If you ever made it to the Surf Ranch Pro you might have noticed that Championship Tour contests in wave pools feel like they go on for an eternity. You’d imagine churning out waves at the push of a button is a bit more efficient than holding a contest in the actual ocean, and in a way, they are. While the CT sets up contest windows around the world that extend for a week and a half, to as long as two weeks at some stops, an event like the Surf Abu Dhabi Pro gets a three-day window between the first heat and crowning a winner. But dear lord are those three long days.
Surf fans in the states got to watch day one of the Surf Abu Dhabi Pro on Thursday night exactly 12 hours behind the action at Hudayriyat Island, where it was Friday morning. Most of us probably went to sleep at some point and when we woke up Friday morning, the contest was still going. By this point it was under the lights at Surf Abu Dhabi for the men’s elimination round.
To give some perspective on just how long a day we’re talking about, the final waves of the elimination round determined the last spot(s) advancing into the head-to-head Round of 16 that will go down Saturday. Mateus Herdy took his final wave of the day with a chance to slide into the fourth and final position for that Round of 16 field. He nailed a 360 alley-oop toward the end of the right-hander, landed without breaking momentum, and comboed it with a cutback to finish of the wave. It’s the kind of thing you might see once or twice ever in the ocean, but in the wave pool, it landed him a 7.37 — still enough to slide into that coveted fourth spot.
Mateus was the second-to-last surfer of the night. Leo Fioravanti’s next two waves would determine if Mateus had done enough to move on or if last week’s runner-up at Pipe would advance. And then Jesse Mendes casually mentioned that Mateus had arrived at the park for his morning heat at 7 a.m. that morning. It was pushing 10 p.m., a full 15 hours of competition…all for six waves.
So yeah, these contests feel like an eternity. Instead of watching more than a half day’s worth of surfing in order to catch up (because you were probably sleeping through a good chunk of it), here’s the night surf condensed into 20 minutes.
Hopefully Mateus Herdy is taking a nap in the meantime.
