Before the yips set in. Photo: ASP | Kirstin
Well, it’s official. Gabriel Medina has the yips and will head to Pipeline hoping to achieve what so few 21-year-olds in the history of sport have ever achieved. His challenge is three pronged.
First, he must arrest a worrying form slump. After outdoing himself through the Pacific leg, winning both Fiji and Tahiti, (including a win over Slater in the final), and causing one of the great boil overs at the Quik Pro, Gold Coast (when he beat Joel Parkinson in barrelling behind-the-rock Snapper), the title seemed a foregone conclusion. As the tour rounded on Europe, which is traditionally a Medina stronghold, a Brazilian world title looked like a sure thing. And then the yips set in. The scenes that unfolded in his round three loss in Portugal will go down as one of those rare sporting moments you look back on ten years later and laugh to yourself: what was he thinking!?
In the kind of shifting four foot peaks that he has proved to be nearly unbeatable in, Medina drew the hapless Huntington Beach native, Brett Simpson – a surfer who, earlier in the year, would have melted in the mere presence of the Brazilian. With his tour future on the line, however, Simpson got down low and went to work, grinding his way to a slender lead with two and a half minutes on the clock. Medina, who’d been typically masterful in the priority battle, gave himself the pick of the final set of the heat, taking off and stuffing an inside pit before shooting out a side-hatch and riding to shore. Then something odd happened. With the score yet to be read out, Medina returned to the sand, leaving Simpson alone in the lineup with more than two minutes left on the clock. The Supertubos lineup is such that it can take as little as 20 seconds to get out the back after a wave, yet by the time the score was read – dropping Medina a fraction short of the required score – he was already in the competitors area.
We’ll never truly know why, but what is certain is that it was the strangest of departures from the tenacious, competitive desire that has so far characterized his push for a maiden world title. He now heads to Hawaii needing something special to turn his year around.
And who else but the perennial competitive force, Mick Fanning, would be breathing down his neck? He’s played a conspicuously quiet game thus far, letting the spotlight shine hot and bright on Medina and Slater. “That’s where I like to fly – under the radar,” he said after his win in Portugal, an event he first won five years ago. He will go head to head with Medina for the title at Pipe.
While Medina’s had the yips, Slater hasn’t fared much better. He’s choked on a number of golden opportunities to reel the Brazilian in and skip ahead of Fanning. His loss to Aritz Aranbaru in round three in Portugal might have kept him awake for years, had he not nailed the arguably the best surfing move that’s ever been done just a few days earlier.
The good news for Kelly is that neither Medina nor Fanning have been particularly successful at Pipe. The possibility of Medina losing out in round four or worse is foreseeable, while Mick has made it past the semis only once at the Pipe Masters – and that was way back in 2005.
The third challenge Medina faces is how to keep keep 14 world titles and 30 years of experience – not to mention a nation’s expectations – out of his head. If he wants the title, he’s going to have to do it in the most honorable circumstances imaginable: by beating two of the all-time greats at surfing’s version of the coliseum. Damn, it’s good to be a surf fan.
* This article has been amended to reflect statistical inaccuracies in this report.
