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The five most spectacular surfing wipeouts of past year
Author: GrindTV.com
The annual Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards also honors surfers in performance categories such as Ride of the Year, which are more prestigious and rewarding for the athletes. But the wipeouts generally are more fun to watch, and to be named winner of this category, at an awards ceremony each spring, is to be presented with sort of a badge of honor.
After all, these are ferocious thrashings, and how the world's premier big-wave surfers are able to withstand them is testament to their training, ability and knowledge of wave dynamics.
So who will be named wipeout king this year?
Australian Mark Mathews bravely accepted his fate on this Tasmanian monster, riding out the hopeless situation to the end. To see what happened watch the video. Frame-grab from Tim Bonython.
Brazilians Felipe Cesarano and Rodrigo Koxa should be regarded as favorites, based on the absurd thickness of the waves at Teahupoo (in Tahiti) last Aug. 27, when several lesser-known surfers were left scraped and bruised. But from the non-Teahupoo wipeouts, Danny Griffith appears to have endured the worst after spinning out on a sucking ledge at the bottom of a wave that literally exploded atop the surfer last Oct. 26 at Shipstern Bluff in Tasmania.
However, Garrett McNamara skipping down the towering face of Jaws, Maui, has merit. So does footage of Mark Mathews tucking into a collapsing tube at a spot called The Right in Western Australia. It'll be up to judges and surf media to vote on a winner, who will be thoroughly ridiculed, but also congratulated, during the May 4 ceremony.
New York's Balaram Stack and Southern California's Chase Wilson just returned from an ice-capade in Tofino, Canada, where they got to experience a much more rugged approach to wave-hunting than their local parking lot surf checks.
Tofino is the epicenter of Canadian surf stoke and the Bruhwiler brothers are masters of the wild domain. For all the tide-swings and brutal weather there are also a handful of world-class waves if you have a boat and the years of experience that the..