Surfers

Summers is here, there's no better time to brush up on your surf jargon! Don't worry if your just a city slicker and try hard surfer girl trying to play it cool on the coast just at over Christmas. We have the inside word on what those expressions mean, which will have you fitting in with the locals in no time at all....

Here's what surfers really mean when they say...


Offshore - wind blowing from the land (literally 'off the shore'), which smoothes the faces of the waves and makes them more likely to barrel.

Onshore - wind blowing from the sea ('on to the shore'), which makes the waves messy and more difficult to ride.

Barrel/tube - the hollow part inside a breaking wave; getting barrelled is the ultimate experience in surfing; barrels are also called kegs or shacks.

Reef break - surf spot where the waves break over rocks or coral; usually more powerful and predictable than beach breaks.

Beach break (beachie) - surf spot where waves break over sand; less predictable than other kinds of surf spots because the sand shifts, changing the shape of the waves.

Point break - surf spot where waves wrap around a headland or breakwall; generally easier to ride because you can paddle out around (instead of through) the breaking waves.

Righthanders (rights) - waves that let you ride towards the right as you're looking at the beach (vice versa for lefthanders or lefts).

Steamer - winter wetsuit with long arms and long legs.

Spring suit - summer wetsuit with short arms and short legs.

Longboard/mal/malibu - traditional-style surfboards usually longer than 7 feet (surfboards are always measured in feet not metres) more suited to nose-riding and cruisey turns.

Shortboard - smaller surfboards with pointy noses, more manoeuvrable than longboards, allowing more radical surfing.

Bodyboard - generic term for Boogieboard. Also called lids (short for esky lids), shark biscuits, boogers and gut-sliders.

Heavy locals - unfriendly surfers who always surf a particular break and make it difficult for non-locals to catch waves. Sometimes their attitude extends to the beach, where they let your car tyres down or rub surfboard wax all over your windscreen to deter you from ever surfing there again.

Read on for our Feature Article on Surf Culture and Australia's pursuit of Glory
Behind the silver
by Rochelle Mutton

Olympic kayak high performance manager Noel Harrod tells Rochelle Mutton of filthy weather, surf culture and Australia's pursuit of glory.

What sort of feeling are you left with after the Australian Olympic kayak performance?

I think we're a little bit disappointed. We believe we could have done better. However, that said, two medals is pretty significant. A lot of sports don't get any. It is the best home country result since Moscow in 1980. Other countries have gone in with world champions - Spain went in with four world champions to Barcelona but only came out with one bronze medal.

The Polish team, which is supposedly ranked in the top four with us, came away with two bronze medals. Of the 16 events in sprint and slalom canoeing, only two world champions from last year - the men's K4 (four-person kayak) from Hungary and the women's K4 from Germany - won the Olympic gold medal. All the other world champions didn't win. Quite a few of them, like David Ford in the K1 slalom, didn't even make the final. Martin Doktor (single kayak 500 and 1000 metres, Czech Republic) and Lutz Liwowski (single canoe 1000 metres, Germany) did not win medals - they're outstanding world champions.

Why don't the world champions win the medals?

The Olympic Games is not like a world championship and it's not like a time trial. It's not about time - it's about enormous pressure. It's no different to the ... under-10s grand final in soccer, or netball or rugby, if you just magnify it. Quite often a young kid will be scared in front of his mummy or daddy - scared to play in the big game. The same thing happens to an athlete except the rewards are gigantic and the downside is gigantic as well. They put ginormous extra pressure on themselves. The Olympic Games is just that - pressure. Just excesses of pressure.

Is it those who can survive in the psychological arena who win, as much as anything?

Yeah. What's the difference between the ones who won medals and the ones who didn't? Their abilities are slightly different but they were prepared the same. They were looked after. All of them were ready. Some of them, through experience, handle the mental pressure, and some don't - even through experience. Some of the ones who are young handle it well and some of them don't. They spend a lot of time with sports psychs but I don't think they can even tell you that either (why pressure affects athletes differently). The trouble is, you get this vicious little circle where a person is scared to fail but they will probably only fail because they are scared to. The athlete has to understand they control that circle and nobody else, so only they can break it. It really is that simple.

What is the next big event for Australian kayakers?

The Sprint World Championships next year are in Poland and that'll be a developmental year and they'll build towards Athens. Clearly the sprint/slalom nation teams are aimed at Olympic games. That's where Australians like to see it go. They like to see participation and development but they like to see people head towards the top. Our job is to make it an environment where athletes can achieve their dreams.

What preparations are you doing with the Australian canoe team for Athens 2004?

We have some retirements as well as some youngsters coming through. We had an under-23 team as well as an under-18 team. We'll be able to identify in the next year people we believe that will go to Athens and then try to work with them. You'd be surprised how many sports don't do that. They just prepare for the next World Championships or the next World Cup.

Those two guys of ours, Daniel Collins and Andrew Trim in the K2 (500 metre) you saw came second - silver medallists - they spent 12 years getting to that day. They are World Champions once, bronze medallists many times. But their whole life has been aimed at the 2000 Olympics because that's when they knew they would be their best. Now when they started doing it, they didn't know it was going to be Sydney.

On that day, they did everything. The reason they lost in the last 50 metres was they had nothing left. There's nobody in the world that can beat them at their best. Their time was unbelievably fast for a really bad day. If it was (in good conditions)... it would have been a world record. But the Hungarians were quicker. You saw arguably the greatest match-race in K2 500 race history, in those sort of conditions, which was unbelievable. They've worked all that time for one day and they came away with a silver medal.

What do they do with coming second, in those weather conditions, after 12 years of preparations?

They live with that now. We wanted gold, they wanted gold - but we know they did their very best and everything was right. If they both said: "No complaints, everything was perfect, our mental preparation was spot on but on the day, one crew just happened to be a little bit better than us" - that's what it comes down to. And now they walk away, they might start coaching, and they have to live with the fact that for 12 years they worked to that one point and got silver instead of gold. Other people see it as a great achievement and it is - it's magnificent.

The great thing about sport at this level is you can lose. That's what makes winning good. If you don't get off on the competition, you shouldn't be there. Not on the parties, not on the ceremonies, not on the drinking. Those two guys didn't have a drink that night - they went to the closing ceremony, had a cup of coffee and went to bed. The adrenaline of the silver medal and the closing ceremony was enough.

What is your main role on Olympic race day?

In slalom my main role is to do split timing and ensure results and protests and the technical sides are correct. In the sprint side of things, it's to ensure the athletes' accreditation is cleared to get their boats on the water. To ensure that the timing is done, to ensure there are no protests.

With the weather (on the last day) I was in the meetings all day convincing those idiots to ... let us race, because they wanted to stop it. At nine o'clock in the morning, I wanted to race. We told them "Don't wait till the afternoon, it'll swing to the south-west, it'll be unfair". When it's straight head-on, it's fair to everybody. When it comes from the side, it's only fair for three or four lanes.

The water got too rough at lunchtime and quite frankly half the paddlers said it was too much. They wanted to paddle too, but it gets too difficult at the start. The starting booths, they move up and down and they can damage the boat and therefore are not safe to the athlete. You can't have sport at the Olympic Games level if somebody's in danger of getting hurt - that's not what it's about!

Remember these are boats that fall over at a drop of a hat. For the canoes it was impossible. They could fall out, they could hurt themselves, they could bang the paddle on their heads - it sounds like minor things but that water is pretty rough and those gate mechanisms are very powerful. Falling out going down the course isn't a problem, it's only the start (booths). They're quite dangerous.

What gives you the drive to stay in the Olympic game?

Competition. I get off on the competition: the fact you can lose, the fact you lay it on the line, the fact you will resign if you don't achieve, the fact that you take it to the line all the time. Whether you're a coach, a manager, an athlete, you test yourself all the time. It's not about money in the end, but the ability to go head-to-head with the best in the world.

Noel Harrod has spent 2½ years as the Australian and Olympic high performance manager for kayak sprint and slalom programs. He moved from representative level water polo and rugby into international water polo coaching and managing. He still runs the National Water Polo League.

With the benefits of hindsight, what areas could the Australian kayakers have worked harder in?

You'll never be perfectly prepared for a home Olympics. We went to great lengths. We made sure all the tickets were out of the way, all the families were catered for - there were people in the stands looking after them. We tried to eliminate all the pressure, we allowed them to have as much time at home as they liked. With the sprint teams especially, we allowed the individual coaches to plan their programs instead of forcing them into a team environment. We got them the boats they wanted. We simulated exactly the same situation as last year in Milan, the World Championship. Physiologically they were prepared. Biomechanically they were prepared.

In the end, I think our ability to handle pressure is the major difference. We don't race enough, because we live on the other side of the world. We perhaps don't learn from our losses as quickly and don't absorb our mistakes and move onto the next one.

The ability of a person to turn up on the day, in their mind have their body nice and calm, keep their adrenaline down and lactate down, don't breath too fast or go too fast early, so their muscles are still functioning at the end ... that really is the trick. Coaches, managers and sports scientists can help, but in the end it comes down to the person and that's what's good about sport - you don't want robots.

It was reported that paddlers at the Sydney Olympics deliberately didn't finish first in their heats so they could race again in the semifinals. Is that a usual practice?

No, that's an unusual practice. I've heard people say that. It can be that in an Olympic games people prefer to go through a semifinal. That can happen because there are not enough races in an Olympic games. In the World Championships you can do 12 - 14 races in four days. A lot of them are used to that. In an Olympic games you can do two in five (days). I've personally never met an athlete who deliberately loses at this level. I've seen them fail to come fourth, so they can go through to the semi, but I wouldn't say they deliberately lost. If they could have won, they probably would have just taken it. People know if they're good enough to make finals - let's be frank. The ones who aren't sure, aren't the ones who let it go to fourth place!

Why is Australia a nation of kayakers that did not even qualify for canoeing at the Sydney Olympics?

We didn't have enough time - we needed four to six years. Two years ago we reestablished a program in Melbourne and we took the canoeists overseas. The program is aimed at Athens (2004) and they didn't qualify for the Olympics but we did take them and they did make semifinals at the World Championships - which is a quantum leap. But more importantly we did plant a seed of enthusiasm among them.

It is a very difficult discipline in sprint. In slalom I think we have a canoe culture. But in the sprint, which is one knee or one foot up, I think you'll find that there isn't a culture here yet, mainly because of surfing. Surfing is surf skis and that's where most of the kayakers have come from. Every male kayaker in the Olympics has done surf at some time.