For better or worse, over the last decade, surfers have gone retro.
In San Diego County perhaps more than in any other location, surfers have returned to longboards, twin-fins, single fins and five fins, quad fins and finless boards from nearly every era in surfing’s history. At times, it feels as though some surfers are merely skipping along the short timeline of surfing history and seemingly at random picking a place at which to stop, exhuming the surfboard relics from the era and applying them to the modern surfing culture.
Proponents call this freeing; naysayers say …Â Details
California, that fount of American cultural invention, has birthed many of our postwar cultural talismans, maybe none more idiosyncratic as popular surf culture. Looking back on it there’s a quaintness to its frantic assertion of the bohemian; we can see it now, with the distance of two generations, as a first innocent acting out on impulses of personal freedom and self-identity that would show up, by turns joyfully and tragically, across the nation before long. …Â
…Pop Surf Culture a splashy, capacious and readable history of the scene, brings together the strands of surfing’s multi-sourced past…   Details
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The first eight heats of Round 3 of the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast presented by LG Mobile were completed today in three-foot (1 metre) waves at Snapper Rocks, and wildcard Julian Wilson (AUS), 20, caused the upset of the season in eliminating reigning nine-time ASP World Champion Kelly Slater (USA), 37, from competition…. Details
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Parity has not existed on the Assn. of Surfing Professionals’ World Tour since Kelly Slater burst onto the scene in the early 1990s.
Now an even playing field appears to also have vanished from the ASP Women’s World Tour, thanks to a blond-haired dynasty-in-the-making known as Stephanie Gilmore.
The Australian power surfer may never match Slater’s nine world titles, but she’s well on her way to claiming a third title in as many years after winning the season-opening Roxy Pro Gold Coast at Snapper Rocks, Australia…. Details