Tahiti sex scandal surfing’s “Watergate” warns the sport’s greatest influencer

“The most damaging incident in the history of competitive surfing amateur or professional."

The iconic surf writer, former pro surfer, creator of Rip Curl’s The Search campaign and fins-free pioneer, Derek Hynd, has thrown a little historical perspective, I’d guess you’d call it, behind the Tahiti sex scandal that is giving the WSL the shivers.

Derek Hynd, a former world twelve, whose writing and ideas influenced everyone from Tom Curren to Andrew Kidman to Ellis Ericson, described the event as surfing’s “Watergate.”

Just before The Incident broke I became privy, being private, to details still yet to emerge, including the alleged assault of a close male friend to the victim during the incident timeline with a door allegedly being locked, and a father later at wit’s end back home trying to secure police action. The timeline from incident to public exposure has been Aug 18 to Oct 14, the better part of two months. This is, potentially if not already, the most damaging incident in the history of competitive surfing be it amateur or professional, that’s 70 years back to the grand eloquence of the Makaha International. Frankly, disastrously, it smacks of nothing less than first exposures to Watergate, that which remains the watershed legal mire of proving innocence or guilt in determining perpetrators and accessories Before and After the Fact. I do note exposed precedents pre current administrations involving rape and Class A drugs, damage control each time just about sweeping grades of depth under the carpet. This, however, puts other public singularities in the shade.

Derek Hynd, Hynd, who is sixty-nine and whose “friction-free” surfing and reflections on his throat cancer form the nucleus of Andrew Kidman’s Beyond Litmus, the sequel to the seminal 1996 film Litmus, worked as a pro surfing coach between 1984 to 1988 and followed the tour, in one way or another, throughout the nineties.

At one point, and along with the “least huggable pro of all” Shane Beschen, Derek Hynd mounted a tour putsch that failed due to reasons long lost to history.

A notable figure on tour in the eighties and nineties was the photographer and writer Paul “Sarge” Sargeant, who assaulted a popular surf journalist in his sleep. A while back at Stab, I commissioned the noted Fred Pawle to write a story Sarge’s misadventures. At one point the story stalled because a former Tracks editor said Sarge would kill himself if it ran. Another surf journalist, notable for being very vocal about the Tahiti scandal, and whose own behaviour with gals wasn’t always so chivalrous, was similarly pushy in trying to get the story iced.

Hypocrisy, no?