So it’s official at last – no World Surf League championship tour for 2020. Given the fact that very few people are going to be able to cross international borders for the remainder of this year, the long-overdue announcement from WSL CEO Erik Logan was something of a non-event. The ambitious tour plans announced for 2021, however, went way beyond this and bordered on the surreal.
Over the Covid lockdown, the surf forecast website Swellnet has been running a very funny series of illustrated articles about the goings-on in the fictional surf town of Toonalook, the creation of the brilliantly sick mind of one Gra Murdoch. In recent weeks, the WSL’s Logan, preppy-smart in button-down shirt and loafers, arrives in Toona looking for “real people content” to fill the yawning gaps in the WSL’s media platforms in a no-contest year. Ridiculed by the hard-core locals, Logan disappears into the untamed coast outside of town where he lucks into some surfable slabs and a baggie of local bud and has an epiphany that the real meaning of surfing is, well, surfing. And if the mainstream doesn’t get that, good.
Watching Logan deliver the good news and the bad news about the future of pro surfing, I began to think that the Toona trip may not have been fiction, and that the local bud has yet to wear off.
Erik, back in his Ben Sherman shirt and horn-rims, tells us that while the 2020 tour has been cancelled, the 2021 tour will kick off in Hawaii, USA, in November. That’s right, in about four months, the world’s leading surfers, primarily domiciled in Australia, Brazil and California, will be required to fly to Hawaii to compete on the north shores of Oahu and Maui where any form of social distancing or isolation would be difficult, if not impossible to implement.
Although Hawaii itself has the lowest Covid infection level of all American states, the United States still leads the world, with 3.7 million cases and 141,000 deaths at a current rate of 1,000 a day, while of the states California has the second highest infection rate after New York. Brazil has the second highest number of cases in the world at 2.1 million, with 78,000 deaths and currently 1300 a day.
We’ve seen how fast things can change in this pandemic, but bear in mind that here in Australia we have a second wave in two states already and since mid-July the global graph has again been climbing rapidly. For the foreseeable future, no Australian surfer should be contemplating being at close quarters with anyone from Brazil or the USA, and that means more than half the men’s tour and just under half the women’s. So we have to ask, what the hell is the WSL thinking?
In preparation for the tour start that is never going to happen, the WSL will host a series of regional, pre-season exhibition events featuring CT surfers in the USA, Australia, France, and Portugal, to be known as the WSL Countdown. While regional series, held within national borders, seems a lot more achievable, the projected Australian Grand Slam in September and October could be jeopardised by further state border closures if the second wave continues, and a European version involving France and Portugal could face similar obstacles.
It also seems highly unlikely that international travel restrictions will be lifted soon enough to enable the actual 2021 schedule to go ahead, but looking at it through somewhat rose-coloured glasses, I have only one serious issue with what looks like a fresh and exciting, if fantastical, tour. France has been eliminated.
While you could argue that the beach breaks of Hossegor offer up sand-churned straighthanders at least as often as A-frame bombs, the incredible surf culture of France needs to be treated with more respect than this. Perhaps I’m a little one-eyed on this – France holds a special place in my heart, and I ran the Quiksilver Pro France with my colleague Rod Brooks for a few years – but a European leg without France is like an Australian leg without Bells.
It’s just not right.
Vale Uncle Derek
In an up-and-down kind of week, hiding away at our Agnes Water retreat, I learned just an hour before recording the Oz Longboarding podcast that fellow guest Andrew McKinnon wouldn’t be joining me to discuss the future of Queensland’s two World Surfing Reserves as he’d been lucky to survive a heart attack. As well as being a former world champion longboarder, Andy Mac has been a tireless worker for Australian surfing for almost as many decades as I’ve known him, so it was with considerable relief that I heard he’d joined the stent club and was doing well.
But within 24 hours tragic news concerning another world champ came in from Hawaii. “Uncle” Derek Ho, the 1993 ASP world champion and Pipeline guru had passed away after a massive heart attack, aged just 55. Although I had a much closer (and sometimes volatile) relationship with older brother Michael Ho, I knew Derek not only as a great surfer but as a mellow guy and a mentor to many young surfers on the North Shore of Oahu.
One story: In 2000 Derek was old enough to compete as a master for the first time, and he and Mike joined us in France for the Quiksilver Masters world championships. At the opening night shindig Mike had enjoyed a few libations and decided he was not happy with the heat draw, telling me that he would be waiting for me in the car park with a baseball bat. At the end of the evening he was indeed waiting in the car park, but with Derek holding him up. We had a group hug, drank some more beers and the incident was forgotten.
Thank you, Uncle D, for that and so much more. RIP.
