“I can still go straight, you know.”
The quinquagenarian surf champ Kelly Slater has stunned fans at Tahiti’s infamous Teahupoo by slicing through the defending champion, Australian Jack Robinson, and Morocco’s Ramzi Boukhiam, with a brutal ease in perfect four-to-six-foot waves.
You’ll remember shortly after his twenty-seventh retirement announcement following an early loss at Margaret River a couple of months back, Kelly Slater admitted he would be accepting wildcards at the tour majors in Fiji and Tahiti, which his company co-sponsors, as well as a cameo slot at the Championship Series Gold Coast Pro.
And on a day that was as picture perfect as they come, not exactly Code Red, Code Pink, maybe, Kelly Slater picked at the waves, playing with the long, dazzling tubes like a pretty girl twirling her corn-silk hair around her fingers.,
In his post-heat interview, BeachGrit’s own Toxic Positivist Chris Cote lures Kelly Slater into a joke when he says,
“Well, Kelly Slater, wildcard. Not used to hearing that. But Kelly Slater, heat win. We are used to hearing that. So congrats on the first win of the year here in Tahiti.”
Slater, of course, has only won one other heat all year and he doesn’t miss Cote’s irony.
“Yeah, well, we’re not used to hearing Kelly Slater heat win, are we? It’s been a while. I saw Jeremy (Flores) in the water and I said, ‘Well, I can still go straight, you know.’ But there’s a lot of technical aspect to the waves right now. There’s some south in it.
“You can actually take off a little bit deeper than I think a lot of people have been today. It kind of gives you one pump earlier than if you take off and stall. So there’s a little bit of technical stuff, but also whoever has the good waves, he’s going to win. No one’s getting third and fourth scores.”
Asked if it’s total muscle memory when it comes to a joint like Teahupoo Slater, who rode his first wave of the trip in his heat, likened it to catching a baseball.
“You see a wave and I guess it’s like a guy in an outfield trying to catch a ball. You’re kind of registering where do I need to be and how deep, how far out, wide or deep or whatever. And then you’re trying to look down the line to see how much cupping it has on the reef. Does it have a lot of west in it? Today’s like a touch of west, but it’s really more south and open. So what you don’t want to do is get one that doesn’t have any end on it because those get almondy. And, the ones that are super west that are way down the end, you tend to not be able to get as deep or very long in the barrel. You can only do with what comes to you. And, you know, I only had three good waves that came to me in that heat.”
Kelly Slater that he intended to “send it” if the expected swell arrives next week.
