Oh Rio. You party so well. Carnival! Beautiful brown skinned women winding around sultry men in tight pants with shirts undone to their belly buttons. Giant feathered hats and strangely sexy masks! I’ve actually never been to Rio, but in my imagination, it’s awesome. I am wearing the coolest mask, and my chest is much more defined.
Not so for the surfing. In my imagination, it is pretty much exactly how it is: pretty damn bad. Yes, it goes off sometimes. It goes off like that guy’s sweaty shirt in Brazilian night club at 2 am! But not for the first few days of the Billabong Pro Rio. I actually heard one of the announcers say that it was a good thing, because now we get to see the world’s best surfers in “regular waves, ones like you have at home.” Ugh. No thanks. I want to see them doing things on waves that I will never be able to properly surf. I want to see them taking ridiculous risks and making impossible drops. I want glory! And carnage! And then more glory! Carnory! Glornage!
Rio ain’t doing it. Not yet, anyway. But thank God that the surfers are the best in the world, because they’re making it look kind of fun.
