Kelly Slater

So you're sort of judging this creativity, right?

How they use the wave.

But there's also a huge luck factor in surfing.

Like the right wave could come at the right time that's way better than all the other waves.

Yeah.

And so the idea behind judging surfing is you're trying to imagine what is the outermost limit of what can be done on a wave.

What's the most high difficulty and whatever.

Not necessarily, because the wave doesn't always ask for the most difficult thing.

You know, sometimes it's just a nice brushstroke.

You know, it's just a nice turn at the right speed.

It doesn't have to be.

the crazy fastest thing in the world.

You know, sometimes depending on the pace of a wave, it might want you to go slow or fast or do something radical or something that's much more subtle.

But it's the control with which you do it.

It's the, you know, the efficiency of body movement, all these sort of things.

But I don't... I guess the best way to kind of go about learning about judging maybe would be watching gymnastics, like a floor exercise.

Because...

the commentators talk you through it so, oh, you can see how they just stepped when they landed there.

Or they flared their arm at a certain place in a high dive.

Or in these different sports that are judged, high-level people can point out the small little things that detract from what the scoring would be.