Apart from his glorious win, and the fact that Toledo helped to make the Corona Open JBay 2017 one of the most impressive surfing events of all time, he did also put something new onto the table, and that was perhaps the most radical wave ever surfed to score a perfect 10.
How did he do it? By ramping, twice, into the devil wind.
There’s always talk of the ‘devil wind’ this time of the year in JBay. It’s often present in the early hours of the morning, and it often backs off or is replaced by a true offshore southwesterly later on in the day as the land heats up.
The devil wind is a warm northwest that blows down from the mountain, and the mountain ranges amplify them as they go. The devil wind is usually associated with pre-frontal conditions. When a coastal low is developing, the barometer drops and hot air from the Kalahari is then sucked to the coast and in to the low pressure, morphs into warm wind blowing up the point and into the barrels at Supers.
The devil wind doesn't really mess up the wave up near the Boneyards section that much, but as you travel further down the point, it starts putting big creases and chops onto the wave faces.
When Filipe took off on his incredible wave that morning at The Corona, he was further up the point, and his massive air rotations were right into the wind, pushing his board back and onto his feet and keeping it stuck there.
His first rotation could have been awarded 10 points alone, but the very fact that he did two of them, as well as a whole series of other carves and cutbacks boggles the mind.
It does draw a question though. Does surfing possibly need a recalibration? It happened in Olympic level gymnastics when it became apparent that there were too many 10-point routines being rewarded, and there was no way to reward athletes for moving the sport forward.
That 10-point ride by Toledo was an incredible ride, and it was a perfect score long before he had finished his moves, which means that he should deserve more, but where do you go to with that tenner limit?
Back to the wave. After that first move, and silky smooth landing, Toledo continued to pump down the line and launched straight into another one – bigger, higher, and with a little over-rotation on the landing, but a complete move, before finishing off with a few more turns. It was a perfect score, and as Peter Mel said afterwards, ‘a perfect heat in one wave.’
Most people arrive at Supers on those blustery Devil Wind mornings, and see wave faces ripped to shreds, big lumps and generally unpleasant conditions for surfing. Aerial surfers see it instead as a way of ramping, getting wind under your board, keeping the board stuck there for the landing.
The devil wind is the new black.
Check out Filipe’s Road To The Final here
