Kelly Slater weighs on surf champ Filipe Toledo’s Olympic Games choke, “It’s something mentally in his head.”

“To have him lose to a guy that no one knows about…that would be a shock to people who don’t surf.”

You know the Wall of Positive Noise has been breached when Kelly Slater starts hitting BeachGrit talking points. 

In this case, the remarkable story of Filipe Toledo, the two-time world champ whose struggle to overcome what appears to be a terrific fear of Teahupoo has been a cause célèbre on these pages since Toledo’s zero heat point total in the autumn of 2015. 

But all that was set to change when Toledo stunned the world with an almost-perfect 9.67 ride at the Paris 2024 Games at Teahupoo, the Brazilian exhibiting all those skills surf fans knew he had but were kept under wraps either by fear or a desire to create an air of mystery coming into the Olympic Games.

Filipe Toledo, who surged into gold medal favouritism after the wave, was deservedly thrilled with the result and posted 25 different angles of the wave on his Instagram account, as did his former pro surfer-daddy Ricardo. 

The knives came out for Toledo, however, when the surf hit an epic six-to-ten feet, heroics abounding from Morocco’s Ramzi Boukhaim to Brazil’s Joao Chianca to Brazil’s Gabriel Medina and Australia’s Jack Robinson, and Toledo barely rode a wave. 

“With all sincerity, I hope he is ok, because I can scarcely imagine a greater swing from high to low,” wrote JP Currie. 

“Yesterday, his demons had been vanquished, silenced and sent back to that dark chamber in the pit of his soul. Today, they are back upon his shoulder, wailing and cackling into the shot blood of his eyeballs.

“And I fear that when it’s all said and done, it won’t be two world titles and some of the most dynamic surfing ever done that is Filipe Toledo’s legacy, but simply a handful of waves he refused to paddle for.” 

And that might’ve been it, of course, as the Toledo-Teahupoo dynamic is rarely discussed in the polite circles of surf media where access is traded for acquiescence.

Yesterday, howevs, in swung the great Barton Lynch and his pal of thirty years Kelly Slater, two men who aren’t afraid to storm the citadel of accepted opinion, and they didn’t hold punches when it came to Toledo’s choke against Japanese minnow Reo Inaba. 

“I feel for Filipe,” says Kelly Slater, who describes Toledo as the most talented surfer in the world although with the important caveat “in small waves.”

“I’ve surfed against him out there (Teahupoo). I had a heat with him when it was pretty big a couple years ago… I don’t know what it is. I think it’s just like something mentally in his head. I don’t think he thinks he’s going to die. It’s just he’s got some kind of block there.”

Slater pointed out Toledo didn’t seem to have the same fear at Pipe recalling another heat where Toledo nearly threaded an epic eight-foot Backdoor drainer.

Still, nowhere quite like Teahupoo.

“To have him lose to a guy that no one knows about,” continued Slater. “You know, Rio Inaba is not a well-known name in the surf world. So, that would be a big shock to people who don’t surf to see that heat and to see who the multi time world champion just lost to.”