Brazil’s Filipe Toledo firms as unbackable favourite for Olympic Gold at LA2028

"(Lowers) is a wave that fits my surfing very well. It’s going to be very cool.”

It hardly needs to be said, but we’ll say it again for posterity’s sake: Filipe Toledo is the best surfer in the world, ever, in waves of non consequence.

The thirty-year-old daddy of three is a little tentative in the hard-breaking waves of Tahiti and Western Australia, as evidenced yesterday in a disappointing heat at Margaret River, gone as you know was the shuck and jive and rhinoceros horn hip-jutting of Burleigh Heads, and it was this timidity that ultimately squashed his Paris 2024 medal hopes.

But hope springs eternal in the human titty, as ol’ Alex Pope correctly adjudged, and, now, after a soft-breaking Californian pebble-bottom wave called Lowers, three miles south of San Clemente, has been chosen for LA2028, well, Toledo must be considered the favourite.

Toledo moved to San Clemente’s little Spanish village by the sea in 2014, uprooting his entire family from their hometown Ubatuba in Brazil.

Filipe Toledo, artist wife Ananda Marçal, children Mahina and Koa along with Daddy Ricardo and mammy Mari live in aa sprawling Orange County compound, living as only a happy family can, connected by blood and love.

Lowers is where Toledo won back-to-back world titles, 2022 and 2023, via Eric Logan’s now defunct Finals Day concept. Deciding the Olympic medallists at Lowers is right up Toledo’s alley, as they say.

And in a sprawling interview for the LA2028 website Toledo said,

“It is undoubtedly a very special place for me, where I won my two titles and also won a regular event,” he said. “It is a wave that fits my surfing very well. There are indeed great chances, but until then, there is still a long way to go. There is a lot still to happen. There is still the qualification, a few years of fighting for titles. But I think the choice was good and fair.”

Lowers, he says, is the ultimate contest wave,

“The wave conditions are such that two or three surfers can catch a lot of waves. It’s a contest that attracts the public’s attention,” he said. There are a lot of good waves and every heat will be great, just like the Burleigh Heads contest. I heard a lot of comments that it was one of the finals that the public liked the most. Trestles is a wave that entertains the public, so I think it’s going to be really cool.”

Agreed?

Or should Mavericks been the Olympic wave of choice?