Surfer Larissa in Bahia © Roberta Borge
Hello Hello Brazil
Nov 05 2006 / BrazilThe World's Top Surfers Head to the Other Land Down Under for the Nova Schin Stop on the Foster’s ASP Men’s World Tour
The Foster’s ASP Men’s World Tour is headed for Brazil right now and when it lands on the other side of the equator, in Florianopolis, it will land in one of the most surf-crazed countries on the planet.
When the competitors fly down and look down, they will see hours and hours of the fifth largest country in the world in land mass, the sixth largest in population. From 25,000 feet the surfers flying to Brazil will see a very large country that goes on forever, hundreds and thousands of miles of Amazon river basin and jungle, occasional coffee farms and cattle ranches, fringed to the east by a 4600 mile coastline. The coast of Brazil begins around 3 degrees north latitude and ends around 34 degrees south, which is the equivalent of a coast that starts in Ecuador and includes all of Central America and Mexico and ends around Los Angeles.
That is a lot of coastline, with more nooks and crannies than a Thomas' English muffin and if you were to do the whole thing you would find surfers all along it: hundreds of miles up the Amazon riding the tidal bore called the pororoca, along the beaches of Recife with all the sharks, under the gaze of Corcovado along the beaches of Rio and all the way down south, in Florianopolis, wear wetsuits are mandatory.
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The population of Brazil is approaching 200 million and while it is a resource-rich country whose motto is "Order and Progress" the 21st Century Brazil goes First World/Third World every hundred yards. In some ways, they are leading the world like with their Proalcool system, which produces millions of dollars of ethanol from sugar cane. But the poverty of Brazil is Third World, and that gap between rich and poor is what many outsiders think of when they think of Brazil.
Brazilians adore their soccer stars like Pele and Ronaldhino, and their race car drivers like Ayrton Senna and Nelson Piquet, but surfing is right up there with jiu jitsu, volleyball and basketball in the hearts of most Brazilians, and as more Brazilian surfers achieve success on the World Tour, it is quickly becoming a national passion.
Brazil has never produced a professional world surfing champion, but there is no reason they won't in the future. Brazilian surfers have the talent and the experience and the support, and all Brazilian surfers know what is waiting for them back home should they ever win the World Title: everything.
Dreams of glory aside, for thousands of Brazilians along the coast, surfing is a way out of the favela and into the middle class. Surfers in the past like Pepe Lopez, Ricardo de Souza, Victor Ribas Fabio Gouveia have learned determination to go with their natural talent, overcome their fear of travel and rode their skill to a home and a life that most Brazilians can't imagine. For most Brazilian surfers on tour, the $10,000 prize purse at a surf contest is way more than most Brazilians make in a year. In an overpopulated country where jobs are scarce, a talented laborer might make $35 a day, and a live in maid costs $200 a month.
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Because Brazilians are a proud people and a talented people and a sophisticated people, national pride plus the financial incentive has turned Brazil into a First World surfing power. There are currently nine Brazilian men on the World Championship Tour. Victor Ribas and Peterson Rosa are the veterans, and the most recent addition is a guy with the somewhat inconvenient name of Jihad Kohdr. In October of 2006, Kohdr was one of the favorites at the Brazilian National Championship, the SuperSurf 2006 at Barra Beach, which was webcast live to tens of thousands of people around the country. Kohdr won the two-man final in decent, three-foot beachbreak surf to win $10,000 and a new Volkswagon.
The scene around the SuperSurf 2006 was typical of Brazil, a blizzard of boobs, bunhuggers, bulges, buns, babes, bellies, boys. There is no beach scene on earth that can compare to Rio, as the Troppopean residents of Rio - called Carioca - are renowned around the world for their loose, uninhibited lifestyle. The men all live as if they have the theme from Rocky playing nonstop in their heads, while the women all walk as if The Girl From Ipanema was on permanent loop, driving them from the waist down.
When Randy Newman sang: "Look at those mountains, look at those trees. Look at that bum over there man he's down on his knees. Look at these women, ain't nothing like them nowhere." he was expressing how much he loved LA, but he could have been singing about Rio.
Brazil faces into the South Atlantic, so when you stand at the beach and look to you right, you are looking south. Farther south, in Florianopolis, the weather is a little cooler and the lifestyle a little more covered up. Florianopolis is to Brazil what the Gold Coast is to Australia and Santa Cruz is to America: It is a place with a lot of surf, where good surfers go to get better in relative peace and quiet.
Nova Schin is a Brazilian beer company who have been sponsoring the event there for several years, and as it is the second to last event on the The World's Top Surfers Head to the Other Land Down Under for the Nova Schin Stop on the Foster’s ASP Men’s World Tour, it has been the scene of a lot of drama over the years, as World Title races have been shuffled and decided.
This year, Kelly Slater has already claimed the World Title, but there will be no end of drama as surfers on the other end of the Top 44 battle for points that will determine whether or not they stay in the Big Leagues for another year, or are sent to the minor leagues of the WQS to slug it out and try to get back to The Show.
Loud and proud and well endowed, surfer-loving Brazilians will flock to the beaches of Florianopolis by the tens of thousands, singing songs, banging drums, waving flags and just carrying on, rooting for Vitinho, or The Animal, or Little Romario, or Mineirinho, or Pedrenho or maybe even Kelly Slater, who had the good taste to date Brazilian beauty Giselle Bundschen.
For more information on the event go to www.aspworldtour.com.
-Ben Marcus
