2025 MEO Rip Curl Portugal: Finals Day

Agree on Yago, good guy and great talent and one of the few 'complete' surfers currently on tour.

+1 on Mamiya's sixth sense tube riding.

-1 on the contest as a whole. Bit of a non-event event.

Growing very tired of the air reverse in competition! Bring on Bells - atleast a surfer has to weave and carve before the shorebreak!

I didn't watch any of this event but thanks for the recaps Steve. Wow that air by Italo was insane, and not a 10?!

good to see the back of the euro leg and now headed to where pro surfing belongs, a variety of wobbly rights.

Disagree on the EE tube , thought it was a tricky barrel , plus he came out after the spit. I'll have a guess you're still pissed off with his semi showing which is probably fair enough. As for the airs, I don't like the idea of the surfers continually throwing a hail mary into the sky for non makes. It's boring and shouldn't be over scored when or if they finally make one.

Yago’s surfing is beautiful to watch, making even shitty conditions look ok.

Interesting take Steve but I would ask you this, just because EE doesn't use his air game in contests, does that mean he hasn't got one? I've surfed with him a bunch and can tell you he throws some insane punts. Not Italo or Dora level admittedly, but not a million years behind. I'll wait for someone to tell me that away from contests, Toledo charges heavy waves...

i went off yago for a while during his 'claim' phase - i still shudder at his carry on at j-bay a few years back! - that said, looks like he may have put this grumpy old coot back in his box and had the last laugh.

italo showing great form this year - exactly how you said it steve, - the take-off, power bottom turn then straight into that air was magnificent.

(and sorry, but i can't have a bad word against ee - he's the most enjoyable to watch out of the whole bunch imho)

Thanks for your recap Steve.
Appreciate your penning of Yago. He is about the only Brazzo I enjoy in competition and am glad to see back on board. "Keep the other Brazilians honest".

Yes to terrible contest, Yes to Yago, yes to EE lacking basic skill sets, yes to underperformance in the air by the women ......and also lets not forget that Yago definitely has the wood over Jack in recent matchups.

Lowest ever audience for a CT? If judging by the comments section of these write ups, it’d have to be close?

This is not even close to a slight on Shearer as there is no better in the business - one can only polish a turd so much.

Perfect waves for the Brazzos as its what they surf a lot in Brazil.......good on Yago.......hope he wins a world title.....Cant see Ethan winning one though, cause he's a lot like Parko even more so in that he's too smooth, beautiful to watch but too predictable imo ,would love to see him do a few airs for something different.....and Caroline Marks mmmmm i find her surfing boring sorry......Gabby or Erin looked way better.

Ummm...will preface this by saying that I watched a grand total of about three minutes of the actual comp...but...surely 'luck' (and/or skill, nous, uncanny wave sense etc etc) is one of the great intangibles that makes competitive surfing such an unwieldy, fickle, beautiful, stupid, joyous and pretty much incontestable (as in contests are dumb but we kinda love em too) 'sport'? Otherwise we'd all be glued to our screens for the interminable yawn fests that constitute any competition held in a pool (that recent blood money abomination was surely the nadir of professional surfing). Anyways...all that's to say...good on ya Ethan!! I'm stoked that wave came to you (or was mystically summoned)...just as much as I would've been spewing if it had've fallen Filipe's way. 'Luck' is beautiful.

"Skid" Marks......Yawn!!

definitely a hard contest to watch , given it was pumping there the week before hand,
like yagos surfing , hi and the pupo's are the only brazo's i can watch .
ee is a lot like jw imo, will win comps but never get a title for some weird reason

airs look spastic , that is why you only see brazzos doing them.

unsure of this "drama" business... i'd just like good surfing in contestable waves thank you.

ironically, and/or hypocritically by my 'contestable' requirement, EE's one-off wave that allowed him to advance was what compsurfing (and free surfing) is about... right place, right time, reading the conditions and executing. it should be rewarded. even if it was an Italo heat and he jagged that wave and speed-stink-bugged his way through the pit it would still be the highlight of the day for me. still!

whenever Yago wins a comp he seems like the epitome of what i consider modern surfing should be... super stylish, smooth and next level radical. an actual proper grab in a controlled air? 100% correct air game. good stuff.

normally i don't think of Yago as WC material but then these comp winning performances appear and it would seem inevitable. we can only hope.

‘The judges rewarded luck, not excellent surfing’
….
Yea but…. Not sure I like the alternatives. Lower scores for pits? Wave pools?
The best guys usually get the best waves, and most critical positioning. It ain’t always luck - intuition is a big part of it.
But luck is a factor and what keeps it interesting and not a chlorinated nightmare.
I personally love a last minute send from Huey that flips the heat on its head.

Didn’t Filipe fail to exit a number of backhand tubes in that same heat yesterday?
Your everyday competent surfer is not surfing that wave the way Ethan did.
Although i could envision a Gabby or Italo not throwing away that perfect ramp after the exit like Ethan did and nailing a straight air for the 10 points. Even a simple but well executed turn they would’ve given one I reckon.

Luck favours the prepared.

Thanks for another great write up Steve. Ee's barrel slicker than you make out tho.

And does he really need an air game? I reckon he would be better off focusing on his strengths than trying to be something he's not

Steve, your gritty observations, the WSL interviews, overlapping heats & these surfers made the 'Moche' surf conditions interesting on a wet weekend.

Finally someone came out and just said it. Toxic masculinity is to blame for the oppression of the female surf athlete’s access to the air reverse. Of course! Right in front of him all this time, but the myopic Western eyes of the misogynistic surf fan couldn’t even see it. Fearless fair brave and true stance, to expose the detested conservative middle aged white male thus. Or to categorise white males in general, white males of all ages, as responsible for the myriad ills of the post-colonial post-feminist age. One wishes Swellnet’s correspondent well in their pursuit of a position at the ABC, or of a screenwriting gig at Disney or Netflix. All of whom are doing wonderful and important work in this space. WSL - heed The Message, repair the injustice, stamp out institutionalised patriarchal hegemony in relation to the air, and wherever else it my be found.

#suspendsnake #banbottle #dumpdog #loseluke #liberatetheair #airsareforthefuckengirls

n.b. The word ‘Brazzo’, used liberally in the comments here, is also highly problematic and symptomatic of anachronistic heterocolonialist values.

Watched 8 waves,
Strange contest.
Is it yagos second event win ?
For a second there yago was the "kolohe" of South American surfing .
BTW kolohe rips , just couldn't seal the deal.

I think you may have touched up on a coach's cheat code in relation to the women surfers.

No doubt they're on a sharp upwards trajectory, the performance is leagues above where it was even a few years ago.

The thing is, a few years ago the judges were elevating ordinary surfing. Which was OK at the time as the notion of, say, an 8-point ride matched what was then considered 'excellent' surfing.

However, the performance level has kept rising, witness Brooks, Pickles, and Simmers, so the judges scale should move with it. The scale should be suppressed to provide a buffer between what was excellent surfing then and what is excellent surfing now.

They haven't done that so there's a flattening of the scoring - great surfing isn't being duly rewarded. Any sensible coach who's noticed this will advise their client to limit the risky moves as there's just not enough incentive from the judges.

EDIT: CM is the perfect example of this. Why risk a low percentage air when three well-timed backside reos will score that same?

JJ & JR suffered major injuries attempting big airs and the pros all pulled back from launching, except Italo who has tendons made of spider web or some similar unbreakable material and Yago whose tendons are the loosest on tour. A risk reward weigh up a lot of coaches go conservative on it seems to me.
I also find the punching down on poor old Portugal amusing. Supers generally produces a 10 most comps, if you're good enough to find it and Goofys go well there, I agree with Italo, "I like surfers who go both ways"

"The judges rewarded luck, not excellent surfing."

This is something pro-surfing will never overcome. Luck is inherent in it.

How did surfing get to the poor state that it's in now? Shit waves, repetitive same old shit air moves...same surfers getting over scored for a tired old move that no one gets excited by (except the Brasso's) Its amazing how a sport like Surfing (that is a spectacle in its own right) is being run in bullshit onshore close out beach breaks for a quarter of the tour!! (Sth American Leg)... WSL has managed to dour down a great sport and turn it into an uninteresting yawn fest. Luckily I can record it and Fast Forward through 90% of the heats where nothing is happening...Do better WSL!!

I think it was reasonable to score Ethan’s tube in the excellent range, particularly as a crowd highlight on a bit of a dull day. And WSL tube points generally get ratcheted up when the foamball is directly involved.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of his tube exit, his vision obscured by spray, coming out after the spit, on his backhand. I don’t think it was a stock standard easy tube.

as @jef said in the wee hours this morning, 'it is when there is a paucity of fare that blows may be exchanged over mere crumbs'.

2 years or so back I read/heard that Luke Egan had been working hard with Caz Marks to get her to take risks in the off-season to extend her in-season competitve repetoire. Paraphrasing Luke, or the content creator from memory ... 'she wasn't falling off enough... thereby, wasn't taking enough risks'

Just somethig I remember that seems relevant, doesn't really wipe away what's being said above.

Mostly I agree wiht Stunet, the judging differential between what Caity, Pickles and next gen can and do do and what caz is serving up isn't big enough.

However, I don't think Caz could suddenly deliver a radically different performance if the differential did suddenly expand - my instinct is that she didn't reach her athletic peak trying this stuff often enough and her cieling in this regard is now pretty much set.

I wonder if the same is true for EE and airs - notwithstanding what he throws in freesurf - he's not got a make rate that means airs are a part of his competitive weaponry and I think at best it's a maybe he could radically change that at this stage of his athletic development.

Then you think about Steph Gilmore in barelling lefts, Felipe in v heavy water. You would think physically they are capable of making a massive improvement. In this case the barrier doesn't appear to be athletic ability but a mindset/motivation shift. Nothing from either of these guys suggests they are going to make that jump - but somehow it sems like a mindset step-change is more possible than the athletic ones that folks like EE would have to manufacture.