Taj Burrow wins his 2nd 4 Star Breaka Burleigh Pro

|Flores gets disqualified for fighting local surfer|

Taj Burrow, has won yesterday night his second consecutive ASP 4 Star Breaka Burleigh Pro on the Gold Coast (Australia), holding on in bumpy waves and doing a good performance in 1m surf at Burleigh Heads.

Burleigh Heads is quite a special place, being one of the first WQS competitions of the year and close to the 1^st WCT stop, which will be in a few days. It could be seen as kind of a warm-up contest, for the best world tour pensionary surfers. Reason why each time, big name riders are engaged to this event to compete with the young guns, including Taj Burrow (AUS), Joel Parkinson (AUS), Pat Gudauskas (USA), Tiago Pires (PRT), Dusty Payne (USA), Jeremy Flores (FRA), or Julian Wilson (AUS) for example.

Burrow showed a full repertoire of moves during the entire event. The talented no. 1 seed surfer held on till the bitter ending, building his scores throughout the competition and closing on a 7.57 and 7.9 for a final two wave tally, scoring 15.47 in the end. Joel Parkinson did come up quite late, but even though getting close to Burrow, he „just“ scored the highest wave of the final with 8.23, but couldn’t rank 1st. For that he would have needed another 7.24 on an extra single wave, which he was unable to find in the last minutes. In the end he made the 1st place in his own heat and ranked 2nd on the overall competition.

“Great to win back-to-back here at Burleigh, Parko came hard at me near the end which made for a tight final and it’s always good to win a quality final like that. I certainly hope history can repeat and I follow up next week at the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast. I’ll take that for sure”, said Burrow afterwards about the contest.

“Burleigh’s an exciting wave, even small like today, its high performance and you can really surf these waves and score, it’s been another amazing event.”

After his injury from last year, Parkinson did a great comeback. He was satisfied with his result, but also disappointed not taking the win back home on the Burleigh Pro. No matter what, he showed us that he is definitely ready for the next season, which starts in the next weeks.

“It has been a great warm up for all of us but you know, when you’re in a final with guys like Taj and Bede you really want to win and I was out there chasing the win, I needed a decent final ride and it didn’t happen but all up, a great event, Taj was always going to be the man to beat in conditions like that” said Parkinson.

Bede Durbidge ranked 3^rd place and overall we can say after this event, that all surfers look pretty well prepared for the opening event of the ASP season 2011 next week, which will be the Quiksilver Pro.

Breaka Burleigh Pro Final Results:

1 – Taj Burrow (AUS) 15.47

2 – Joel Parkinson (AUS) 12.96

3 – Bede Durbidge (AUS) 12.20

4 – Jayke Sharpe (AUS) 11.73

Breaka Burleigh Pro Semifinal Results:

Heat 1: Taj Burrow 1, Jayke Sharpe 2, Tiago Pires,  3, Jay Thompson 4

Heat 2: Joel Parkinson 1, Bede Durbidge 2, Thomas Woods 3, Julian Wilson 4

Despite of the actual event, we have seen some trouble outside the competition too:

Jeremy Flores and Sunny Garcia have been disqualified from the contest before the quarterfinals, after being involved in a fight with a local surfer. « Sunny Garcia (USA), rushed into the water grabbed the local surfer in a headlock and repeatedly punched him on the head » said a witness on the contest site.

Quite an entertainment, but still though the ASP did right on disqualifying the two surfers. There cannot be any acceptance for this kind of happenings in sport.

| Breaka Burleigh Pro |