The 8th stop of the WSL Championship Tour, the 2016 Hurley Pro at Trestles, and a whole lot of upsets as the title race heats up. Speculation was high at the start of the contest. Would Slater bring a home win after his success in Tahiti to power up the rankings? Would John John consolidate his lead and tighten his grip on the yellow jersey? Nobody could be sure that one of the rookies wouldn’t steal the show either. After all, Trestles is arguably the home of progressive new-school surfing…
The waves never really pumped during the contest. Shoulder to head high surf with variable winds made up the majority of the contest days. Still, the world’s best left the traps galloping, racking up high scores in the early rounds. Joel Parkinson, who lodged one his best results all season at the 2016 Hurley Pro at Trestles, scored a 9.10 in his Round 1 heat…
Onto Round 2 and we saw defending world champion Adriano de Souza ejected from the event by Kai Otton. Other surfers kissing goodbye to the contest were season trailblazer Matt Wilkinson, Julian Wilson, Jeremy Flores, Adam Melling, and Nat Young. In a match up with Matt Banting, Mick Fanning scored a whopping 9.77 to progress into Round 3…
The man they call White Lightning couldn’t make it any further though, losing to Stu Kennedy in his Round 3 heat. John John Florence and Gabriel Medina both failed to make it out of Round 3 too. With some of the top ranking surfers knocked out it became anyone’s guess who would eventually win, but some bets were definitely going on Toledo, who dominated his Round 4 heat…
Surprisingly there wasn’t a whole lot of air game at the 2016 Hurley Pro at Trestles. A few guys were daring to go fins free and sometimes it really paid off. Here’s Kennedy throwing it into the wind and nailing closed the coffin on Josh Kerr’s hopes of reaching the quarterfinals…
As the final rounds approached Slater was still in with a chance, until he met Toledo in the quarters. Kennedy also got taken out by local wildcard Tanner Gudauskas. Just four guys, a South African, a Brazilian, an American, and an Australian, left to compete…
By the way that Toledo and Tanner were surfing they looked dead set to meet each other in the final. It didn’t play out that way though. Both lost their semifinal heat, leading to the 2016 Hurley Pro at Trestles being a face off between Jordy Smith and Joel Parkinson. Parko, who was ranked 14th before this contest, hadn’t reached a final all season and Smith had only reached one. The pair battled it out but Parko couldn’t quite beat Smith’s combo score, with just 0.44 of a point between them. Parko is now 6th in the rankings, just behind Slater, and Jordy climbs to 4th, with the world title now within reach!