Slater takes off basically blind and squeezes out a nine-point ride. Photo: WSL
Kelly Slater has a special relationship with Teahupo’o. Hell, he’s got a special relationship with a lot of waves, but the one with Chopes is close to the one he’s got with Pipeline. And during the WSL’s Teahupo’o Pro, Slater turned that relationship into true magic.
Slater has a very strange ability to seemingly conjure waves. The number of times he’s needed a score and had the perfect wave arrive on the horizon just in time is, quite frankly, a little eerie. And although Slater didn’t need the nine-point ride he got during his first round heat against Eli Hanneman, it certainly didn’t hurt.
The conditions were not perfect. Far from it, in fact. Rain squalls blew through the lineup. The swell was big, but the wind churned things up into a bit of a maelstrom. It was hard to see through the driving rain, but Slater spun late on a big one, casually side-slipped under the hood, and got about as deep as humanly possible on a cavernous barrel.
Slater was there as a wildcard. His company, Outerknown, is an event sponsor and Slater draws a hell of a lot of eyes. He’s been out of competition for a while, but it didn’t take him long to get right back on the horse.
“It’s sort of like riding a bike,” he told Chris Cote from the channel after his heat. “But you forget how gnarly Teahupo’o is. You’ve got to just jump back on the horse out here. We didn’t get time for any big waves this week and all of a sudden you jump right back into it. It’s good not to have the first heat — you get to see a couple of guys do the rights and the wrongs and see what happens.”
And while it’s too early to say what will happen when the event is over, it’s certainly early enough to say with confidence that Kelly Slater did what Kelly Slater does best: put on a show.
