Kolohe Andino Hosts San Clemente’s Very Own Summer Olympics
The 2% Surf Relay Battle — with paper airplane draft picks, human corndogs, national anthems, and small-wave heroism.
It was 3 PM on a sweltering San Clemente Saturday and the Paris Olympics had just begun, but few surfers in the “Spanish Village by the sea” had tuned in — they were too focused on Ian Crane wrestling an enigmatic, big-boned opponent known locally as “Big 20” into the tar-strewn sand.
Why such a spectacle? It’s all a part of the pie that is the “2 Percent Classic” — one strong front in Kolohe Andino’s war against boring surf communities.
“2% has done a lot for me because I was super down after my Hawaii season a few years back. Then I heard something in a Christian podcast. It said, “Community heals and isolation festers.” I had to keep that one with me forever,” Kolohe told Stab.
“When I got home, I just let the floodgates open. I wanted to roll 15 deep to the beach, get this crazy energy together, and make something out of it,” Kolohe continued. “Then I thought I could potentially help these kids with their careers — whether it was with competing or media. I could give them that boost from a veteran perspective.”
The 2 Percent Classic’s format is something other contests should joyfully emulate. It’s a relay, which we’ve seen many times before in Boardriders contests. But, this is different. The night before the contest, every grom in San Clemente it seemed showed up at a warehouse and had a competition to see who could throw a paper airplane the farthest. The winners were designated Team Captains and there was then a classic schoolyard draft for teams. And, don’t worry, the rule was you had to have girls on your team, no kickball chauvinism here (the girls ended up getting better scores than some of their male teammates anyway).
The next day, after a Star-Spangled Banner guitar solo from an 11-year-old, the competition began. Each team had one hour to compete, and every surfer needed to catch at least one wave. The entire team had to ride the same surfboard, each one shaped by a young local surfer/shaper. One surfer was designated as the “Double Whammy” surfer (a common surf relay feature) and their score was doubled as soon as both their hands went up in jubilation.
The team names were, as expected, quite rogue: “Swamp Donkeys”, “Biggie Smalls”, “Get It Right”, “Banana Bunch”, “Dumb And Dumber”, and a favorite… “98%”.
In the end, it was team “Loadie” that took the Victory Royale, composed of CT rookie Kade Matson, former Stab High Ladybird Bella Kenworthy, Reed Platenius, Carson Carr, Nolan Senn, and Waylon Brennan.
The team won free gear from, you guessed it — 2 Percent, a free surfboard, and plenty of high-fives and admiring glances on the road down to Lowers.
In the end, this is all part of Kolohe’s benevolent plot to highlight the youth.
“My biggest goal would be taking someone who wouldn’t necessarily have a career in surfing, and because they’re part of our crew, they get sponsored and are able to enjoy life as a pro surfer for some years,” Kolohe said. “For example, if there was just some loner kid, somewhere up the coast, he would never get sponsored. But, if he’s part of a crew that’s putting out movies and doing rad shit all the time, someone would want to sponsor him. I think that would be a huge win.
As Smalls’ mom admonishes in The Sandlot, “I want you to get out into the fresh air and make some friends. Run around, scrape your knees, get dirty. Climb trees, hop fences. Get into trouble, for crying out loud.” Yeah, that seems to be the kind of community that Kolohe (now a dad of two kids himself) wants to proliferate from Calle Estrella to Calle Cristianitos.
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