John John Florence defeats Julian Wilson to secure place in Billabong Rio Pro Semi-finals
Hawaii’s John John Florence successfully advanced into the Semi-finals at Billabong Rio Pro after getting the better of Australia’s Julian Wilson in the third Quarter-final that went down at the primary event site of Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
on Wednesday, May 16.
The man-on-man bout between the two blossoming surfing sensations did not turn out to be as intense as expected and featured a pretty one-sided show with Florence completely stealing the show with his superior performance.
The third of ten stops on the 2012 Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Title Series had been running in tough surfing conditions, pushing the surfing heavy-weights to their limits during their search for a couple of good wave-scores in the battles.
The three-to-four foot barrels gracing Barra da Tijuca on the final day of the competition hardly qualified as ideal conditions, but still promised a heavy dose of enthralling action.
The third Quarter-final placed Florence against Wilson in a man-on-man battle for the Semi-final spot. Both the surfers had done exceptionally well to keep themselves under spotlight despite being surrounded by the likes of Taj Burrow, Mick Fanning and Joel
Parkinson. The competition field was an intimidating one, but the two surfers had held their own and risen to the occasion quite adeptly.
As the third Quarter-final got underway, the 19-year-old Florence got off to an excellent start. Taking very little time to adjust to the conditions, the Hawaiian surfer locked his first business-wave to unload a series of exquisite manoeuvres, posting a
7.27 on the score-board in the process. He kept the momentum going to soon add an additional 7.67 points to his account, thus reaching a heat-total of 14.94 points.
Wilson did not look too comfortable in the barrelling conditions on offer. He remained quite busy throughout the course of the heat, catching a handful of waves, but only managed to collect a couple of scores in the four-point range off his best-two waves
to finish with a heat-total of 9.43 points. The effort proved inadequate, thus forcing him to surrender an easy win to Florence and sending him through into the next stage of the competition.
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