“I want to go into the Olympics so I can make the United States a better place!”
A cavalcade of superstars, including the man who pioneered backside tube riding at Pipeline Johnny Boy Gomes, have lined up to praise a tweenie from Oceanside, California, after the kid fearlessly attacked one of the world’s heaviest waves.
Uriah McDonald has been surfing since he was eight months old although confesses he wasn’t able to spring to his feet then but it was this early exposure to the ocean gave him the bug that he sure hasn’t been able to shake.
Uriah, who swings under the handle @uriah_anchor, was recently filmed taking on Tahiti’s Teahupoo, a wave that famously flummoxed the otherwise brilliant San Clemente-based surfer Filipe Toledo.
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Toledo, you’ll remember, was in the running for a shock gold medal at the Olympics, even clocking an almost perfect ride while the surf remained small.
However, his hopes of glory were shattered when the surf got a little bigger and Toledo threatened to reprise his famous zero-point heat total there.
The world’s best surf contest analyser, Scotland runner and foiler JP Currie, wrote:
Three waves attempted, none critical or close, the highest coming in at a 1.43.
He was roundly trounced by the committed Japanese surfer,
Reo Inaba, who deserved the victory regardless of Toledo’s
no-show.
Inaba charged and grinned throughout.
Even when he was ragdolled by the heaviest wave in the world, he still came up smiling.
Toledo, by contrast, was locked back into his familiar grimace, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Ideally 24 hours in the past, posting an obscene number of Instagram stories highlighting his waves from yesterday.
But pay for his hubris he did.
With all sincerity, I hope he is ok, because I can scarcely imagine a greater swing from high to low. 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.
Uriah McDonald, meanwhile, is readying himself for Olympic Glory, probs not LA, he’ll only be eleven, maybe Brisbane, when he turns fifteen.
