Heitor Alves downs Jeremy Flores to move into Round 4 at Volcom Fiji Pro – Surfing News
Heitor Alves from Brazil got the better of France’s Jeremy Flores in the eighth heat of Round 3 at Volcom Fiji Pro, the fourth of ten stops on the 2012 Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Championship Tour, which went down at the alternate event
site of Restaurants in Tavarua, Fiji, on Saturday, June 9.
The success in the Round 3 heat served to carry Alves into the fourth round, while bringing the latest stop on the elite tour to a premature end for Flores in the process.
After the arrival of the highly-anticipated massive, long-period swell at Cloudbreak on Friday, only the final-two heats of Round 2 were able to take place after the event organisers had to call off the contest for the day due to disorganised swell. With
little improvement in the conditions on Saturday, the event organisers were compelled to the alternative venue of Restaurants for the third round and quite possibly fourth round.
The draining four-to-six foot waves breaking at Restaurants promised a heavy dose of enthralling action throughout the course of the day. The pressure of elimination was bound to bring out the best in the elite surfers as they battled it out for survival
in the contention for the event title.
The eighth heat of Round 3 pitted Alves against Flores in a man-on-man battle for the Round 4 spot, with both the surfers aware of the fact that a failure to clinch victory meant elimination from the competition.
As the battle got underway, Alves got off to an energetic start. Locking his first business-wave in the opening minutes of the heat, the Brazilian sensation unloaded a flurry of quick turns to post a 6.67 on the score-board. He kept going through wave after
wave, searching for another potent opportunity to collect a good score. The persistence eventually paid off as he got his hands on a juicy wave in the final minutes of the heat, which he utilised to add an additional 7.23 points to his account, reaching a
heat-total of 13.90 points as a result.
Flores struggled to find his rhythm throughout the course of the battle and 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 10.87 points. The lacklustre effort resulted in a comfortable
victory of Alves.
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