Spectators thrilled with legend's arabesques, fouettés, picqué tours and port de bras inside the long tubes.
Some years ago now, a tribute to the bodysurfing and bodyboarding icon Mike Stewart appeared on BeachGrit its author positing, “He is simultaneously the, Duke Kahanamoku, Miki Dora, Tom Curren and Kelly Slater of his sport; its godfather figure, its most stylish practitioner and its greatest champion.”
Rarely is this sorta hyperbole tested, but in the case of Stewart and the sport’s current leaders, Italo Ferreira, Carissa Moore and Stephanie Gilmore, a showdown at the Boa Vista wavepool in Brazil, easily the best of the genre, put Stewart at the top of the surfing totem.
Stewart is sixty years and has won the Pipeline Bodysurfing Classic fourteen times and the bodyboarding world crown nine times. He was filmed at the planned community one-and-a-half hours from São Paulo, thrilling spectators with his arabesques, fouettés, picqué tours and port de bras inside the long tubes.
Starting at one million dollars, well-heeled surfers can buy their way in via apartments and villas built around a wave pool it ain’t a stretch to call the “most high-performance wave in the world.”