Women's Final Five Dreams Comes Down to the Magic of Cloudbreak
Heading into the Fiji Pro at Cloudbreak, the women’s race for the Final Five is considerably more buttoned up than the men’s. Americans Caity Simmers and gold medalist Caroline Marks have a firm hold on the top two spots on the leaderboard, while Costa Rica’s Brisa Hennessy also appears to be relatively well entrenched at third, especially given how much time she spends surfing in Fiji year in and year out.
Crunching the numbers, there are really only two contenders capable of kicking down the door to the top five, Olympic bronze medallist Johanne Defay, currently sitting in sixth, and Olympic silver medallist Tatiana Weston Webb, currently in seventh. This pair of Championship Tour veterans will be looking two unseat a couple of groms in Hawaiian Gabriela Bryan, ranked fifth, and Aussie Molly Picklum, in fourth.
Tati is likely looking at a final finish to get the better of Gabriela and force her way into the top five. She was a runner-up at this event in its last iteration in 2017 and shocked the world with the greatest tube ride ever seen in a women’s event this year at the Tahiti Pro. Her frontside rail and tube-riding game is as good as it gets in long-period lefts and a win or runner-up is very much in the cards.
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On the back of a gutsy bronze medal winning performance in Tahiti, in which she surfed the entirety of the event with four stitches in her head after head butting coral in her opening heat, Johanne, will be counting on a decade’s worth of World Tour experience to get the job done against her inexperienced opponents. A final finish will also lock her spot for Trestles though anything less than a semi will leave her destiny in her rivals hands.
Gabriela was raised on heaving Hawaiian slabs and knows her way around big tubes and lead-footed carves. The 22-year-old just needs to finish ahead of Tati and Johanne to lock in her spot at the WSL Finals. She has the form—a first, second and third in her last four starts—to do it.
Molly, on the other hand, must arrest a steady decline in form that’s dogged her since she blew minds during the Hawaiian leg. She has a 2,000 point buffer over the sixth placed Johanne, and 4,000 points over Tati, both of whom she simply needs to finish ahead of to guarantee her spot.
Then there’s Brisa, who has done more laps of the Cloudbreak lineup than any surfer on tour and can punch her ticket to the WSL Finals with a semifinal finish.
Reigning world champ and Olympic gold medallist, Caroline Marks, proved she’s got more than just a blistering backhand with a clinic in frontside carves and cones in the Olympics at Tahiti. A quarterfinal finish will be enough to lock her spot. While 18 year old wunderkind, Caity Simmers, is already on her way to contest a world title at Trestles.
With surf in the forecast and plenty of energy in the water after what we just saw at the Olympics in Tahiti, the women’s Final Five race comes down to this, a tuberiding shootout at Cloudbreak.
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