The Guaruja Kid

He’s just won his first big WT event, and he’s part of the surfing world’s biggest minority group. Find out why Adriano De Souza might occasionally be tempted to claim.

By Nick Carroll

An estatic Adriano.

Here’s something that’ll tell you a bit about Adriano de Souza.

At the age of 11 he won the Brazilian schools championship, kind of like the Rusty Gromfest or something, which came with a free ticket to Hawaii. But nobody in his family had the money to come along too.

So at 11 years of age, without knowing a word of English, Adriano flew to Hawaii, for two weeks, by himself.

Think about THAT one for a moment.

Pig-dogging in the Ments. Pic Red Bull

“The stopovers were really difficult,” he says mildly. “The plane went to Dallas, then LA then Hawaii. When I got off in Dallas, I thought I must be in Hawaii already. This guy kept trying to shove me back on the plane, and I was, ‘No! I’m IN Hawaii!’”

Half his life later, Adriano can grin at the memory. He’s earning six figures from Oakley and Red Bull, he’s bought houses for his mum and big brother, and – thanks to a crash language course after he’d won the ASP World Juniors in 2004 – he speaks excellent English.

Lost on a desert isle a long way from Guaruja. Pic Red Bull

But that’s not how it’s always been. When he flew out for Hawaii as a mini-grom, De Souza was leaving a family home that’s little more than a humpy. He hails from the flat-land favelas behind the beachside town of Guaruja, near Sao Paulo in south-eastern Brazil. Translated, “favela” roughly means “slum”, but the average Aussie’s idea of poverty just doesn’t compare with what the De Souzas coped with back then.

Adriano took us for a tour of his old home during a visit to Brazil in June this year – along dirt streets not quite wide enough for cars, with barefooted kids squealing and running out of low-roofed concrete-walled shacks down alleyways just wide enough to walk.

Halfway down one of those alleys, behind a besser-brick wall, is the unfathomably tiny house where he grew up, not even two metres from ground to roof and framed in uneven planks and iron sheets.

Back on the dusty street, a few of Adriano’s friends gathered, riding up on bikes, laughing, happy to see their friend. “I only left here at 15,” he told me later, “it’s such a short time – there’s been no time to miss it.”


Adriano's perfect pit pose. Pic Red Bull

You’d think such a background might leave its mark on a rising young pro … in over-eagerness, maybe, or some kind of desperation to make more of his luck. But there’s nothing eager or desperate about Adriano. When he’s not overwhelmed with the thrill of victory, he’s a quiet, smart, soft-spoken kid with a pretty old head on his shoulders.

But he’s under no illusions about what it’ll take to get to the next level. After all, as a Brazilian surfer, he’s part of the biggest minority group in the sport.

“We have no way – no path, to tell us how to be world champ,” he told me. “In Australia there are 10 world champs. 10 runners up. 30 third places. You can see a path – a lot of paths. In Brazil, surfing has been going only about 50 years. We’re building, just building.”

Lately that building has been paying off. If you saw the clips from the recent Quiksilver King of the Groms final in France between 15-year-old Brasilieros Gabriel Medina and Caio Ibelli, you’d have seen the first perfect 20 score in any junior event, ever. And it was earned purely through Gabriel’s insane, flawless air work. The mega world tour event held the week before at the same spot looked pretty weak by comparison.

Now Adriano’s won his first big one, you’ve got to wonder: is this the start of something?

Click here for blog and video from his win in Mundaka