When you think of modern-day surfing you can’t help but think of Kelly Slater, 11-time world champion and both the youngest and oldest man to ever win that title.
Now the sport’s most recognisable face may just have changed surfing forever, his team manufacturing what those in the know readily acknowledge as the greatest man-made wave ever created. Here’s BGR:
It’s been called the holy grail or the mythical unicorn of sport, but creating a perfect manmade wave has been just out of our collective grasp for some time…the Kelly Slater Wave Company dropped this clip of him surfing a misty artificial wave and, mark my words, the surf world changed forever. If this wave can be replicated, this opens the world up—for better or worse—to the sport.
This is what accompanied the video being posted on Slater’s Instragram post:
Now that the world title has been decided and events for the year have finished, I’m excited to show you what I’ve been sitting on for the past couple of weeks. For nearly ten years, my team and I have been working on creating the first truly world-class, high-performance, human-made waves. This is something I dreamt about as a kid. Through rigorous science and technology, we’ve been able to design and build what some said was impossible, and many very understandably never thought would actually happen. I’m proud to say we took our time to get it right, and the first fully-working prototype of the wave now exists (a huge personal thank you to everyone in our lab and on our team for seeing this through!). I’ll be sharing more details in the coming weeks and months but I can’t wait any longer to share a film of my experience surfing the wave for the first time, almost two weeks ago. It was an insane day. I’m still a little in disbelief, and trying to process how much fun this wave is, but it certainly feels like this is going to change a lot of perceptions about human-made waves. There’s a direct link in my bio to kswaveco.com to view the short film. Can’t wait to see other people surf it soon and show what is possible on this thing. #KSWaveCo #FreakOfTechnology #LooksLikeSuperbank but #NotCrowded!
I think Mick Fanning might be fan as well, far fewer denizens of the deep cruising around looking for their next meal.
[source:bgr]
