Everyone loves a beach vacation, right? And while for some it’s all about lying back with a cold cocktail and good book, others like to take a more… active approach.
One such person is certified Brazilian hellman Rodrigo Koxa who earlier this year was inducted into the Guinness Book of Records for an 80-foot wave he rode off the coast of Portugal in late 2017. On November 8th, as an unprecedented and massive swell started pounding the cliffs at Nazare, Koxa climbed into his wetsuit, motored out into the most alien environment on Earth with his waveski driver Sergio Cosme and hurled himself down the face of a moving mountain.
data-param-cid="62cec241-7d09-4462-afc2-f72f8d8ef40a"
data-player-id="44f947fb-a5ce-41f1-a4fc-78dcf31c262a"
data-playlist-id=cce06289-75b9-40f5-8676-50e517ab7eb5
data-elements-player="true"
layout="responsive"
width="16"
height="9"
>
And while Koxa’s achievements have been suitably lauded and rewarded (indeed, as such reward could ever be given for such a bravado act) with a place in the record books and as winner of the World Surf League’s 2018 Big Wave Awards, it’s only on seeing footage of his extraordinary feat that any normal (sane) person could begin to appreciate it.
Which is why this footage that reemerged online last week and has spread like wildfire with more than 100 million combined views to date is such an eye-opener. Shot from an unusual head-on angle, it’s likely to give anyone watching a distinctly uneasy feeling (or for many, a sense of sheer terror) as we watch the mountain crumble behind him while the surfer, a tiny figure skimming along the wave face who gives a great sense of scale, races for the safety of the shoulder.
The big problem with this footage, however, is that it’s not Rodrigo Koxa and it’s not the wave that broke the records. Below is the footage that went viral last week, properly sourced from the World Surf League and with the correct credits. Undeniably eye watering and extraordinary, it is in fact German surfer Sebastian Steudtner, still surfing Nazare, from a completely different session on January 18, 2018.
So what, you may think? But consider the implications for a sport high in costs (not just physical but financial) where sponsorship is the only real way to stay afloat (forgive the pun) and going viral is the kind of thing that can secure your funding and sponsorship for an entire season. Especially on this scale.
It’s a tough one for both surfers. Steudtner misses out on the kind acknowledgement only hundreds of millions of online views can garner, while Koxa’s notoriety now comes from a wave he didn’t even surf. But while both surfers have tried desperately to clarify the situation with posts on their own social media pages, requests to the major news outlets to correct their credits for the wave have fallen largely on deaf ears.
And sadly, neither surfer has the social klout to match the kind of people sharing the video – famous Jackass Steve-O, for example, has 21 million views of the post he shared, tagging Koxa as the surfer in question. He has since updated to credit Steudtner, with that video now hitting two million views at time of writing (a 19 million viewer discrepancy)!
Speaking to Magicseaweed, Steudtner was philosophical if frustrated by his stolen thunder, “We work hard to surf and put ourselves in the biggest waves of all time. It’s what I do. I’m trying to smile about this situation but it’s making me a bit angry, you know? All that time spent to be in the right place, all that time training. I think there’s something fundamentally wrong here and this wouldn’t happen in any other sport. You perform and you’re supposed to get rewarded for it.
“Imagine Usain Bolt running the 100 meters, breaking the world record. Then a few months later a video comes up of a Russian sprinter and the tagline ‘it’s Usain Bolt’. It just doesn’t happen.”
For good measure, here’s Koxa’s actual record-breaking wave:
The moral? Check and double check what you read and watch online is right – and don’t just take one source as a guarantee. Personally, I’d liked the video and images several times across social media channels and it was only when I decided to write about it that I realised the mistake – but even then it took some real research to get to the truth of it thanks to the prevalence of social media. And that only spurred me to explain what happened and learn my own lesson.
One thing is for certain though. If you travel to Nazare and are lucky enough to coincide with one of these giant swells, it won’t matter to you who it is riding the waves, what their motivation is or what the financial outcome may be because you’ll be so mesmerised, terrified, humbled and confused just trying to figure out how on Earth they can take on such monsters and emerge (mostly) unscathed.
Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.