View from the Line-Up

By Alex Wade

The 2006 Rip Curl Boardmasters champion is South African David Weare, who avenged last year’s defeat to Antonio Bortoletto thanks to a week of surf that was always contestable and, every now and then, pretty good. Weare bagged a cheque for just over £6,000 and 2,000 vital WQS points with a win over Australian Cory Ziems, just as fellow South African ripper Roydon Bryson was charging to victory in the 6-star rated Yumeya Tahara Pro in Japan. Weare and Bryson consolidate a strong South African showing on the WQS, with Durban’s Bluff surfer Ricky Basnett also in the top 15.

So much for the stats, but what of the Boardmasters itself? The talk this year – and there was a lot of it – was of commercialism. The naysayers appeared in force, inspired perhaps by The Guardian’s apocalyptic 17 July article entitled “How surfing went mainstream… and lost its soul.” ITV Westcountry ran a piece last Friday, in which yours truly appeared, which captured the prevailing view among Fleet Street’s finest. Surfing was massive, said Steve Hardy’s well-informed item, but was there a price to pay? I found myself half-agreeing, bemoaning more crowded line-ups as the presenter Louise Midgely asked me if the romantic notion of lone surfer was a thing of the past. In the background, some of the estimated 140,000 attendees of the Boardmasters watched Adriano de Souza tearing it up, as he had been all week.

For much of the Boardmasters I was miles away in West Penwith, helping my wife, an abstract artist, run a show of her paintings. The area is a stronghold not merely of painters who have historically been drawn to its extraordinary light, dramatic cliffs and moorland, but also of free-surfers who eschew the competition ethos. One such is West Penwith local Jonty Henshall, who wandered into the gallery a day before ITV’s piece. We had a chat that seems to me to sum up the dilemma posed by a major commercial jamboree such as the Boardmasters.

“The Boardmasters is not representative of British surfing,” said Henshall. “We have a ridiculously diverse surfing population but the Boardmasters’ ethos of commercialism and exclusively short-board competition is worlds away from most people’s experience of surfing. The event also fosters a sense of what it is to be a surfer that is driven not by reality but by corporate marketers. Many so-called surfers cover themselves in logos but have no idea about basic etiquette in the water. They paddle out at unfamiliar breaks and behave ignorantly, making the whole experience of surfing unpleasant. Worse, they’re in danger of doing themselves and others harm.”

Henshall is a surfer of over 25 years’ experience, but finds being a surfer nowadays “very frustrating.” As he put it: “You see people going out with tiny short-boards because that’s what they think looks cool, when they can barely stand up on a mini-mal. Or parents taking their children out in swells that most surfers can’t handle, because they assume surfing is as easy as it looks in the adverts. It’s not. The trouble is that because surfing is used to promote so many other products these days it seems accessible, which leads to people thinking they’re surfers just because they wear the clothing.”

Henshall’s was a view with which it was easy to have sympathy on the rare occasions that I managed to get away from work and go for a surf during two weeks in West Penwith. My favourite spot, Sennen Cove, was packed, as, of course, was every known break in Cornwall. Newquay’s beaches were heaving more than anywhere else, as surfers of all levels jostled for waves, car parking spaces and, on Fistral itself, somewhere to sit. Even Radio Five Live noted the hell of driving out of Newquay and hitting the A30 once the last wave of the Boardmasters had been ridden.

Against this, James Hendy, Rip Curl’s marketing manager for the UK, has this to say: “The event is incredibly popular and goes from strength to strength each year. It’s a chance for British people to see the best surfers in the world competing on their own doorstep.” You might think well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, but Welsh surfer Tom Anderson, a former competitive surfer and author of Riding the Magic Carpet, agrees: “The Boardmasters is analogous to the experience of watching Thierry Henry in a live football match. The vast majority of people watching him would never be able to do what he does, but without them, he wouldn’t be Thierry Henry. Once people have seen him, they go away inspired.”

There lies the rub. It may be hyped to the max, and there may be purists who dislike the trade village, the crowds, the stress, but the Boardmasters does showcase surfers such as de Souza, Weare and our own Russell Winter. After the circus leaves town, the standard of domestic surfing goes up a notch, and the slow but steady rise of surfing as a serious sport in the UK continues. Moreover, many other businesses in Cornwall besides Rip Curl profit from the event. And this brings us full circle: is surfing a sport, an art, a profession, a way of life? Or something else entirely? Perhaps it depends on the kind of person you are. For me, I loved seeing de Souza ripping on my visits to the Boardmasters, but I didn’t miss the traffic when I wasn’t there, and once, I even found a right-hander in West Penwith with no one on it.

The romance is still there, and I suspect the likes of Rip Curl would be as perturbed as Henshall by this fact: in Las Vegas casinos, at last year’s World Series of Poker, hundreds of miles from the ocean, the imagery of surfing was as prevalent as that of fast cars, beautiful women and sparkling diamonds. Surfing has not lost its soul, but there are people out there looking to steal it. And they’re not all poker hustlers.

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