France Lashes Out At WSL For Cheating On Ocean With Wave Pools

The French are notoriously good at protesting.

Ask any silver level member of Air France’s Flying Blue loyalty program (free extra bag, first class check-in line, etc — no offense but myself included). They strike all the time. Les grèves will fucking kill you. Well maybe not you, but differently your travel plans.

Suffice to say, it is a time-honored French tradition to make things complicated for those who expect things from you. And so when the WSL expected the French controlled area of the Atlantic Ocean to cooperate for the Quiksilver Pro today, they were gravelly mistaken.

Not gravely, gravelly. As in, the wave La Graviere (which translates to The Gravel) was firing today and the Quik Pro was running heats up the beach.

The process of picking where exactly the Quik Pro will be run is part educated guess and part optimistic gamble. While there are only a few kilometers of beach to choose from, the bank has to be picked a month before the event starts. Swells come. Storms hit. Banks change. For logistical reasons, you just gotta pick one and hope for the best. 

This morning, the chosen bank of Les Culs Nuls was the best wave for miles, by miles. This afternoon? Not so much. Le Culs Nuls does not like high tide right now. With the ability to push a skeleton system down the beach and keep running, they moved the event down the beach in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, La Grav was pretty much as good as it gets.

Look at the heat analyzer from Round 1 Heat 10 - Round 2 Heat 2 to see what Les Estagnot was doing. Look at any CT surfer not in said heats Instagram to see what La Graviere was doing.

It was a special day.

However, the Quik Pro still produced a great day of surfing — just not quite as good as spitting tubes right on the beach in front of naked people at La Grav. Highlights!

Julian Wilson’s 8.50 was one of the most handsome waves you could imagine. A tube. An alley-oop. A turn. All very nice and very fluid.

Adriano de Souza gets a lot of heat from anonymous people on the internet but he literally loves surfing so much that he refuses to pull out of waves until the very end. Which, by that logic, just goes to show you that Filipe Toledo loves his wife more than anymore.

Speaking of Filipe, I got the feeling that he would lose to wildcard Jorgann Couzinet in some act of cosmic fury when the comp moved to Estagnot instead of La Grav. Instead, he metaphorically thanked Jorgann — who presents another example of QS-tailored surfing looking like apples to pigeon meat on the CT.

The permanent wildcard, Michael Wright, put up the second highest heat score of the day in a heat that officially marked the most composed thing anybody with a mullet has ever done.

Other than that, there were a few 7s from Griffin Colapinto and Ace Buchan that are worth a brief moment of your existence on earth.

According to Stab’s France Correspondent, Air France Silver-Level Flying Blue and official wine drunk forecaster, conditions look tricky for the next few days. Tomorrow looks pretty good. Thursday doesn’t. Friday has potential. Swell isn’t an issue, but wind certainly is, and there will be windows of glory amongst it all.

And all the while, the waiting period is quickly slipping away.