CJ Hobgood loses to Julian Wilson in Round 3 of Billabong Rio Pro – Surfing News
Australia’s Julian Wilson put on a superb performance to take down America’s CJ Hobgood in the ninth heat of Billabong Rio Pro’s Round 3 that went down at the primary event site of Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Tuesday, May 15.
The outcome of the battle served to take Wilson into the fourth round of the latest stop on the 2012 Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Championship Tour, while bringing the competition to a premature end for Hobgood.
Returning to the powerful beach-break of Barra da Tijuca for the consecutive day, the world’s top surfers continued to battle it out for survival in the contention for the event title. Failure to collect victory in Round 3 meant elimination from the competition,
a fate that no surfers was ready to settle for after doing really well to hold their own in challenging surfing conditions during the previous rounds of the competition. The three-to-five foot barrels on offer on Tuesday promised plenty of entertainment as
the surfers had ample opportunity to cut loose and put on solid performances.
The ninth heat of Round 3 pitted Wilson against Hobgood in the battle for the Round 4 spot.
Wilson, the 2011 ASP World Rookie of the Year, had a lot of hype surrounding him this season due to the massive potential that he had show last year. However, he was up against the world’s best surfers and thus had his work cut out for him.
As the ninth heat of Round 3 got underway, the 23-year-old Wilson did not get off to a very convincing start, struggling to get hold of a juicy wave. After a lot of patience and perseverance, the Queensland-based surfer rode through a barrel to post a massive
9.07 on the score-board, thus moving into the lead. He soon backed it up with a 6.83-point ride to move to a heat-total of 15.90 points.
Hobgood had a tough task at hand, one that put both his experience and skills to test. Not a stranger to pressure, the American surfer had shown quite often that he was more than capable of rising to the occasion. However, things did not work out his way
during his latest heat. Struggling to find his rhythm during the course of the heat, he only managed to score a 3.17 and 5.77 off his best-two waves to finish with a heat-total of 8.94 points. The lacklustre performance by the America-based surfer resulted
in a comprehensive victory for Wilson.
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