Lewis Hamilton tells how surf star Kelly Slater almost killed him while eating hot chicken wings

“It’s not about surfing. It’s about you. It’s not a martial art. It’s not just competition, it’s fun.”

These are rare birds. Surfing competitions where there is no reason to complain.

I will certainly shock you here by first addressing the words of Kaipo Guerrero.

“It’s not about surfing,” he said. “It’s about you. It’s not a martial art. It’s not just competition, it’s fun.”

And this one time – and I mean this one time – he was absolutely right.

Teahupoo provided the canvas for a top-class surfing competition experience. Competition as an art.

And I realized that this is exactly what we, myself included, always get wrong about professional surfing. We feel conflicted by the competition. Hundreds of thousands of surfers see surfing competition as the opposite of their experience.

We are constantly grappling with the question: Is surfing a sport or an art?

This question was answered here. At its best, as we saw on the final day in Teahupoo, it can be a perfect symphony of both.

It was a surfing competition as one could imagine at this elite level. Relentlessly perfect waves tested the limits of the competitors’ skills and commitment. Each man was on the cusp of dedicating his life to surfing, and their love was revealed to the world.

The competitive format adds an extra edge, another layer of consequence. I would have little interest in watching any freesurfing here. And if it seems a little arbitrary whether someone wins or loses, remember that humans are killers at heart. Competition is an evolutionary necessity.

(Think of Filipe Toledo, somewhere watching, but through a veil of dark agony too terrible to comprehend.)

The Teahupoo Amphitheatre is second to none. The proximity to the canal has to make for one of the most captivating experiences in all of sport. Gladiatorial combat with plenty of love. Every man wants to win, but celebrates his rivals’ victories equally.

The fans, who are so close that they can feel the spit in their mouths and hearts, are enthralled by performances that will stay with them for a lifetime.

I wondered how many of the local children floating on boards in the canal would quote this in the years to come.

To be hypercritical, it sometimes seemed a little trite to divide the waves in a surfer’s life by a point in the range of nine to ten. How can one rate such an experience? Is any of the several nine-plus waves we saw at Teahupoo objectively better than the others? Hell, give them all tens.

But they didn’t.

Do they run out of YETI coolers? Some judges seemed aware of this. In the men’s competition, only one ride was awarded ten points to Gabriel Medina, although several judges included tens where their fellow countrymen were seeing high nines. Hair-splitting and perhaps not of great consequence, but it would have been nice to see a few more for waves that I can hardly imagine being any better.

There were too many great moments to condense into a single comparison report. In many ways, one review diminishes that. So how do you analyze it? It seems wrong to pit one guy against another when all were great, so let’s look at the ones that stood out to me individually.

First, where appropriate, Kelly Slater.

To be honest, I was hoping Slater would win. If he got the Hollywood ending he deserved, maybe it would be here. For a moment, it looked like he might.

In his round of 16 duel with Ethan Ewing, he was timeless. Kaipo wondered if he was a magician. I raised an eyebrow and nodded. Somehow it didn’t sound far-fetched.

He managed a 9.73 for a wave that remains one of the best of the entire competition and holds a worthy place on his Teahupo’o championship list, but lacking a backup, he finished behind Ethan Ewing.

With two minutes to go, both men had lost their boards and were rescued from the maelstrom by the Tahitian Water Patrol.

With only 59 seconds left on the clock, Kelly grabbed a new board from his caddy Glen Micro Hall and sprinted back to the lineup with his paddle.

After 22 seconds, the volume in the channel began to swell as a wave began to build, the kind of wave Kelly seems to have been conjuring up at crucial moments for decades.

After 15 seconds, he stood up, threaded a small but challenging pipe, and stepped out when the horn sounded.

He only needed a 4.44 and there was no doubt that this was enough.

The fairy tale shimmered before our eyes and his.

But in the end it was just a glimmer. Kelly lost in the quarterfinals to Ramzi Boukhiam in a heat where nobody had any reason to complain. Slater led for most of the time, but Boukhiam’s 9.80 late in the match was deserved and decisive.

Boukhiam was once again clearly a standout.

“Ramzi is the real deal. A veteran already. My favorite newbie in a long time,” I noted early in the competition. I think I’ve made more or less the same note at almost every competition so far.

Of course, he’s no rookie, having been injured in his rookie season before Pipe. But he’s nothing short of an anomaly. At thirty years old and in his first full year on tour, he should be a typical journeyman, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. He has a certain poise and elegance about him. Not to mention the deep aura of a man who has slept with a thousand beautiful women and broken the hearts of a thousand more.

Another man with the ability to capture a guard’s heart and open it up was and always will be Gabriel Medina. His performance in Teahupoo was once again outstanding. He didn’t win the competition, but for me he was the standout on a day where everyone stood out.

Two near-perfect heat totals of 19.83 and 18.96 may back up that claim, but you really have to experience Medina’s intangible power on waves like these for yourself.

He was perfect. His results should have been too. His best waves couldn’t have been better. They were critical, they were technical and they were stylish. A point I’ve made many times but that bears repeating is that on days like today, the remaining critics of Medina’s style look like amateurs.

The only shadow of disappointment was that his semi-final against Florence was not the legendary heat that perhaps it should have been. But that thought should have vanished in the face of the day. And it was almost entirely different.

After a brief pause and a start that saw both men paddle each other a little too deep, the run was restarted. Medina’s eventual first wave was just a touch away from perfection. He lost his balance coming out, was pulled over the reef and was lost in the turmoil of whitewater as the next wave broke. Tahitian water police grabbed him, apparently underwater. He was visibly dazed but still smiling, his vest hanging around his shoulders and his back bloodied.

Florence deservedly won. His total score of 18 points, including a near-perfect 9.77, showed the kind of mastery we expect from John in such conditions, but in a way that almost belittles his ability.

Everyone is impressed when John performs, but no one is surprised. As a competitive surfer, this was often an Achilles heel that was not of his own making. When you’ve been anointed as the Messiah for a long time, no one is shocked when you perform godlike deeds, only when you don’t.

Sometimes, though, anticipation is enough. I would be remiss not to mention wildcard Mihimana Braye, who I think deserved the point that could have turned the game in his favor in the final seconds of his duel with Florence. But John came out on top by just 0.14 points. Maybe it was too close to predict, or maybe people just wanted to see more of John surfing.

But in the end he lost the final to Ferreira by less than a point, even if this difference does not reflect the sovereignty with which Italo took the team by storm from the start.

With 8.93 and 8.77 in his first two waves, Florence was able to chase the whole time. John almost got there with a 9.33 towards the end, but that would have been stealing.

Italo Ferreira has been in a rhythm we haven’t seen since the heady days of 2019. The days when he never looked like he was going to fall, just like today. He may not have been everyone’s favorite to win here, but perhaps his credentials in heavy waves have been forgotten in recent years full of hyped-up interviews, roid tantrums, and airs into the abyss.

Today he was calm. All that speed and stray tension were kept under control and released at just the right moment to give him control of the most beautiful and scary wave in the world, and it was gratifying to see him happily on top again.

John Florence travels to El Salvador as number one, Italo jumps up eleven places to number five. Suddenly it looks like both of them could win another world title, even at Trestles.

Teahupoo 2024 was an exciting start to the Olympic Games and at the same time a competition for the ages that has been long in the making.

And while the vagaries of the weather and the universe mean that such days are rare, it seems appropriate for the surfing experience in general.

Is it worth pursuing something even if the beautiful moments are so rare that they might as well be dreams?

Today I think so. But tomorrow it could all be over again.

But today. Today is enough.