“When Kelly thinks about what’s being done on his behalf and looks at himself in the mirror, does he always see an environmentalist looking at him?”

Since the impending Jeep Surf Ranch Pro turned heads, sick notes and absence reason forms have been sent to WSL email addresses. with the relentlessness of Qassam rockets at destination Ashkelon.

Julian Wilson has wanted to think about the Olympics for six weeks and there’s no way he’ll run off to Tachi Palace and ride the tank.

Jordy Smith, absent with a knee injury, although the beast six-three isn’t a fan of the pool, says it’s “predictable” and “really not that exciting to viewers after seeing the tenth surfer return to the pool. barrel for another ten seconds. “

John John Florence, Kolohe Andino, Michel Bourez and daughters Tyler Wright, Lakey Peterson, Bronte Macaulay, Macy Callaghan.

All out.

Brazil were the black sheep of the tour, with injuries, seemingly catastrophic before the competition, magically healing themselves shortly after.

After last year’s event, BeachGrit ‘Tour reporter Steve “Longtom” Shearer, jerked awake long enough to pop his head out of his pretzel bowl and write,

We’ve been in this stuff for five years now.

Five long years.

The gap between the rhetoric, that the tubs would lose a radically innovative surf tsunami, and the reality, conservative surfing, is becoming clearer every day. It became what Orwell called the “inadmissible fact”. It puts us in a world upside down, where Chris Côté, when he hears the train say: “It never gets old” means “there is something really wrong here but I can’t dare to admit it. “.

Five years.

Can someone on the pro side of the wave pool explain to me why, given the basic repeatability of the wave, a new trick isn’t designed, mastered and then executed in front of a stunned jury like green skate or half-pipe snowboarding?

Wasn’t that all the point?

In a recent post featuring seven-time World Champion Stephanie Gilmore on the tank, WSL fans wrote:

Take a nap. Throw in the air section.

Most uninteresting event of the tour. Every time I see this wave, I keep scrolling.

Good for training, horrible for the contest. RIP WSL.

Soooooooo boo.

Same comment on every wave… stick with mother ocean.

Etc.

**********

It will be six years, in December, that Kelly unveiled the tank, a miracle of technology and vision, a wave so perfect that most thought it was a prank. Better than anything before him or, if flawless stitches are your thing, since.

It would be the final legacy of the sumptuously tanned eleven-time world champion; his knack for surfing, a facsimile of Little Marley, the draining sand-bottomed right-hander that crosses Rainbow Bay.

And here we are, 2021, years after Kelly sold the company to the WSL and other than the Lemoore prototype, not a single Slater pool has been built.

Wavegarden Israeli-German-Basque technology flourished, fully functional commercial swimming pools in Melbourne, Switzerland, England and Brazil.

American Wave Machines has tanks in Texas and Japan, more will follow.

Ditto with Tommy Lochtefeld’s Surf Loch, one under construction in Palm Springs, some soldiers are walking around, others to come.

City Wave, the German supplier of stationary swimming pools, represented in particular by Shane Beschen in the United States, has them indoors, outdoors, in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Russia and Israel.

A Slater Pool’s closest to its first commercial pool is a $ 1.2 billion development on on 510 hectares, or 1,200 acres, of “very small land” near the seaside town of Coolum, Queensland. The proposal includes a Surf Ranch wrapped in a 20,000-person stadium, a six-star eco-resort, restaurants, bars, a retail village, and “an environmental education center based on the site’s wetlands and landmarks. nearby streams ”.

Andrew Stark of the WSL said the local surfing community was “ecstatic and excited”.

It’s as far from being built in 2021 as it was two years ago,

I sent Longtom to investigate in 2019.

I put boots on the floor on the site. I know this country very well. It’s in my blood. My people come from the cane swamps of Queensland. They are Danes, Swedes, Sicilians.

Practical people.

They would understand the need to raze the bush to make room for jobs. But I don’t. The eye of the developer escapes me. I see trees and bushes. Birds, insects, frogs. I’m sad the surfers are behind the bulldozers erasing this wildlife, this bush of history.

From what I can see however, while there is ambivalence, mistrust and even hostility towards the development of the Coolum Wave Pool, it is unlikely to stop the bulldozers.

The greenwashing on the project will be immense. Next level.

But I wonder, when Kelly thinks about what’s being done on his behalf and looks at himself in the mirror, does he always see an environmentalist looking at him?

From a miracle out of nowhere and greeted with universal acclaim to the tour’s most hated event and wave pool technology being used nowhere.

Why?

Why?

The Jeep Surf Ranch Pro starts this Friday and runs through Sunday.