each individual day of competition (no chance there’s many there when it isn’t running) and added all the days up you’d get 51k? That’s still hard quite hard to believe…
It would take large parking lots with a dedicated busing system just to handle a fraction of 50k
ELO: If we build it they will come…parking lot. Reserve tickets now! Bells Beach bleacher’s too! 4-4-23. “But not you Bethany!”
He’s bitten hard. taken to social to clap back at critics
They also said 32000 turned up at the beach for the opening day. That had me laughing
As long as Ziffy believes those numbers….
Be lucky to be 1000 people there.
Also what happened to the story about Britt merrick? He threaten to sue?
What was that about?
Something about britt merrick calling out shapers rankings? I never got to read it clicked the link an nothing happened then it was gone from the stories.
Do tell…