Paddling out to a beautifully formed left and right breaking at Bali’s Seminyak beach break recently, I was taken by the quality of surfing in the water. One surfer in particular threw fins free snap after fins free snap, like a switchblade slicing through the lip. “Bango bango bango” as Stryder might say. In the water the Indonesian kid responsible surprised me when he asked “sorry, did you want to go right then” ? …It came as a big surprise that he had even considered my presence.
“Hell no. .. dude you’re ripping,” I replied.
“Oh ..Thankyou very much,” he responded with genuine humility.
When I mentioned how cool it was that Rio Waida had won a Challenger Series event recently and was now poised (currently number one on The Challenger Series) to become the first ever Indonesian on the dream tour, he told me he was also at Manly, wher Rio won. It transpired that Ketut, who is 20-years old and living in Seminyak, was the only other Indonesian male representative aside from Rio Waida on this year’s Challenger Series.
As we waited for another set he was happy to fill me in.
“My first heat on the Gold Coast I had Kelly. I wanted to beat him so much. But an old guy crashed into me and ruined my board when I was practicing before my heat and I had to surf on a bad board”.
Later I saw that in the second comp at Manly he made it through to the round of 16, earning himself some valuable points on his quest to make the dream tour himself.
“I have goals,” he says alluding to the new tour.
When I asked him about his trip he explained that although he’s sponsored by Rip Curl, the Australian leg of contests was something he had paid for himself, highlighting one of the main reasons not one Indonesian has ever qualified for the top echelons of the tour just yet. Without the resources to just surf without working, let alone travel the world, generations of Indo rippers have had to watch from the sidelines.
When I talked to Ketut on the phone a couple of months later he’d just started surfing again after recovering from an injury that forced him to withdraw from the Huntington Beach Challenger Series event. He had just turned 21 a week earlier and when I asked if he’d had a big one to celebrate he told me, “No. Just had dinner with my family.”
Ketut explained how his father, who was a lifeguard at Kuta, would take him to the beach from Denpasar, where his folks still live, to play in the sand while his older brother Narobi surfed. Eventually Ketut got his own second hand board at age five.“I started surfing a lot because I wanted to surf better than my brother,” he explains.
Eventually Made ‘Bol’ Adi Putra gave him a board shaped by Hansel which he used to come third in a Magic Waves comp when he was just eight.
By the time Ketut was nine, Rip Curl started sponsoring him with surfboards and “money for my schooling.” They’ve sponsored him ever since, something for which he is very grateful. But despite wanting to do all the Challenger Series comps this year it is cost prohibitive. Ideally if he does well in the next one in Portugal he’ll try to do more of them this year. Either way he’ll come back to Bali after Portugal to re-qualify for next year’s Challenger Series and has Olympic qualification in his sights also.
This year Indonesia had two, major regional qualifier events – one at Krui and another at Nias. Hopefully the new regional qualifier series introduced by the WSL can provide a springboard for more talented kids from Indonesia to be given the opportunity to reach the highest level. In the interim, keep an eye out for Ketut and his silky act.
