The letter was the initiative of 1977 world champ Shaun Tomson and Kelly Slater is, or was, unaware of the push.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the Olympic surf qualifiers for Paris 2024 at Teahupoo were a failure of a magnitude greater even than, say, Custer’s hubris at Little Big Horn.
The byzantine selection process was slammed as “absurdist” and branded a “colossal failure” after Filipe Toledo, whose fraught relationship with Teahupoo ain’t no secret, was selected for Team Brazil over Teahupoo standouts Gabriel Medina and Italo Ferreira.
In an ironic twist, it was against Ferreira in 2015 where Toledo suffered the ignominy of becoming one of only two surfers in pro surfing history to paddle in from a heat without a wave being caught.
Worse, was the exclusion of Kelly Slater, whose record at Teahupoo is unlikely to ever be touched: seven perfect rides, five contest wins, two perfect heats and all wrapped up with an average heat score of 16.29.
The dreams of surf fans being able to watch Kelly Slater, who’ll be fifty two, stroll off into his harvest years with a golden Olympic trinket have been raised, however, after fourteen world champions co-signed a letter to ISA prez Fernando Aguerre requesting Slater be given a wildcard into the contest.
The letter was hand-signed by Wayne Bartholomew, Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, Shaun Tomson, Peter Townend, Mick Fanning, Martin Potter, Mark Richards, Joel Parkinson, Damien Hartman, CJ Hobgood, Barton Lynch and even ol Adriano de Souza whose world title reign was compressed to less than one day after Slater released footage of his game-changing wavepool one day after de Souza was crowned.
The letter was the initiative of 1977 world champ Shaun Tomson and Kelly Slater is, or was, unaware of the push.
Kelly trading pool sessions for signatures?
rules, what rules? we’re surfers. we make our own rules. you don’t like like it, we’ll make nasty posts in instagram
Ah let him in I say. He could win the gold .
And retire.
They’ve misread it, thinking it was a signing of new contracts where they’d get a free ute
LA 2028!!
He will be in
Is Damien Hartman Phil Hartman’s brother?
I would encourage everyone to see or revisit the South Park episode that took the piss out of Bono from U2. That sums up Kelly perfectly.
hmm, no Occy/Pip/Italo/Medina……..maybe they thought they worked their collective butts off to win the Champingnon Of the surf world…….and Kelly, well whatever he wants please!
Off topic..probably alot late with this. Really good piece in Carve. Honesty is a breath of fresh air.
Let’s be honest, Kelly has been cheating since he broke his foot at J Bay.
Not denying that he was an absolute freak but he’s been way off the pace for years and he should have retired after he won pipe.
The US surfing association even left the door open for him to weasel his way into the US team. Instead of saying “the potential third spot will go to the third highest ranked surfer” they made it “the third spot will go to whoever finishes highest at Teahupoo”. Gift wrapped for egghead but he even fucked that up, and now if there is a third US surfer it will be Barron Mamiya.
There is absolutely no way the US will be allowed 4 surfers. I mean is US swimming going to try to get Michael Phelps onto their team because years ago he was the greatest swimmer ever? What’s next? Carl Lewis? You don’t get into the Olympics on past glories. You get in by qualifying according to the rules.
The only way he could have done it is move to Puerto Rico and keep his precious US passport (his ego would never allow him to surf for Syria). Mind you, both options are shut as you have to make the move well over a year in advance; see Erin Brooks, the yank who tried to pretend she is a snap frozen but left it too late.
I think it is the surf. The contest windows are too tight and the events have suffered. How many WSL events in the past 2 years had epic surf?
If every event was in epic surf (start chasing the best swells), Kelly would still be in the top 5.
I think it is his boards TBH. I still remember that comp at Dbah when he completely spazzed out because his board was like 6 inches too short for him.
Notwithstanding that no tour has ever had epic surf in every comp, and I do get your point, he milked that foot injury to stop getting kicked off tour and got photographed surfing while “injured” multiple times.
Can we get a petition going to get Medina into it also? Signed by everyone who doesn’t fancy their own chances of winning a medal in Tahiti!
Last roll of the dice for the cheating goat.
Interesting list of Slater goons, tho …
Gabby, Pip, and Italo are conspicuously absent from that list.
Looks like Shaun forgot
That other world champions
Have a vagina
Also JJ
I’m no investigative surf journalist but I’d like to know if there’s been any precedent to allowing this type of one-off olympic entry.
Cut and pasted from the ISA Olympics qualification details.
Universality Place: For the first time, one place per gender will be made available to eligible NOCs. Special consideration will be given to the nature of the wave in Teahupoo in terms of the eligibility criteria for these places. Should there deemed to be no qualified surfers in this category, these slots will be reallocated to the highest ranked eligible surfers from the 2024 World Surfing Games The complete process and selection criteria for these places will be communicated by the IOC at a later date.
Wow. The Ke11y Clause.
Settle down with the fucken journalism cunt!
Xox
Notwithstanding corruption and shady deals by the IOC (!), Kelly’s not able to represent team USA.
Re: the Universality place:
“To be registered for a spot granted by the principle of Universality,
the athlete must be in the top 50 of the 2023 or 2024 ISA World Surfing
Games.”
Unfortunately for egghead, he didn’t surf in the 2023 games and Surfing US is obliged to send the two highest CT ranked surfers from 2023 to compete in 2024. That means the universality place can’t go to him even if they wanted, nor can he get the “reallocated” (unused) universality spot.
One thing I did find though, is there will be 24 surfers in the Olympics (Japan was 20). That means 4 extra sacrifices to appease the surf gods. Even if from what we were talking about the other day, we parachute in Rio Waida, Ramzi Boukhiam and Carlos Munoz, there’s still 4 other guys to qualify.
It’s really handy to be a hot surfer from a non-powerhouse surfing nation because there’s such a small pool of eligible surfers and all you have to do is win a few heats at the world surfing games. I dare say Fred Morais will get in, but that still leaves three others. You never know, it might be Ricardo Christie after all. Hell, Glenn Hall would be mad to not put his hand up for Ireland.
Cheers! Some good info. I do wonder how flexible those rules are. After all it’s all about promoting a sport that new to the Olympics 🙄
Ric hasn’t done any events in NZ so he won’t be a pick for the team!
Sounds like surfing with Shaun. He thinks you don’t have to paddle up and get into position. You just take what you want with out earning it.
Can we petition Shaun into the Nazare event?
They’d be dumb not to give Slater a wildcard.
Being the arguably the only household name in surfing (USA at least) you’d think having him in the mix would draw more eyes to the event and help boost the sport’s popularity in the olympic mix
Legendary but fading figure skater gifted entry to Olympics outside qualification process — so grateful for one last shot at glory, she says, as critics claim her entry makes mockery of Olympiad.
What figure skating blog did you pull that info from?
I follow Chas across all his platforms.
Hands down. We all want to see it.
Shaun’s a dumbass but if they decide to move the event to a crappy beach-break for environmental reasons I’m all for giving Slater a wildcard.
Shaun the Prawn clearly missed the BG piece about Kelly supporting Palestinians from the river to the sea! But maybe that was just DR’s assumption. Fake news everywhere it seems.
Hmmm…anyone else notice AI didn’t sign it?
Neither did Sunny. More questions than answers…
Shit, or Derek Ho.
No Occy? 🤔
Occy’s still trying to find a pen
Crayon
Occy can’t read or write