With the Hawaiian Pro underway we are officially into the home straight of the 2018 QS year. Haleiwa and Sunset offer two of the five QS 10,000 events on the calendar and so over the next 20 days we’ll see the make up of the 2019 CT roster form in Oahu.
Because these QS 10,000 events usually make up three or four of the five results that each QS surfer counts, it’s hard to make predictions. There’s huge points on offer and bolters can still bolt. Dusty Payne in 2014 and Fred Morais in 2016 showed that vast gains can be made when you get on a roll.
Also the QS cutoff points tally, the points needed to get in the top 10 on the QS, is a moving target and hard to predict. Twelve months ago Pat Gudauskas made the CT at 13th place with 16,400 points. However in 2015 the last QS surfer to sneak under the door was Stu Kennedy who needed more than 20,000 points to shut the door behind him.
As it stands now though the current top 5 (Igarashi, Callinan, Colapinto, Seth Moniz and Chrisanto) have all bagged 17,000 plus points. There is then a big 3000 point gap to 6th (Deivid Silva with 14,660). It’s fairly safe to say those top five have secured their CT qualification. However Igarashi and Colapinto will also be double qualifiers given their CT form. That leaves seven QS places up for grabs.
It is at this stage that those surfers in the lower rankings on the CT might have wished they’d put a little more effort into their QS campaigns. Of the surfers ranked 22 or below on the CT only one has done six or more QS events. The highest ranked CT surfer on the QS after Colapinto and Igarashi is Michael Rodrigues at 20, followed by Jesse Mendes at 33.
Al Hunt, who apart from owning the world’s best surf mag collection, has been calculating the surf rankings for three decades sees this as a trend. “It shows that not doing the QS tour has hurt the CT guys,” says Hunt. “I have noticed that surfers who finally qualify for the CT think they have finally made it when all they have done is make it to the starting line.”
Of course doing the two tours full time isn’t easy. The travel, logistics and sheer expense is considerable. There’s also a school of thought that doing both tours will affect your performance on one, or both, tours and so be counterproductive. And for surfers who have spent five gruelling years trying to get off the QS, you’d understand why they might not want to go straight back to the “Qy” having attained their goal. Many also decide to back their talents and give the CT their full attention.
This year’s ratings however show that approach can be problematic. Nearly all those backmarkers, barring a ball-tearing run at Haleiwa and Sunset, now need a miracle at Pipe to continue their CT dreams for 2019.
Cervantes, who often took time out from writing Don Quixote to follow the fortunes of Connor O’Leary and Tomas Hermes closely, once said that, “It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not to venture all his eggs in one basket.”
Looking at the ratings, he may have had a point.
