Get your levers yanked!
First thing. I can’t get enough of Italo Ferreira, the twenty-five-year-old Brazilian who has won a remarkable four WCT events in eighteen months and who controls his board like bait on a fishline.
A pivotal shift in surfing, still coming, will be the way we approach a wave on our backhand. Don’t you think it’s crazy that the same turns that won world titles for Barton Lynch and Damien Hardman in the nineteen-eighties still gift Owen Wright and co nine-point rides thirty years later?
Do you think, like me, that new lines have to be drawn at the highest level?
And here’s where Italo fits. His backside turns yank on different levers, his combos gut and rope waves.
In this promotional video from Billabong, we see Italo in the Maldives, I think it is, first, terrified out of his head on the puddle jumper plane to the island they visit, and, later, blasting his horn like an interstate trucker on the pretty three-foot waves.