WHAT’S BENEATH THE BRAZILIAN STORM?
Even if you think pro surfing and everything that goes with it is the spawn of Satan, you’d have to have a peculiar form of blindness to not notice the boys from Brazil—the so-called Brazilian Storm—have almost completely dominated the sport in the last year, following on from a period of near domination only broken by the back-to-back world titles of John John Florence. Almost unremarked in that dominance are long lasting relationships with some of surfing’s saltiest shaping gurus who have been plying their trade under the radar for years, decades even. That has led to a sly, almost secret advantage in equipment which the front-runners of the storm—Gabriel Medina, Italo Ferreira and Filipe Toledo—are using to fuel their dominance. It deserves a closer look. For its own sake and also to see if there is anything in it for the average Joe (spoiler: there is).
25-year-old Italo Ferreira comes from Baia Formosa (Bay of Gold), a small beachside town on the north-east coast of Brazil. He wasn’t yet a twinkle in his old man’s
