“Hahaha wow, go babe,” wrote wife Lakey, “@wsl what does he win? hahaha.”
Earlier today in a post narrated by Bailey Ladders jester Kaipo Guerrero, the Australian husband of Lakey Peterson, Thomas Allen, was announced winner of the WSL’s Fantasy League.
Allen, who is thirty-three, won the year-long contest out of an astonishing 115,000 competitors, though the number of active participants in unknown.
The lightly commented post was marked by readers asking what prize Allen might receive for the remarkable feat.
“What does he win?” asked The Green Room Times.
“Hahaha wow, go babe,” wrote wife Lakey, “@wsl what does he win? hahaha.”
The lack of a prize is a sore point.
Four years ago, the staggering lack of any prizes was brought into the spotlight when Berlin-based Australian surfer Shane Starling aka Zmonde, picked ten of the eleven event winners, although his victory came and went unacknowledged by the owners of the game.
(BeachGrit remedied that situation a little with a despatch of t-shirts and air fresheners.)
When I ask Allen about the prize he said he’d heard that someone, some year, won a trip to Indonesia although “I might have to buy myself a trophy”.
Allen is a little better placed than most to participate in the game. He films his wife freesurfing around the events and gets to see who the in-form surfers are.
Like in Brazil where eventual winner Yago Dora was “landing everything. He couldn’t make a wrong decision. He was surfing better than anyone in the free surfs. If you weren’t there it was impossible to know how in-form he was.
One thing he noticed this season was “John John hasn’t been the stand-out he normally is”.
Allen waits til the morning of the event to choose his team and picks horses for courses. Small waves, the small-wave guys (Filipe), if it’s bigger, “the guys who are better on rail.”
As for Finals Day, the missus thinks Carissa Moore is going to come in hot and angry and win it, although Allen is leaning towards super kid Caity Simmers, who grew up down the road at Oceanside.
“Caity throws her tail, gets her tail loose so easily and the judges are scoring all that progressive stuff on the women’s side this year.”
Either her or Molly Picklum.
“They’ve got air reverses on dial. Throw those and the judges will wait it up all day long.”
Men?
Well, yeah, real hard to go past Filipe if it’s small, he says, but a little bigger and Griffin and Ethan come into the mix.
“You can never count Ethan out,” says Allen, “at the wave pool he proved everyone wrong.”
On V-Day, Allen says he’s been “cruising and soaking up the victory” although a repeat of the feat is unlikely.
“Maybe I’ll retire. It’s a one and done deal. I’ll depart while I’m sitting on top of the mountain.”
