A generationTalo Ferreira won the premiere of the Surfing Olympics by an advantage. In the final, the 27-year-old Brazilian defeated the Japanese hero Igarashi Chana with 15.14:6.60 points. The bronze medal went to Irving Wright in Australia. Although Igarashi, who was born in Huntington Beach, California, was unable to cope with the pressure and expectations of his compatriots in the final, Wright defeated the most popular superstar Brazilian Gabriel Medina (11.97:11.77) in the competition. Gabriel Medina). The third place scored points and held a party on the beach to celebrate his medal. Six years after he was severely injured by the waves and had to fight for his life and the future, the bronze shone like gold to him. It was also a great victory for him.
The 2019 world champion Italo Ferreira is the son of a fishmonger in Baia Formosa in northern Brazil. He learned to surf on the foam box his father used to sell fish. The money is not enough. For many years, he has been one of the Big Three in the international surfing world. Medina and American John John Florence are the other two. Two charismatic superstars have always been ahead of him in popularity. This is about to change.
As evidenced by the premiere in Japan, the Olympic gold medal is also a hard currency for surfing. The way Ferreira won it was undoubtedly its outstanding level. In the quarter-finals, he defeated Japan’s Hiroshi Ohara with a score of 16.30: 11.90, just as easy as Igarashi in the final. In the game against Ohara, he won the highest score of the game: 9.73 points, slightly lower than the highest score of 10 points. Add the best two calculations in a round.
Use technology and good feeling
Irving Wright. His story as a surfer, his ordeal, found a happy ending at Tsuzaki Beach, 100 kilometers east of Tokyo. The waves there, their height and power, were not close to Wright’s ideas, his dreams and nightmares. Too small. The Australians are the people of the saboteurs. He is in his element. But if necessary, he can also use all his power to reduce it by several sizes.
There is technology, there is a delicate feeling. At the age of 31, he is a veteran in this field and he has seen everything in his sport. Victory and tragedy. The medal he won now is so precious because he couldn’t even consider surfing for a while. All this is to survive and recover again.
It happened in 2015, when he was run over by a 5-meter-high wave during training to compete for the World Championship title in the elite WSL Tour. This is not the first time, but this time he has been pushed underwater for too long. When rescuers took him ashore and sent him to the hospital, the shocking diagnosis was: traumatic brain injury. Wright had to start again. Surfing is impossible, he must first learn to walk again.
Wright later said that his heart was broken, not because of the accident, but because he might never be able to surf again. You must know that surfing is not just a sport-it is not just a phrase in the discipline, even the best-but it is also an integrated lifestyle, deeply influenced by the beach and the sea, freedom and adventure.
Wright lost all of this. Before that constituted everything in his life. His rebound was in the corner, and he struggled to take a few steps again. Anyone who has suffered such a severe brain injury will need to drive to work day after day to return to their original position. For Wright, it was the world of surfing, the prospect of returning to surfing at some point.
He returned in 2017. In his own way. He won the start of the Championship Tour. He is back. how. His situation hasn’t gone well this season, and the ninth place on the tour is his best result. He focused on the Olympics and increasingly trained in the small waves of the United States. For a person of 1.90 meters, this is more like a bathtub than the sea, but this is the prospect of the Tokyo Olympics: Xiaolang. Wright’s plan worked. His theory is: even Xiaolang can achieve great things.
