You have to be a real tragic to get up in the middle of the night to watch an international sporting event in which there are no Australian competitors, but that’s exactly what your columnist did last weekend.
Admittedly, in order to watch the WSL World Longboard Finals live from Surf City, El Salvador, I only got up momentarily, in order to make a cup of strong coffee and grab my Mac and earphones and take them back to bed, but it was a supreme sacrifice nonetheless, given that the cobblestone rights of El Sunzal are not the most exciting waves in the world to watch, particularly when you have to spot the lineup through the fog, and that you could argue that the men’s event was a foregone conclusion, although the women’s was a little more open.
But watch I did, because not only did I have mates in the competitor mix and in the commentary booth, but Noosa could also claim a bit of skin in the game, with about half of the final 16 surfers having come up through the ranks at the Noosa Festival of Surfing, most prominently world champs Honolua Blomfield and Taylor Jensen, who is in fact half an Aussie through marriage and part-time domicile! We’ll get to Honno in a minute, but first let’s deal with Taylor, whose fourth world title in El Salvador puts him on a par with his father-in-law, the great Nat Young, who also won four world longboard titles in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but a few of us on the surf charter boat Mangalui Ndulu 20-something years ago in the Mentawais couldn’t stand a bar of the arrogant surfer from San Diego who’d just won his first US Open title and was a little bit full of himself. Most of the time, if he wasn’t surfing, teenaged Taylor would mooch around by himself on deck, smoking cigarettes, but come sleep time, there was no escaping his frequent snarls as we curled up in the common bunkhouse. (This wasn’t the Indies Trader IV – no cabins, let alone a helipad.)
But hey, the kid could surf. Not just longboards but all boards, and as he became a fixture on the podium in Noosa and around the world, we started to warm to Taylor, and by the time he hooked up with the lovely Nava, married and started a family, he’d become a very nice guy, and an honorary Aussie who spent half his year at the family compound in Angourie.
Taylor joined the World Longboard Tour in 2008 and won his first world title in 2011, backed it up in 2012, and re-emerged as an elder statesman to win his third in 2017. Now, at 40 and a grand old man of the tour, he went into the finals in El Salvador as a red-hot favourite in the yellow jersey, and in career-best form. But he wasn’t the oldest surfer in the finals, that honour going to defending world champ Hawaii’s Kai Sallas, 43, a friend and rival for decades.
But here’s the thing: having finished fifth in the rankings, Kai had to fight almost from the bottom up, taking out Hawaiian friend and protégé Kaniela Stewart in a tight finish in the second match of the series, the Filipino surprise package JR Esquievel in a low-scoring third, then Hawaiian super kid Johnny the Ripper in the fourth. Kai won it with a 7 and a high 6, but rode only two waves in the heat, perhaps starting to run short of puff.
Taylor came out fresh, and took out the final match two sets to love, catching only four waves for the entire one-day tournament, but they were good ones! In fact it was a masterclass in dealing with tricky sections and wobble on the face. He simply never put a foot wrong, and scored two eights in the first and a seven and a nine-plus in the second, effectively combo-ing the defending champ.
In the women’s a similar situation applied, with two veteran rivals with three world titles apiece facing off. In this instance, Hawaii’s Honolua Blomfield was starting, like Kai, from the bottom, while California’s Soleil Errico was wearing the yellow jersey and coming in for the last match-up. But Soleil had missed the Abu Dhabi wave pool event with an injury so there was a question mark hanging over her, while Honno came out guns blazing, dispatching fellw Hawaiians Kelis Kaleopaa and Sophia Culhane with two sevens in the first, then Japan’s Natsumi Taoka and France’s Zoe Grospiron in the second, before finding a buzzer beater seven in the third to see off France’s Alice Lemoigne. In the fourth, just like Kai, Honno showed signs of fading, and a fresh Rachael Tilly fired up with two score of 7.5.
California’s Tilly won a world title in 2015 at the tender age of 17, but hadn’t done a lot since then. Until this year, when she was the form surfer, taking out the US Open alongside Taylor. In El Sunzal she had Soleil’s measure from the start, and took out the title in straight sets with only one excellent score, but good backups.
The American surf media called it the “So-Cal Sweep” of the titles. I prefer to add, and a little bit Angourie/Noosa.
