Padang’s New Management: Gen Z

Three perfect 10s. An average heat total of 16.02 points, rising to 17.83 in the final, culminating in South Coast NSW’s Lucy Darragh and Lakey Peak’s Rajo Barrel winning the 23rd Rip Curl Padang Cup with aplomb under a golden sunset. Two Gen Zs with white-hot futures and a combined age of Ian Crane.

Live surf events are a gamble. The beauty of the Rip Curl Padang Cup is that it runs in a single day, over eight hours, with the entire month of August to pull the trigger. An elated but fried Harry Mann explained the pressure of being Contest Director over celebratory beers last night.

“People will just take a screenshot of a tube on the Surfline camera and send it to you with no context. What they don’t see are the lulls or how the tide’s going to affect it in two hours,” he laughed.

And he can laugh, because he brained it. It was the best Padang’s been all month.

A little concern crept in during the first few heats of the men’s. The rule of thumb says low tide is when Padang does its best work. Not yesterday. I headed for the channel early under the assumption that less water over the reef would mean hollow, stretched tubes.

Within about 30 seconds of climbing onto the sled, I was involuntarily rear-naked-choking water safety’s Luke Studer six feet in the air as we launched over a cleanup set, narrowly avoiding an unplanned electronics salvage mission.

Once we reached the channel, it looked funky. Too big, perhaps. Too south. A strange rib through the end bowl. Roll-ins that looked promising and then simply ceased to exist.

Concern burnt off with the morning fog around 10am, when Padang decided to behave like a good girl and took on an almost angelic form until sundown.

Chirp of it being “the best Padang all month” began circulating through the channel by midday. I’ve been here for exactly 37 hours, and previously not for six years, but concurred knowingly with the local boat drivers nonetheless.

Bruce Irons demonstrated that very specific forms of expertise depreciate more slowly than athleticism. Bruce was sick as a dog, reportedly. Still, his lazy, panache-filled tube entries were sicker. A 15.60 heat total? Very respectable work for feeling rotten.

Taj Burrow looked sharp on his quiver of SITD-winning Dark Noizes between juggling kids. Interestingly, they also carried an Oceans Observatory sticker, a new apparel brand he co-founded with Nathan Webster. We’ll do a proper piece on that soon.

Another real highlight was the gutsy performance of the women. Though it was South Coast NSW 16-year-old Lucy Darragh who took the crown, we saw a 10 from Ruby Berry, and 8s and 9s from Jas Studer and Vahiti Inso.

I’ll wager Darragh is going to be a big problem for women’s competitive surfing in a few years. Absolutely charges, great technique and style, and kind of appeared from nowhere to win the Australian QS. Paired with her skills in heavy water, I think she might blitz the Changa and be on tour sooner than expected. And, as is the case with many South Coast NSW surfers, she seems humble and grounded.

Now, I wasn’t watching the TV. I simply spent most of the day within earshot of Jed Smith, who was keeping the engine room in high spirits with his noxious ditties. He should start a surf podcast. Harry Mann was great too, functioning as a semi-staunch terrestrial foil to the intergalactic, mystical and increasingly indescribable reaches of Jedaum’s inner cosmos.

Heat of the day goes to Round 2, Heat 3 of the Rip Curl Padang Cup men’s. Makana Pang posted 19.23 points to lock in the top spot on the leaderboard. Indo-born-and-raised Rajo Barrel and Dyl Wilcoxen both dropped 10s. Bruce Irons posted a very respectable 15-point heat total. According to many who have attended this event in the flesh ritually, it was one of the better heats in the Cup’s 23-year history.

It also meant that for the remaining three heats, Tosh Tudor, sitting fourth on the leaderboard and yanked into the booth for commentary, was tweaking while his fate was determined. There aren’t many waves where a 17-plus scoreline is unworthy of a final. That’s how good and consistent Padang was from midday onwards. Dyl Wilcoxen literally held a 10 in his scoreline and didn’t make the top four.

The day’s landmark moment of pantomime arrived aboard a jet ski during the men’s final, when a Russian man on an Al Leone-stickered waterhorse drifted directly toward the end bowl, blissfully unaware his noble steed was pushing wake all over the lineup. When somebody (i.e. everybody) pointed out the flaw in this arrangement, he responded with a hostile stare and theatrical gesticulations before speeding off toward Dreamland.

There is probably an essay to be written about Bali’s increasingly surreal convergence of world-class surfing, unchecked development and men from former Soviet republics treating the Padang lineup like a mildly inconvenient marina. This is not that essay.

This is about the Padang Cup, which was very, very good and rid from any politicking, sourness or visible ego among the competitors. Winners and losers hung around, watched heats, screamed for each other and generally behaved like people who were quite pleased to be surfing very good Padang with their friends.

You’d almost call it wholesome, were the whole thing not fringed by spider-web-tatted, Y2K-clad Aussie and Brazilian cliff-hangers, busily fastforwarding diminishing returns on the word “core.”

That might be the enduring image of the day: two teenagers winning one of surfing’s most intimidating tube contests, Bruce Irons coughing his lungs out before packing six-foot Padang, Jed Smith broadcasting from another astral plane, and a Russian sipping seltzer on a jet ski in the impact zone.

Bali remains a difficult place to summarise. The Padang Cup, was a little easier.