Mark Richards (born March 7, 1957, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia) is an Australian surfer who was a four-time world champion (1979–82) and the first professional surfer to win multiple world titles.
Richards was taken to the beach by his sun-loving parents at an early age and was riding a scaled-down surfboard at age six. By the 1970s he had emerged as one of the best junior surfers in Australia, making the Australian team for the world amateur championship in San Diego in 1972. Although he made little impact in California, the trip honed his skills, and the teenager was immediately seen as an emerging threat to the established surfing stars.
Although a full world pro tour began in 1976, Richards elected to stay home and build up his new surfboard-shaping business rather than spend the entire year traveling. The many victories he accumulated outside the tour did not count in competition for the world title. In 1978 he debuted a new take on the twin-finned surfboard of his own design that was perfect for the gliding, swooping turns that made him famous and that was key to the four straight world titles he won beginning that year.
After his championship run, Richards again left the tour (he had long suffered from back problems) and competed only selectively—mostly in Hawaii—through the 1980s. At the turn of 21st century, he returned to the pro tour in the Masters ranks, winning an age-division world title in 2001 at age 44. Although other surfers would take multiple titles through the 1980s, no one approached his achievements until the emergence of Kelly Slater in the mid-1990s.
Maya GabeiraBrazilian surfer Maya Gabeira competing during the second round of the Billabong Rio Pro competition at Barra da Tijuca beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 12, 2011.
surfing, sport of riding breaking waves toward the shore, especially by means of a surfboard.
History
Surfing’s roots lie in premodern Hawaii and Polynesia, where the sport was practiced by both men and women from all social strata from royalty to commoners. Early European explorers and travelers praised the skills of Hawaiian surfers, but 19th-century missionaries assigned to the islands disapproved of the “constant intermingling, without any restraint, of persons of both sexes” and banned the pastime. Surfing was practiced only sporadically in Hawaii by the end of the 19th century.
In the early 20th century, however, concomitant with the development of Hawaii as a tourist destination, surfing underwent a revival, and the sport quickly spread to California and Australia. Key to this diffusion were the American writer Jack London and the Hawaiian surfers George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku. After visiting Waikiki, London published several accounts of surfing in popular American magazines; in 1907 the American industrialist Henry Huntington hired Freeth, whom he billed as the “man who can walk on water,” to help promote his new railway line to Redondo Beach. Surfing thus took hold in California. A few years later, after Kahanamoku won the 100-meter freestyle event at the 1912 Olympic games, swimming officials from New South Wales invited him to Australia to demonstrate his swimming and surfing styles. In 1914 and 1915 Kahanamoku thrilled crowds in Sydney with his wave-riding skills, thus helping to establish the sport in Australia as well.
Early board design impeded the development of surfing. The typical surfboard ridden by Kahanamoku’s generation was solid wood, was 8–10 feet (2–3 meters) long, 24 inches (61 cm) wide, and 3 inches (8 cm) thick, and weighed 100 pounds (45 kg). Rudimentary designs and a lack of fins made the boards extremely difficult to maneuver. Most surfers simply pointed their craft shoreward and made no attempt at steering.
In the 1930s American surfer Tom Blake attached plywood over crossbeams to produce a “hollow” board. He also added a fin under the tail, which enabled surfers to better steer their craft. Blake’s primary aim was not to produce a more maneuverable wave-riding board; he wanted a faster board to compete in the then-popular paddling races. Nevertheless, Blake’s lighter board, which weighed between 60 and 70 pounds (27 and 32 kg), proved much easier to ride in surf. New materials such as balsa wood, fiberglass, and polyurethane further revolutionized board design and manufacture in the 1940s, producing still more maneuverable wave-riding craft. Called “malibus,” for the California beach on which they were introduced, and weighing a mere 20 pounds (9 kg), these boards allowed surfers to “trim” (adjust their position and weight on the board to allow it to travel at the same speed as the breaking wave), “stall” (slow the board to allow the breaking wave to “catch up”), and change direction on the walls of breaking waves.
Contemporary surfboards are still made from polyurethane and fiberglass. However, they are shorter (6–6.5 feet long [1.8–2 meters]), narrower (17–19 inches [43–48 cm]), thinner (2 inches [5 cm]), and very light (5–6 pounds [2.3–2.7 kg]). Carefully shaped rails (edges of the board), noses, and tails, together with three fins, allow riders to move their craft freely around the wave and have transformed surfing into a gymnastic dance. Today the wave is the apparatus upon which surfers perform spectacular maneuvers such as “tailslides” (withdrawing the fins from the wave and allowing the board to slip down the face of the wave), “floaters” (“floating” the board along the top of a breaking wave), “reverses” (rapid changes of direction), 360s (turning the board through 360 degrees on the face of the wave), and “airs” (flying above the face of the wave).
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Because they were lightweight, easy to transport, and easy to ride, malibus popularized surfing and sparked a unique, hedonistic subculture. This subculture originated in Southern California but spread around the world, from South Africa to Australia, by surf-film cinematographers, surf magazines, and the travels of the peripatetic California surfers. By the late 1960s a distinctly Australian way of surfing had emerged; based on more aggressive maneuvers performed on shorter boards, it quickly dominated and influenced the global surf culture.
At the heart of this worldwide culture, which was loosely based on free-spirited beatnik philosophies of the 1950s, was the “surfari”—a wanderlust trip in search of perfect waves. This culture was reinforced by its own unique language: “like wow,” “daddy-o,” “strictly squaresville,” “dude.” “Surf’s up!” meant the surf was high enough to ride; “Wipe out!” meant to fall off the board; and “Hang 10” meant surfing with all 10 toes over the nose of the board. There was also a “dress code” (T-shirts, striped Pendleton shirts, narrow white Levi’s jeans, Ray-Ban sunglasses) and de rigueur bleached-blond hair and goatee. This surfing culture was predominantly male-oriented, with long-haired women in bikinis serving mostly as admirers on the periphery.
The culture rapidly diffused into the mass consciousness of the baby-boomer generation, assisted by Hollywood surf films (romantic beach musicals and comedies: Gidget [1959], Ride the Wild Surf [1964]), surf music (a thundering guitar-based sound played as single-note riffs: Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” [1962], the Chantays’ “Pipeline” [1962], the Astronauts’ “Baja” [1963]), “pure” surf films (“travelogs,” with footage of surfers riding waves: The Big Surf [1957], Slippery When Wet [1958], Surf Trek to Hawaii [1961], The Endless Summer [1964]), and specialized surfing magazines (Surfer, Surfing, Surfing World). The nonconformism of surfers did not endear them to the public, and social commentators branded these youths as itinerants, nomads, and wanderers and characterized surfing as an indolent, wasteful, selfish, and institutionally unanchored pastime.
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