"Now you’re making more stupid rules and you guys want the surfboard manufacturing industry to kow-tow to your demands."

If you know your boards, you’ll know the name Bert Burger, the surf industry adjacent Western Australian-born shaper who invented the technology that would eventually become Firewire Surfboards.

Firewire, if you didn’t know, is a surfboard brand owned by Kelly Slater that builds boards in Thailand and sells ’em for between six hundred and thirteen hundred dollars.

Burger, who lives in Thailand, was named Surfer Magazine’s shaper of the year in 2007, which the now-revived AI zombie magazine celebrated by spelling Bertie’s name wrong throughout.

Anyway, he’s got surfboard building bona fides. So when he launched an extraordinary tirade at the WSL on his personal Facebook page, figure I should put it up in lights.

Responding to an apparent change in the ruleset for the longboard tour, Burger wrote:

“WSL…over the past five or six years I’ve watched the world’s best longboarders leave the sport, disgusted with the change of judging criteria. Replaced with kooks who go straight. Now you’re making more stupid rules and you guys want the surfboard manufacturing industry to kow-tow to your demands. Talk about regression.”

There’s a longboard tour? The rules have been changed?

Last I heard, grappling dynamo Joel Tudor, a three-time world champ, had been disappeared following conduct detrimental to the integrity of the WSL per the WSL Rule Book, which includes the violation of the following provisions: sportsmanlike conduct (14.02), damage to surfing’s image (14.04), and verbal assault (14.08).”

The suspension followed a heated series of posts, interviews, with and from Tudor following a rumour, possibly started here, that the World Surf League was gonna slash cut the longboard world tour from three events to one.

“(They) want to run this fake shit about equality and inclusiveness,” wrote Tudor. “Don’t be a bunch of fucking phonies.”

Burger, whose initial missive struck a chord with his followers later added,

“You spend your entire career helping to advance the sport through innovation and product development. Then one day, the powers that be decide to show favoritism to all those manufacturers still using 70 year old technology.”

Dark days, I suppose, or is it a subtle way of telling log people to ride a regular craft if they wanna do turns?

But silence over China "that little country known for tucking its lovely Uyghurs away neatly in dark spaces".

The International Surfing Association has extended its competition ban of Russian surfers running up to the 2024 Olympic Games.

Apparently, the ISA wants to show you its morals much the way the Dali Lama wants Sam George to show his secret spots.

The continued ban is in reaction to Moscow’s attempted reclamation of Ukraine, its former sister state. If you haven’t heard, the year-long aggression in the East hasn’t gone over well in the West, as the razed cities, estimated 30,000 civilian casualties, and the kind of general vulgarities associated with invasions pile up.

According to the ISA, “these decisions are the result of the ISA’s strong condemnation of the Russian Government’s invasion of Ukraine – a war which has been fought for more than a year. As a top priority, the ISA is ensuring the safety of the public, athletes and officials, and is protecting the integrity of its competitions. The ISA continues to express its solidarity with the people and surfers from Ukraine.”

However, the International Olympic Committee, from which the ISA takes its guidance, makes exception for Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag as the IOC has “serious concerns” over excluding athletes “strictly based upon their nationality.”

Cheers to a world without bias.

Yet here’s where the ISA deviates stating, “There is no provision in the ISA rule book for the participation of individuals outside their national teams, including for World Surfing Games and other events that play a part in athlete qualification for the Olympic Games via their National Olympic Committees.”

Hard line tactics here from surfing’s world governing body.

Does the ISA believe that the barbaric Wagner Group eating up Bakhmut will see this, drop their guns and pick up their rosary beads?

Of course, this could be the rare moment in history when every voice screams, “This ain’t right.”

It’s a fool’s bet that we’d see a surfer with the hammer and sickle on the sleeve in Teahupo’o next summer, anyway.

It makes one think the ruling is simply moral preening, knowing that the exclusion of any potential (see fool’s bet) Russian surfers from competition will have zero impact on the war?

Afterall, the IOC, and by extension the ISA, continues their silence over China’s participation in sporting competition, that little country known for tucking its lovely Uyghurs away neatly in dark spaces. Since 2014, over one million Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang territory have been killed or imprisoned in “re-education camps.”

And remember Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai? In 2021, after accusing a senior Communist party official of sexual misconduct, she disappeared. IOC president Thomas Bach shrugged and Peng is still gone.

The expressed goal of the Olympic movement is to “contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without a discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity, and fair play.”

Considering this mission statement, should not the ISA let surfers compete regardless of where they happened to drop from mother’s womb?

"I wonder if we will see a collaboration between Urbnsurf and Slater’s Surf Ranch."

The greatest athlete of all time, as determined by The Outsiders star Rob Lowe, has sent surf fans, conspiracy theorists and online sleuths into overdrive after a surprise visit to the Urbnsurf wavepool in Melbourne, Australia. 

Fifty-one-year-old Kelly Slater, along with fluid mechanics engineer Adam Fincham, created Surf Ranch in 2016, a one-off pool near Fresno, California, that has become the go-to for tech millionaire birthday parties and home to the tour’s own Coachella-esque event and festival. 

En route to Margaret River, where the 11-time world champ will attempt to keep his spot on tour, Slater visited the two-year-old Wavegarden pool a short taxi ride from Tullamarine airport. 

And while the Champ’s jumping and swerving was adored, as always, online gumshoes were quick to point out there may be more to his visit than a simple rinsing after Bells.

“Been there, surfed it, seen others surf it in real life and posted! No one, no one has ever destroyed a wave like that… Kelly your a legend! P.S. don’t think I have ever seen you do that at your surf park, must be a better wave here.”

“I wonder if we will see a collaboration between Urbnsurf and Slater’s Surf Ranch. Guaranteed he wasn’t surfing; he was evaluating.”

A psy-op or psychological operation is the use of propaganda, disinformation and other psychological techniques to twist the minds of a target audience’s behaviors.

Think, Operation Mockingbird from the nineteen-fifties when the CIA recruited journalists and editors to spread propaganda and disinformation in support of US government policies or the wonderful MK-Ultra, when the CIA, responding to claims of Commie-brainwashing in Vietnam, used drugs and hypnosis to get into their subjects’ heads, Charles Manson a famous test pilot.

 

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