Bells Beach Pro 2012 Kelly Slater vs Mick Fanning Controversial Heat

Well at first I was just gonna leave this topic alone but two days after the fact I feel like I've got something to say.  When I first heard the controversy brewing I didn't know what to think. The highlight video looked to weigh pretty heavily in Slater's favor but I couldn't say for sure. Then I started poking my head in on some of the comment sections and those too again seemed all in favor of Slater walking with the victory. To top it all off Shea Lopez wrote a blog that was posted on Surfer Magazine's website which again leaned in favor of Slater.

When I got home that night I sat down in front of the computer with my pal Britt and we watched the heat on demand at live.ripcurl.com.  After it ended my first reaction was to call the police because Kelly Slater had been robbed in broad daylight!!!! But I managed to restrained myself and kept from taking to the web and voicing my angry opinion with every other Slater fan in the world.

It's a good thing too because I've settled down now and I've chatted with a couple folks and believe it or not after thinking it over and watching the heat again I'm gonna go with the judges on this one and say that they got it right.  Mick Fanning won that heat.

You might disagree with me and that's cool, I appreciate you opinion, but I'm the one writing the blog so hear me out.  I watched about 80% of the heats and through it all Mick was SHARP! Mick was the inform surfer of the event. He consistently posted 18 plus point heat scores leading to the final and had the 2nd, 4th, 5th, & 7th highest heat totals of the event. Both Mick's surfing and the judging of it were consistent from the first heat to the last. He surfed BELLS the way that BELLS has been surfed for 51 years, at high speed, on rail, with raw power and flow! That is what the judges were looking for and that's why he earned the scores he was given not only in the final but throughout the event in it's entirety.

Now I'm not trying to dog Kelly, he's the 11 time world champ (and after the fire this heat is going to light under his ass dare I say soon to be 12 time world champ), he is truly a freak. The full rotation air that he did without a grab was amazing!!! But.... a ten? Really? For one move? At one of the most iconic point breaks in the World? Nope, wrong score... and I think the judges new it right after they all locked the 10 in.  Josh Kerr did a similar aerial in an earlier round that wasn't as critical as Kelly's but it was pretty damn close. He then went on to back it up with two more turns and scored a high nine. To me that's more of a ten than Kelly's wave because he surfed the wave from start to finish.

I think one thing we often forget is that the judges job is to decide a heat winner and a heat loser, simple as that. So yes, they oversored one of Kelly's and underscored his next one, which was poor judging, but at the end of the day Mick won because he got two long waves and ripped the tops off of them.

So call it like you see it, sponsor favoritism, getting the local nod, under scored, over scored but from my angle it was perfect. One of the best heats ever! In this case the judges wanted to see power surfing on a pointbreak and Mick delivered the goods earning him the bell.

This is just one man's opinion on a topic that at the end of the day doesn't really matter at all.