What happened to Stand-Up Bodyboarding?

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What happened to Stand-Up Bodyboarding?

Stand-Up Bodyboarding

PHOTOGRAPHY HANK PHOTO

First of all, did you know stand-up bodyboarding existed? Haven’t you ever seen a surfer riding on top of his bodyboard? Well, if you haven’t seen it yet it’s because many bodyboarders fighted to abolish this kind of bodyboarding style saying that it wasn’t bodyboarding, it was surfing, and therefore Judges couldn’t or didn’t know how to score the tricks of the stand-up bodyboarders during competitions.

I found a great article with amazing and astonishing pictures of Stand-Up Bodyboarding that explains us why it is a forgotten surfing art. Stab Magazine has made an incredible effort to explain what happened here. But the truth is that it was the own bodyboarding community the ones that decided to abolish stand-up bodyboarding.

 

Former boyboarder PRO Chris Taloa says the exact moment in which Stand-Up bodyboarding experienced it’s early death was in Brazil 1996 where Prone, Drop-Knee and Stand-Up bodyboarders all competed under the same rules. Judges fought against each other as there was a bodyboarding civil war. On one hand there were the bodyboarders who wanted to take the sport to another level, respecting the 3 different styles named before and on the other hand, the other bodyboarders who were really proud of bodyboarding itself as a different sport from Surfing and therefore the ones that didn’t like standing-up and wanted to erase it. 

According to Chris Taloa’s own words and thanks to Stab Magazine we hear that he said: “In my first heat (at the World Games), I’d take off backside and do four huge roundhouse snaps into a full backside reverse 360, and I didn’t hear my scores,” Chris says. “(The judges) didn’t get it. But we had a Hawaiian judge, who was actually from Brazil, and he understood everything they were saying. He came and told me that they took my score sheets and had a huge fight about it in the judges tent. A couple of the international judges were like ‘F… you, that guy is ripping,’ and the other ones were like ‘F… you, that’s not bodyboarding.”

Nevertheless, Stand-Up bodyboarding has been extinguished from Serious competitions, but their founders in Hawaii keep on with their bodyboarding stand-up tradition, especially for one main reason: A bodyboard costs much less than a surfboard (100 dollars vs 400 dollars for a minimum quality bodyboard and surfboard, respectively). Do you think you have the skills to stand up both in a surfboard and a bodyboard? Come and try our Bodyboarding lessons in Tenerife.

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