What Instagram Has To Say About Jordy Vs John

If you’re like me, the last handful of days your Instagram stories have been awash with ridiculous polls. From Kelly Slater deliberating on whether chocolate is the meaning of life, to a salt-infused Harry Bryant dropping a selfie asking, “Is Haz cooked?” (I hit yes, of course), regardless of the level of absurdity, it’s hard to resist tapping the little box for a glimpse at the stats.

This new feature got me curious. Eager to jump on the bandwagon I hastily dumped a symmetrically flawless A-frame with two simple, yet polarising options; ‘left’ or ‘right’. The results weren’t groundbreaking by any means, natural footers took the win, however we got a kick out of the notifications received when big names dropped their opinions.

Next on the list of social data experiments – the most timely question in performance surfing; will current yellow jersey holder, Jordy Smith take his first title, or will John Florence sneak past and go back-to-back? The peak test post was cool, but in the end we were far more interested in the opinion of surfers and persons of significance, over the broader surf community (no offense!). I curated an exclusive ‘close friends’ group on @stab, from Mick Fanning to QS grinders, photographers, film makers and more, then posed the question.

Admittedly, thanks to a weekend road trip and the 24 hour-only nature of Instagram Stories, we missed the window to screenshot the final figures (sorry Ashton!), we’ll allow the WSL to cover that below (John won). What we were after were credible opinions, Kelly didn’t respond, however we did score finger taps from a modest list of noteworthy personalities:

Connor O’Leary – Jordy
Luke Davis – John
Ryan Callinan – John
Ashton Goggans, Stab‘s Editor In Chief – Jordy
Keanu Asing – Jordy
@Unholypotato, our boy Mike Ciaramella – John
Jack Robinson – Jordy
Nathan Webster – John
Ryan Miller, Stab-adored World Tour photographer – Jordy
Mitch Coleborn – John

Our dear friends at the WSL caught wind of the new function and ran their own poll to their 2.5mil sample size. They wanted to know who was ‘In’ and who was ‘Out’ of the 2017 title race, here’s the take-outs:

-Far more people are backing the Hawaiian over the South African.
-Their audience believes Julian Wilson has almost as much of a chance as Jordy, despite the 6,200 point gap between second and third on the leader board.
-People are losing confidence in Matt Wilkinson.
-I should set an alarm 23 hours after I share an Instagram Story.

We’ve only just turned the keys on this new toy. Let’s play some more. What would you like us to ask the upper echelon of surf next? Airs or turns? Slabs or points? Revs or oops? Feel free to get weird people.