Nick Carroll

Pretty flatulent eh.

Nothing mega-aquatic faces our top 45 heroes as they brace for an end-of-an-era event at the Billabong Pro Teahupo'o this week.

By the look of the forecast charts, at least some of the 45 may find their careers turning on two to four foot surf.

A small westerly fetch bending over NZ and a couple of feeble cutoff lows well south of Tahiti look to be setting up mixtures of minor groundswell for the first week of the contest. The west angle of some of this swell will turn the break into a wedgy peak rather than a drawn-out wall. With conditions like this, Matt Wilko's recent mocking remark about the chances of him going right at Teahupo'o may well become a weird reality.


Damo Hobgood's deep bottom turn. Pic Tim Jones

The conditions also seem likely to even up the event, with big end power surfing barrel experts like AI and Slater being hauled back to the field, and fast moving newcomers like Jadson Andre and Owen Wright springing into major contention.

Chopes is the last 48-man main event, bringing to a close 18 years of the format at the ASP's top end. The next event, at Lower Trestles, will flip to a 36-man system, concentrating the talent and prizemoney into a tighter envelope.


Adrian Buchan's casual hand-draggery. Pic Tim Jones

Only 32 surfers will survive the cut post-Tahiti, and the arithmetic is brutal. The current top 10 can be assured of safety, but to varying degrees, everyone else will feel some sort of heat other than the tropical kind.

Seven of the trailing 13 right now are Aussies, some of them outstanding long serving names: Tom Whitaker, Mick Campbell and Dean Morrison will all need to pull out 9ths or better, and rely on bad placings for the guys immediately ahead of 'em, in order to avoid the follow-on. With them in the pit will be Ben Dunn, Jay Thompson, Drew Courtney and Blake Thornton. 33rds or 17ths will spell doom to all these guys.


Taj Burrow's Teahupo'o tube time. Pic Tim Jones.

Word from the end of the road is round one will run tomorrow, so stay tuned for our lethally accurate reporting and possibly some appalling scuttlebutt as ASL goes poisson cru crazy at the End of the Road over the next coupla weeks!

Click here for pre-event Chopes gallery.

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