Jake Kelley surfing a Hypto Krypto at Cloudbreak, the new board of the WSL Big Wave World Tour
According to one anonymous World Surf League insider with knowledge of the Big Wave World Tour’s nuts and bolts, the league will institute its boldest rule change ever for the 2019 season. When the contest windows open for the Nazaré Challenge and the Jaws Challenge on October 1, all big wave competitors will be under mandate to ride 5’4″ Hypto Kryptos.
“People in the SaMo headquarters were just going mental on Jake Kelley’s Cloudbreak clip,” the anonymous source told The Inertia. “We started comparing that to Ando’s (Craig Anderson) wave at Kandui and arguing about which one was gnarlier, then somebody was like ‘We should make the big wave surfers compete on those things,’ because, hey everyone can ride anything on a Hpto, right? We were all dead silent for like, 60 seconds just letting it soak in because we knew, deep down it was genius.”
According to the same unnamed source, that initial suggestion snowballed quickly into a phone call with Hayden Cox about the potential for an exclusive, league-wide board endorsement. Then on Monday, April 1, the source confirmed with a text: “It’s so on.”
With the league’s desire to push the Big Wave World Tour onto a bigger stage, this move will undoubtedly drum up some untapped interest for the three-stop men’s tour and two women’s contests.
“Some of the athletes are kinda frothing on it,” the source told The Inertia. “When Jaws got put on hold back in November, a bunch of the athletes were grumbling about how the WSL shouldn’t be so afraid to get gnarly. And with all the calls for constantly evolving and mixing up competition formats, ways to revamp pretty much anything on any tour, and even all the calls for equality in surfing, this seemed like a natural evolution for the sport. Honestly, what better way to even the playing field than to make everybody surf the exact same thing?”
Big waves. Ridiculously tiny surfboards. It’s the future. And the future is now.
Vaya con Dios.
Editor’s Note: Johnny Utah is an “Eff-Bee-Eye” agent and an expert in works of satire. More of his investigative work can be found here.
