Leonardo Fioravanti performs during qualifying session of Red Bull Unleashed in Surf Snowdonia, United Kingdom, on September 18, 2015
This event is years in the making. The first thing running through the imagination of surfers everywhere when they learned about Wavegarden’s existence was having waves on demand and the end of getting skunked on surf trips. Right behind that came the endless possibilities for holding organized surf contests – organized being the operative word. Since the beginning of time the unpredictable nature of the ocean has thrown curve ball after curve ball at surf contests. In fact, the entire concept of a lay day is almost exclusive to surfing. So the ability to hold a contest in controlled conditions has been a gigantic step in the evolution of surfing. And now that Red Bull Unleashed at Surf Snowdonia is officially underway the surf world will never be the same.
The format of the contest has been relatively under wraps leading up to its launch. The biggest advantage of holding a contest in a wave pool was the ability to plan every detail down to the minute.They’ve held Formula One style practices, scheduling time for competitors to warm up in the competition area, and even using a qualifying format for seeding the tournament field of 16. Next up in the main event surfers have been taken away from the best 2 waves heat scoring and into a best of five elimination, similar to a soccer shootout. Surfers trade wave for wave, making each ride more crucial than the last. With waves coming every three minutes Red Bull Unleashed turned surf contests into a ping pong match rivaling the intensity of a Forrest Gump Olympic showdown.
