Alejo Muniz down Australian surfing icons to reach Billabong Rio Pro Quarter-finals
Brazil’s Alejo Muniz managed to overcome a formidable competition in the second round of Billabong Rio Pro’s Round 4 that went down at the beach-break of Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Tuesday, May 15.
The success in Round 4 served to take Muniz directly into the Quarter-finals. Australia’s Mick Fanning and his fellow countryperson Joel Parkinson finished in third and fourth place respectively, consequently getting relegated to the fifth round.
The third of ten stops on the 2012 Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Title Series continued to run in challenging surfing conditions at the primary event site. The world’s best surfers had to push themselves really hard to get their hands
on a couple of decent scores. The three-to-five foot barrels on offer on Tuesday gave plenty of potential scoring opportunities to the surfers, but the windy and rainy conditions prevented the surfers from really letting loose.
The second heat of Round 4 saw Muniz take on Fanning and Parkinson in a three-man non-elimination bout for the Quarter-final spot.
As the battle got underway, the 22-year-old Muniz utilised his local knowledge of the waves to get hold of a juicy barrel halfway through the heat and utilised it to post an impressive 7.27 on the score-board. Backing it up with a 4.63-point ride, the young
Brazilian got to a heat-total of 11.90 points, which held up until the end to seal the fate of the bout in his favour.
“My heats are always like that, where someone is always getting a score at the end to get through,” Muniz said. “I’m just happy. Mick [Fanning] and Joel [Parkinson] are two of my favorite surfers. I knew there were a couple of lefts and for some reason my
board didn’t feel good on the rights, but on the lefts, it felt good.”
Fanning, former two-time ASP World Champion, put up a determined effort to try and collect a couple of two good scores, but only managed to score a 6.93 and 4.50 off his best-two waves to finish with a heat-total of 11.43 points.
Parkinson was another Australian surfing icon who ended up succumbing to Muniz in the second heat of Round 4. The 31-year-old sensation only managed to collect a couple of scores in the five-point range off his best-two waves to finish with a heat-total
of 10.73 points.
Both Fanning and Parkinson still had an opportunity to make it into the Quarter-finals stage by clinching a win in their Round 5 heats.
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