By PHIL JARRATT
WITH Julian Wilson taking an early exit from the Hurley Pro at Lower Trestles, California, last week – he’s still in the world title race, but boy, it’s going to be tough – my parochial attention turned to the Swatch Women’s Pro, where Sunny Coaster Dimity Stoyle emerged a giant-killer.
Dimity is a surfer I really admire, because she’s the full package. While she is focused on the world tour right now, she is a gal who rides them all, a red-hot longboarder and finless surfer as well as a shortboard pro. But Dimity has been a battler since she qualified for the tour, showing flashes of brilliance but also dipping out early too often, and struggling to keep up in the rankings.
Going into the Swatch, she was sitting at 16, with four events to come, and needing to make top 10 to automatically requalify. Well down on the qualifying tour rankings too, it didn’t look good.
And then, on a glorious fall Saturday at Lowers, she took out title contender Sally Fitzgibbons to move into the semis, her best result of the year. As I write, the Trestles event is on hold, and Dim has to take out world champ Carissa Moore next, but I think (hope) she can do it, and by the time you read this, you’ll know.
It’s a tough game, the women’s tour, with only a fraction of the money of the men’s tour on offer, and middle-rankers chewing through that in airfares. Not quite in the top echelon yet, Dimity has limited sponsorship and her winnings for the year so far are less than $60,000. Let’s hope a big result at Trestles changes all of that, and keeps her on the tour.
Kelly Slater and the four-point punt
It was the judging decision heard around the world! Kelly Slater, 43, the greatest surfer in history, hit the water running at Trestles for his round five clash against Mick Fanning, knowing that he had to take the Aussie down to keep his hopes alive for a 12th world title. Fanning and Slater have had some monumental heats over the years, with the results fairly even, but normally you’d back Kelly to beat Mick at Lowers, a high performance A-frame where he’s produced so many wins over his storied career.
But Slater is a thinking surfer, and last Saturday he paddled out knowing that his point of difference over Fanning was his superior air game, and his ability to excite the crowd.
Rather than ride rail for rail with Mick, he paddled to the left and took off late on a crumbling set wave. What happened next is difficult to describe. Even when you rewind the video, it’s hard to know what exactly happened. Slater stalled at the bottom, then stepped on the gas into his turn and exploded through the lip into a massive punted air reverse.
The huge San Clemente crowd held their breath as he brought it down to land, and then the unthinkable happened. Slater and his board became unglued and both were free-falling at jaunty angles. He had blown the most radical manoeuvre of the event.
But wait! The champ grabs the rail in mid-air, tries to set it under him, then lands heavily on the deck with his knees, then belly, smashing the board in two places. Then, in the midst of the exploding foam, he finds his feet again, powers off the bottom and flips a casual 360-degree turn to finish the wave.
The crowd, admittedly partisan, goes berserk. Watching at home, I go berserk too! Sitting in their not-so-ivory tower, on the gravelly strip next to the railroad tracks, the World Surf League judges consider what they have seen – surfing history in the making – and tap their scores into their handheld computers. They give Slater the low-average score of 4.17. Now it’s time for social media to go berserk!
I have run world tour surfing events and worked closely with the judges, so I don’t want to join the squadrons of armchair judges who get quite hostile and personal in their dissent on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Judging the biggest events in surfing is not an easy job and, contrary to popular misconception, it doesn’t pay a motza. I feel for these blokes, but really …
Did they see what the world saw? Okay, you can pull out the manual and quote the bit about power and flow, and deem that the manoeuvre was not completed, and you can disregard the fact that even without the manoeuvre, Slater rode the wave extremely well, but can you call that low-average!
The ramifications of that textbook reading of the rules could be enormous. Slater put up a fight, but it was really all Fanning after that. A younger Kelly might have had a piece of the judges during the post-heat interview, but for years now he has been the voice of reason and positivity in the face of a negative result. He took the party line – “didn’t complete the manoueuvre, didn’t get the score” – but he conceded that he was now out of title contention, then dropped a quiet bombshell. He’ll skip the next leg in Europe, citing “niggling injuries”.
Kelly is too great an athlete to go out on a bum note, but that 4.17 could be the beginning of the end of an era.
Madam Chair
And speaking of ends of eras, Noosa’s Norm Innis steps down this week after a stellar reign as chair of surfing’s national governing body, Surfing Australia. Norm and CEO Andrew Stark have presided over a period of huge change and dramatic growth at SA, and now the Noosa connection will be kept alive as our Festival of Surfing ambassador and eight-times world champion Layne Beachley takes the chair. Well played, Norm, and good luck, LB!
