World Title Favorites Dodge Elimination On High-Stakes Day In Portugal
“This last three or four days has been so hard,” copped California’s Griffin Colapinto after eking out a win in the Elimination Round of the MEO Rip Curl Pro Portugal. “It’s been a crazy rollercoaster mentally. One second I’m super happy, the next I’m thinking about my heat coming up. Just so much going on in the mind.”
Dealing with hail storms, gale-force winds and an angry Atlantic Ocean, over the last several days, Colapinto and his fellow competitors have been forced to wait for the contest to be called on. After suffering an interference call that relegated him to the elimination round, Colapinto was struggling to reset until he pulled out the magic board he rode at the contest last year, put the past behind him and got to work.
Putting together a solid heat against fellow Californian Jake Marshall and Portuguese wildcard Joaquim Chaves, Colapinto did what need to be done to bounce back and get him back in the mix. After a bit of a disappointing start to the season in Hawaii, he’s looking for stop number three of the Championship Tour to get him back on track.
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“I think we were lucky with the mid tide coming in, usually when that happens a lot of waves seem to come through,” Colapinto explained in his post-heat interview. “I’ve been surfing here the last couple of days, trying different boards and I was losing confidence quick. So I just had to put it all in the past, pull out the magic board from last year and it’s still magic.”
Colapinto was one of a number of world title hopefuls that fought through the elimination round in Peniche’s tricky conditions. Also living to surf another day was three-time world champ Gabriel Medina and 2020 Olympic gold medalist Kanoa Igarashi.
“I had a long trip coming here and felt really tired in the first round but we just had a few days off and it was good to relax,” said Medina, who’s coming off of a gold medal performance at the ISA World Surfing Games in Puerto Rico last week. “That was pretty much my first good waves here and hopefully I can get a few more but I’m feeling good and my board feels good so I’m excited for the next round.”
When competition resumes the men will be into the Round of 32 at the MEO Rip Curl Pro Portugal, while the women’s quarterfinals have been locked in. Stay tuned.
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With more than 25 years of writing about surfing, the ocean and action sports, Jake Howard continues to share stories, profiles and issues that shape the surfing world. One of the premier subject-matter experts in the field today, he's savvy in the ways of print, digital and social media, his breadth of work is expansive. Getting his start writing Surfline surf reports and recording the phone reports for 976-SURF in the late '90s, Jake served as the managing editor for Surfer Magazine in the early 2000s before moving on to launch RedBullSurfing.com and cover surfing for ESPN and the X Games. Over the years, Jake has also enjoyed time behind the edit desk at The Surfer's Journal, as well as the World Surf League, where he worked as the Senior Editor for a number of years. Beyond producing editorial content, Jake has served as a digital marketer and copywriter for iconic surf brands such as Quiksilver, Roxy and Rip Curl. Writing thousands of pages of copy for Surfline, he has deep SEO experience as well. The surf columnist for the San Clemente Times, Jake continues to dedicate himself to the culture and history of the sport through his involvement with the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center in San Clemente.