Teahupoo Contest

[foamy]

The ASP surfers are the best high performance surfers in the world, IMO. The variety of conditions in which they can astound, in the next half hour, at someplace somewhere, puts them ahead.
You can't rate as comparable to that someone's 2 minute highlight reel from 3 weeks in Indo. As enjoyable as that might be.

All that being said, I reckon Laurie Towner could have been one of the very few outsiders who would have been competitive in those Teahupoo conditions.

[Nick Carroll]

Really, only 2? Jeff Rowley, Marty P and a whole host of other nuts? Surely at least some of them crew are on a par in that sort of stuff?

Nup. Not even close.

That level of surfing is not about being nuts. It's about ironclad control of every aspect of your performance. Heat after heat after heat.

Exerting that level of control in those conditions is what being a top 34 WCT pro is all about. If other guys could do it, they would.

[Nick Carroll]

oh my God surfie c don't tell me you took Bro out to 10' Teahupoo in a boat

what was your plan if everything went wrong?

[SurfieC]

He liked it. He is scared of roosters and cats. But not of Teahupoo in a boat. Maybe the first dog at the Contest. The Street dogs in Tahiti are more dangerous..

[foamy]

Chas Smith's piece on Teahupoo from 6 days ago, on the Beach Grit site that Steve S highlighted, is worth a read.

http://beachgrit.com/first-impressions- ... -teahupoo/

[swvic]

Really, only 2? Jeff Rowley, Marty P and a whole host of other nuts? Surely at least some of them crew are on a par in that sort of stuff?

Nup. Not even close.

That level of surfing is not about being nuts. It's about ironclad control of every aspect of your performance. Heat after heat after heat.

Exerting that level of control in those conditions is what being a top 34 WCT pro is all about. If other guys could do it, they would.

Yeah, fair enough, but at slight risk of being tarred with the tard brush, some of the guys didn't appear to have the capacity for that level of control to have any chance of winning. If the WCT was all consequential surf, would the top 34 be quite different?

Also, I wouldn't have gone anywhere near it and respect them all for that alone

[todd cullins]

Great contest. Anyone else feel like John John got robbed from the judges?

[steve shearer]

That level of surfing is not about being nuts. It's about ironclad control of every aspect of your performance. Heat after heat after heat.

Exerting that level of control in those conditions is what being a top 34 WCT pro is all about. If other guys could do it, they would.

And yet so few of the Top 34 can produce that.......only five to ten in any given year. The field is too big, too many back markers making up the numbers.

[spork]

Not sure how you can say that when many of the surfers at the pointy end where well into the 20-30 area.

[Beerfan]

Among the many other variables, how much does flying all over the world every few weeks into different time zones etc come into it?. I reckon I'd get jack of waiting in airport lines constantly. Then having to "switch on" a few days later. And you'd surely pick up the odd random flu ?. What about plain old home sickness?

[Nick Carroll]

Downhill Alpine ski racing.

the thing with surfing is that it's a great sport, like a really great sport. One of the world's great sports. It's never gonna be a mass audience sport and maybe it shouldn't stress over that so much. It wants to guard and advance its greatness so that when people do see it, they are absolutely riveted by the psyche, the incredible skills, the danger, the settings. It's not a team sport so it will never generate the kind of fanatic loyalties you find in team sports, and it's not a social-backbone sport coveted by lots of well off white men a la golf. So it's not something a non-superfan will want to be bothered seeing very often. But when they do, you want to knock 'em dead, the way the downhill events in the winter Olympics just knock you flat on your back with how full on critical and fine edge crazy they are.

[PeepeelaPew]

...

[brendo]

So you're saying don't broadcast highlights of the Rio Pro?

Interesting comments re alpine skiing. I watch and enjoy but I have a background. I would have thought it would not appeal to a wider audience. E.g. I watch ski movies but I struggle to stay interested in snowboard movies.

yea but that's cause you ski....im sure being a surfer you don't watch boogie board movies
talk to the average punter that has done a couple of snow trips, and even though they are shit they
still get the whole thrill thing from the taste of whatever downhill speed they generate. so then they appreciate the lunatics pulling 140km/h + while laying it over on an edge.

[Nick Carroll]

So you're saying don't broadcast highlights of the Rio Pro?

Interesting comments re alpine skiing. I watch and enjoy but I have a background. I would have thought it would not appeal to a wider audience.

Yeah but this is the point I am trying to make. A mass audience sport has to appeal to a wide audience every day of every week - of course some mass audience sports are great sports too, but whether or not they are great sports is almost irrelevant. Great yet isolated sports like top end pro surfing in epic conditions and downhill ski racing, frightening and brilliant and on edge skilful as they are, will only capture a wide audience a couple of times a year at a maximum; they shouldn't sweat that too much but instead draw on their own internal resources and whatever cash they can dig up to continue to protect and develop their epic-ness, so that when a wide audience does catch a glimpse, they're shaken to the core by it.

I really feel for instance that the whole "try to get Middle America etc people in via wave pool comps" is fundamentally misguided and misses the whole point of fine edge top end surfing, which is that it is a superb physical and mental challenge in an unmatched aquatic environment. I mean just do it yourself, compare Wave Garden or those weird pool drawings to what you all saw yesterday, who's kidding whom. If they ever come to exist, wave pools will be fun to play in I'm sure, but as a basis for impressing the world, a ha ha ha. All anyone will have to do is see a day like yesterday and they'll instantly write wave pools off as a serious athletic endeavour.

[foamy]

The problem for sports like Downhill Skiing is that, for the general audience, watching it about once every four years is enough. Even then, it needs the magic of the Olympic Rings which is the ring magic that make any activity watchable.

[scroopulis]

If they got Rosie Hodge to interview the skiers they'd have a wider, or longer, audience.

[Skipper]

I recall it said in that Speaker interview someone posted elsewhere that Pro Bull Riding was the current regime's inspiration for the WCT .