For the first time since 1998, the world tour had two wild cards in the finals. Manoa Drollet, a local surfer from Tahiti and Bruno Santos from Brazil. As I have said in my previous entry, Bruno took out defending world champion Mick Fanning in round 3. But the on fire Brazilian upsetting the big guns did not stop there. In round 3 he faced another top seeded surfer in Taj Burrow and you guessed it, he sent him packing too.

Manoa, the other wild card, did the top seeds no favor either. He ended 8x world champion Kelly Slater's hope of winning all 3 events this year. He took down Kelly and is out in the 3rd round just like Fanning. He then ousted the in-form Adrian Buchan and got rid of the "lucky" Joel Parkinson in the Semi Finals.

This event wasn't short of controversy too. Kelly Slater was handed an interference after he tried to pull off, what some would say one of Kelly's "tricks". Usually the other surfers get bitten on the ass by Kelly's tricks and mind games but this time his "tricks" bit his own ass. It backfired and blew up in his face. Another was Joel Parkinson. He was getting smoked in his heat against Tiago Pires but "lucky" for him, the rookie didn't see or know that the wave priority had changed and was handed an interference because he went on a wave that he thought belonged to him and thought that Parko was supposed to back off, wrong!

Bruno Santos won the event over Manoa Drollet in a not so great finals due to declining swells. It was still a good event. Lots of drama. Lots of great surfing. And did I mention that I moved up in the fantasy surfing standings? Prior to this event I was ranked 315 out of 17624. Now I'm tied for 6Th in the "Men's" standings not the overall.

Up next, the Globe Pro in FIJI with the waiting period starting on 05/23/2008 and ends on 06/06/2008. For those who missed the event and want to see the heats, see the scores or see the highlights, you can get it here.

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