The Weirdest WSL Week Ever, Pumping Kirra, and Nate Florence's Backdoor Gem
Ten Things from Surfing & the Internet on the Week That Was December 18 2020
Photo: WSL / Bielmann
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1. Pipe Masters got the Rona
Was this the most bizarre week in the WSL’s time as an organisation? It has to be a contender, right? To recap: on Sunday, Aus time, the WSL announced that they were halting the Pipe Masters “as a result of positive COVID-19 tests within the WSL staff, including WSL CEO Erik Logan”.
Who could have foreseen that coming? The running of an international sporting event in a public and natural environment, in a country easily hitting over 2000 COVID-related deaths a day? But what came next was even more bizarre. Following the suspension of their competition, the WSL went completely silent. They didn’t post on Instagram or Facebook for a full five days. Not once. To put that in context, they normally hit around eight posts a day on each of those platform – the most of any surf related media or brand – so, yeah, this was odd behaviour. It’s quite hard to imagine any other major sporting body the world over handling an incident like this in a similar way. It led a few of us to start filling the information void ourselves: “Are they in crisis talks right now?” We asked. “Is the WSL going under? Will the ISA and its fantastic and colourful CEO Fernando Aguerre be the new competitive surfing overlords?”