"It sure ain't the Banzai! Sacrilege!"

Many tears and sore tummies after day one of the Lexus Pipe Pro where your reigning and multiple world champion deftly recorded a sub-two point total before quitting the event due to “food poisoning.” An extraordinary cataclysm by any measure. 

A small, but significant I suppose, criticism on a day at the Lexus Pipe Pro that was otherwise marked by the long promised world’s best surfers in the world’s best waves. Greatness and daring still reigns occasionally.

Now, an online sleuth has revealed the onsite poster for the Lexus Pipe Pro isn’t actually of Pipeline, or at least Backdoor Pipe given its right lean, but of an Australian beach. 

Hard to tell until examined closely. From Pipe, you’d be looking down to Log Cabins and, in the distance, you’d see the familiar outline of Kaena Point. 

Ah but here, long rolling yellowish sand, a few houses here and there, and a high-rise apartment building at the right edge of the frame.

So, where? 

To my rheumy eyes it looks a little like Palm Beach on the Gold Coast or maybe, as one pal suggested, Collaroy in Sydney, just south of Narrabeen there, but miles, many thousands of miles, from the most photographed and most photogenic wave in the world, Pipeline. 

So, why advertise the Lexus Pipe Pro with a photograph of an Australian beach? Isn’t it just the wildest thing ever to not run a photograph of the actual Pipeline on the event poster. 

As someone who has flirted in the corporate media game, and I do miss the goodwill among my comrades and the pleasure of those slightly rough kitchen kisses that end with a little bite, I would guess the blame lays on a designer given the brief to create a folder of “assets, as they’re called, for the Lexus Pipe Pro.

At some point, and with the deadline for the Lexus Pipe Pro approaching, a stock photo was bought to fill the gap in the on-site poster graphic.

“No one will know,” says the designer, cracking the knuckles on his long pale fingers, small pink nose wrinkled and nostrils quivering as he savours the divine pleasure of another successful day.

But so wrong! Surfers no dumb.