After competing in the junior air games in France earlier in the year I decided to have a go at the main event in Tarifa, this was the first official stop of the Air Games format since the planned competition in Leucate did not have enough wind to take off.
Tarifa is of course famous for it's howling levante wind alternating with days of lighter poinente wind, the Jeep pro event has been running for a few years already and in the last years it has been one of the tour stops for the strapless freestyle, this year both events were running during the same week.
As I live in the south of Portugal to get to Tarifa by car is pretty easy, it's about a 4 hour drive from home, over the last couple of years it has become a place for me to visit and get a wind fix whenever we have a long period without wind at home, that also means I have the luxury of being able to decide when to go based on the forecast, this time however the comp dates were of course fixed and the weather forecast was not looking amazing leaving all the riders hoping that the summer thermic winds would at least give a few good hours each day.
As we were relying on the thermics the event organisers and judges called late morning skippers meetings and as the wind started to build made regular announcements so everything was ready to go as soon as the wind allowed, with a full set of heats to get through for Air Games and Strapless Freestyle no-one wanted to miss a moment of suitable wind conditions'.
As this was the first event of the season and the whole Air Games competition there was no official seeding, that met that all riders names went into the hat for the draw, mine was one of the first to be called, giving me a free pass to the second round of the single elimination which sounded pretty good to start with until the rest of the ladder took shape meaning that I would have to face Alex Pastor for my first heat.
On day two the thermic kicked in and although it was not too strong there was enough to get started, it was clear that although the riders knew the rules of the new format no one was really sure which tricks would be scoring higher and with the lighter winds there was a lot of discussion on the beach as to choice of tricks, was it better to go all out freestyle or just send it and try to get more height into tricks? The first few heats saw some of the favorites getting knocked out as riders that are ore known for massive loops were trying to adjust to the lighter conditions and many of the 'pure freestylers' were trying to get to grips with board offs.
I had an OK heat and was happy to land a big dangle pass, but unfortunately crashed a couple of other tricks so I was out and putting my hopes on there being enough wind to run double eliminations.
Over the following days the event organisers, judges and riders had several informal meetings on the beach to talk about the competition format and get riders feedback and suggestions so the criteria can be tweaked in coming events, it's clear that this new format is attractive to plenty of different riders but we can expect to see some different moves and tactics depending on the conditions, for now I'm quite excited to hopefully participate in another event sometime soon.
As the days ticked by it became clear that there probably would not be enough time to run double eliminations, the thermic winds were not staying strong enough or long enough to allow that, and actually the girls did not even start until the last day of competition, that's the nature of our sport, it would have been great to get a full double elimination run and especially in this event if could have changed the standings quite significantly, but now it's time to focus on the next events and a nice long summer break, I was still pretty stoked to end up in 17th place, I would have liked to have been a bit higher up but out of 40 riders including all the familiar names from the world tours I'm also not disappointed, and surely ready to train hard and aim for a higher spot next time.
