Jordy Smith Releases Footage of the Wave that Busted His Knee

About a week ago, Jordy Smith announced he would not be competing in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics due to a recent knee injury that required LCL surgery.

Today, Jordy decided to share with his 600k Instagram followers the cause of the injury.

From @jordysmith88:

Been getting a lot of questions about how I got injured. So I thought I would share the wave that it happened on. After pulling up a little higher in the barrel hoping the pump down would give me enough speed to make it out of the “doggy door” I could only see the lip at the last minute and thought I might have a chance. Sometimes you got to risk it for the biscuit haha. So I tried…. And then ended up with surgery haha. Anyways my rehab has been going extremely well. I am walking and have a bunch of range of motion. It’s been 1 month after the surgery and I’m super excited about everything to come. I will keep you posted on the process. I appreciate the love and support

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And…ow. But how ow?

Some math.

Jordy is 6’3, which makes the wave in question about 12 feet on the face. From this height, the lip was falling at a rate of 27.8 feet per second (aka 30 kph, aka 15 kphawaiian) when it hit his knee. Water weighs 1 kg per liter, and if we assume that a 12-foot wave heavy enough to barrel top-to-bottom has a lip thiccer than a Snicker, we can then apply these data points to the equation of force = mass(acceleration) and conclude that Jordy Smith’s knee, did, in fact, explode on impact.

While Jordy will miss the Olympics, it’s possible his knee will be healthy enough to compete again by the Mexico CT event, or at the very least, Tahiti. Jordy is currently sitting at number 6 on the CT standings, so if he wants to make the top-5 and qualify for the WSL Finals at Lower Trestles, he’ll need a decent result in at least one of the final two regular season events.

In the meantime, we hope he stays well away from falling walls of water.