Surf world rallies behind Griffin Colapinto after title contender endures same hip surgery as Kelly Slater

"I got an MRI and now I’m waking up today with a fresh labrum surgery from one of the goats Dr Warren Kramer."

Only one month ago, Kelly Slater revealed he’d just undergone gruelling hip surgery for a “shredded” labrum. 

The hip labrum, if y’didn’t know, is a ring of cartilage that lines the rim of the hip joint socket. It deepens the socket, which gives stability to the joint, acts a sorta shock absorber when you rum and jump and helps lube the joint. A small but real important part of the machine. 

Slater, who’s fifty-one, said his hip has been real bad ever since he did the splits on a wipeout at Sunset thirty-two years ago and thought he’d snapped his femur. A few years later he was towing in Tahiti and doing flips off the back of waves when he landed weird, hurt his hip, and then in the summer of 2000 he went in for surgery to clean up the mess.

Slater employed the noted orthopaedic surgeon Warren Kramer for a complete Labral reconstruction, the doc using a dead man’s labrum to replace Slater’s old beat-up cartilage.

“Warren got in there and said it looked like a war zone, said he had to get in there and chop through the woods,” said Slater. 

Last night, the world title contender Colapinto, who is almost thirty years younger than Slater, got his Labrum surgery from Kramer, too. 

So, turns out this last half of 2023 I’ve been surfing with a torn labrum in my right hip. I did it during one of my heats in Wetsern Australia when I hit one of the scary Margaret River end sections and as I landed I compressed the bone up into my laybrum tearing it from 11 to 1 o’clock. The pain wasn’t that bad so I thought it was something to do with my muscle, and maybe it was a pinching thing going on but obviously I’m no doctor haha.

I surfed the rest of the season trying to figure this thing out until the season finally finished I got an MRI and now I’m waking up today with a fresh labrum surgery from one of the goats @drwarreng . Thank you @drwarreng 🙏. So word on the streets is recovery could be anywhere from 2 to 4 months for athletes. So now ill start a new journey to hopefully come back better than ever and ready to compete at pipeline with my brothers in 2024!

Many famous surfers in the comments, Dorian, Jack Robinson, Dora, Conner Coffin, Taylor Knox and even Selema Masekela, silent since his recent and very acrimonious split from Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o who described their parting as “a love devastatingly extinguished by deception.” 

To Colapinto, Selema wrote simply, “Captain Resilience.”