Joel Parkinson shows his class during Round 2 at Quiksilver Pro France
Packing his bags for Quiksilver Pro France, Australia’s Joel Parkinson was well aware of the fact that it was extremely crucial to make a solid impact at the latest elite tour event and in order to do that, he needed to get a good start.
The main event site of La Graviere in Hossegor, France, did not turn out to be very kind to the 31-year-old powerhouse on the opening day of the competition.
Finding himself pitted against his fellow countryperson Bede Durbidge and America’s Dane Reynolds, Parkinson found himself struggling to get his hands on a couple of good scores and despite all the determination, he just could not go all the way.
As a result, he finished behind Reynolds in second place and therefore found himself getting pushed into the relegation round along with his compatriot.
This is hardly the sort of start that the Australian surfer had planned on getting. Sitting at the No.2 spot on the 2012 Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Championship Tour rankings, he had as good a chance of reaching out at the coveted World
Title as anyone.
However, in order to get there, he needed to collect a good result at the seventh of ten stops on the latest version of the elite tour.
He may not have gotten an ideal start, but luck did not seem to have deserted him completely. As it turned out, he was pitted against Brazil’s Wiggolly Dantas, who had surrendered to Australia’s former two-time ASP World Champion Mick Fanning in the second
round, with the two surfers to kick-off the proceedings when the competition resumed at La Graviere on Tuesday, October 2.
Dantas is without any doubt a very talented surfer who had done really good to get himself a place in an elite tour event. However, he was up against an opponent who had taken done some of the best surfers in the world and was expected to be extremely ruthless
during their encounter.
As the opening heat of Round 2 got underway, Parkinson wasted absolutely no time to stamp his authority over his rival, putting the latter under immense pressure. The Australian surfer thrived in the barrelling conditions on offer, locking a juicy wave to
show-off his back-hand tricks to earn an 8.60 points for the effort.
Remaining energetic throughout the course of the battle, he went on to get his hands on another superb wave and this time put his fore-hand prowess on display. The effort earned 9.67 points, thus moving to a heat-total of 18.27 points.
“I was just looking for a couple corners, and a couple of waves that were like medium scores, so to find a couple of good ones and get good scores are unreal,” Parkinson conceded. “I only rode it (a broken board early in the heat) once before I broke it.
I just got slammed paddling out and it sort of had a buckle in it, and I knew as soon as I pulled into that first barrel that if I didn’t make it, the board was going to snap for sure. I jumped on a better one and it felt really good.”
Competing against one of the best in the business and finding himself staring at a heat-total of 18.27 points was not exactly the sort of situation that Dantas had hoped to find himself in. Succumbing to the pressure, he only managed to score a 1.43 and
1.23 off his best-two waves, thus finishing with a heat-total of 2.66 points.
The dismal performance by the Brazilian surfer allowed Parkinson to walk away with a comfortable win into the third round, where he was to face America’s Patrick Gudauskas for the Round 4 spot.
Parkinson sure proved himself as a force to be reckoned with, exhibiting a form during an elimination stage that proved him to be a class act.
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