Confession: I fell asleep watching watching the Miggy Pupo vs Cole Houshmand battle of the goofies semi-final at the Rio Pro so I wasn’t really there.
Not for the first time this championship tour season, the time zones beat me and, still somewhat sleep deprived, I had to play catch-up on deadline morning, watching the replays on my Mac with a strong coffee for support. Well, at least I did better than my colleague Steve Shearer over at Swellnet, who vetoed the whole Rio show! I’m no fan of the backwash festival that is Saquarema, even when the gorgeous Chloe Calmon, who’s been to Noosa on several occasions and should know better, keeps insisting in the commercial breaks that it is paradise on earth, but I have to say that flicking around on the replay settings makes the long lulls and the frequent backwash splitting of the peak a lot more bearable.
So here we are. Finals day in the third last event of the season and the sun is shining, the waves are kind of breaking and the Brazilian crowd on the beach is going nuts. Home girl Luana Silva, who is having a stella season, dispatches Caz Marks, who is not, in a lacklustre first semi in which Caz barely troubled the scorer.
By the time our Molly Picklum hit the water for the second semi the waves had started to pick up a little and Pickles set about demolishing the petite enfant du jour, part-time Canadian Erin Brooks, with two solid sixes out of three waves ridden. Erin, who will be a world champ one day but not today, had no answers to the Pickles formula of gouge, reset, gouge, rinse, repeat.
Pickles is so good she doesn’t need a coach waving a red towel at her from the pavilion, although having longtime Rip Curl circus master Ryan “Fletch” Fletcher in your corner is as good as. And Molly seems so focused as the season winds down, and with two contests coming up in the challenging waves she thrives on, it’s hard to see her out of the yellow jersey.
And that was the attitude she took into her final against LuLu Silva, with a high six right out of the blocks after commandeering priority. Smooth as silk as she is, Silva had no answers. Molly has a 5000 point lead in the rankings, and is almost assured of pole position in the finals at Cloudbreak, but let’s see what she can do to the beautiful long walls of J-Bay in 10 days’ time, and see if we can eliminate that “almost”.
In what has become an annoying habit of late, Jack Robinson’s zen approach to life let me (and a million Aussie surf fans) down again, smiling his way through an early round loss to Jake Marshall. Wake up, sunshine, this is serious! And, having knocked Aussie rookie Joel Vaughan out of the way, that left us with Ethan Ewing carrying the green and gold into finals day, even though he was head to foot blue.
In Saquarema’s unpredictable split peaks, the cool, calm efficiency of Ethan’s brilliant railwork might have been enough, except that he had to get past a rampaging Griffin Colapinto on the comeback trail. In the booth, announcer and San Clemente buddy Mitch Salazar was urging him on: “Oh my lord, Griff is one of the most versatile surfers on the planet. Backside, frontside, he can do everything!” Well, duh, I doubt he’d be on the CT if he couldn’t go both ways, but yes, he was tearing up the lefts and levitating over the rights in waves which, for the first time ever, watching this venue, made me want to paddle out on my 9-4 Jive and have a crack. (Sort of.)
So Ethan’s two solid sevens couldn’t match Griff’s high six and an eight, and the final becomes a high-flying San Clemente buddy battle, which was effectively decided on Cole Houshmand’s first real wave, for which the judges awarded him (inexplicably in these tired old eyes) a near-perfect 9.4. Griff found an eight late in the final to put him back in touch, but big Cole won the day while his T-Street beach-mate failed repeatedly to finish the hail Mary he so desperately needed. Never mind, Griff continues his late charge up the rankings to wedge himself between Jack and Ethan at number six.
So come on, Aussies, come on!
FOOTNOTE: My mate and former colleague at Tracks and Quiksilver, Kirkie Willcox, was recovering from doing the arduous Camino pilgrim’s walk with a few days r and r in the Pays Basque of France when he popped into the beautiful seaside village of Guethary for lunch and sent me this snap with the one-liner: “Great memories?” Indeed, my friend. A quarter of a century ago, this was where we called home, alongside neighbour Miki Dora, looking out at the Bar Basque across the fronton in one direction, and down to the beautiful waves of Playa de Parlementia from the other. My wife has nightmares that they’ll knock the lovely Basque building down before we get back there. I somehow doubt that.
