By Roy M. Wallack
The customers at Wave House on San Diego’s Mission Beach sit at the bar and at tables, ordering drinks and food, just as they would at any other beachfront hotspot. Then they turn to watch the entertainment 15 feet away—and it ain’t no rock band. It’s acrobatic men and women in board shorts and bikinis backflipping and spinning in the air, riding a 3-inch, 25-mph wave of water up and down a ten-foot barrel and launching into trick after jaw-dropping trick. It looks like surfing, skateboarding, wakeboarding, skimboarding, and snowboarding all at once. It’s one of the world’s hottest new boardsports and one of the most anticipated competitions at the Alt Games: College Flowboarding Championships.
The sport of flowboarding, contested at Wave House from 8:30 a.m to 9 p.m. on Saturday, is plied on artificial waves created by powerful pumps of the FlowRider sheet wave machine. The machine and the sport were born 14 years ago when inventor Tom Lochtefeld set up his first machine at the Schlitterbahn Water Park in New Braunfels, Texas. Although there are no true professional riders, there is a 20-event summer Flow Tour that culminates at Wave House Summer Flow Tour National Championships in September in San Diego. There are 80 venues with FlowRiders in operation around the world, all made by Lochtefeld’s company, La Jolla-based Wave Loch.
In 2000, a FlowRider opened in Durban, South Africa, where it was an immediate hit. “It had two giant waves. The minute it opened, I was there,” says Greg Lazarus, then a local 18-year-old surfer and now one of the best flowriders in the world, the “Wave Ambassador” at the San Diego Wave House, and the Alt Games flowboard competition director. “It’s a totally different feel than surfing. Back foot rather than front foot, and way more tricks. Incredibly fun and creative. Great for TV.”
A flowboard, which costs from $100 to $400, resembles a combination surfboard and snowboard; 38 to 43 inches long, 11 to 14 inches wide, concave on the bottom, with a nose and tail rocker. There are strap-on boards and strapless boards, designed for different types of tricks. Various flips and backflips done on the flat part of the wave are done with both feet strapped into the board. Tricks done on the barrel, such as skateboard-style airborne hand-grabs, require strapless boards. Falls are common, but injuries aren’t, aside from occasional broken ankle, because the soft, wrestling-mat texture of the Flow Rider flooring is relatively forgiving. The sport isn’t as easy on your wallet. The Wave House charges $40 an hour for wave time, although it often discounts to $20 per hour and offers a month pass for $60.
For the Alt Games, Lazarus is planning on hosting roughly 60 competitors from a dozen teams, including San Diego-area and Southern California schools such as University of San Diego, San Diego State, Point Loma College, Mesa College, the Art Institute of San Diego, USC, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara. Teams from Universities of Georgia, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and Madison Technical College are also expected.
Competitors get runs of 45 seconds each to impress a panel of judges, which award scores of 0 to 10 based on factors such as difficulty of tricks, execution, variety, and program flow. Flowboarders can generally pull off five or six tricks within the time limit, says Lazarus.
As for favorites to watch for, the South African throws up his hands. “This will be interesting,” he says. “The best of the best are out of college now, so there’s a lot of newcomers here.” Pressed, Lazarus mentions two Art Institute of San Diego students: Brandon Stevens and Tyler McIntyre.
Stevens, a 20-year-old graphic design major who started flowboarding 18 months ago, has an unusual background for a top competitor. “I was a BMX rider before this—not a surfer or snowboarder,” says Stevens. “So it took me longer to learn it. But I have a big advantage: I work at Wave House and get all the free wave time I want. And I have a barrel here.”
A Flow Barrel—a simulated 10-foot wave—is actually a rarity in Wave Boarding. Out of 60 domestic facilities, only two—the San Diego and Texas venues—have them. “There’s lots of flow riders in the U.S., but hardly any have a chance at the barrel,” says Stevens. “They spend all there time on the flat wave and have to learn fast when they get here. Take the UCSB guys last year; they tried to practice, but ran out of time.”
Stevens hopes to blitz his undertrained rivals and dazzle the judges with inverted backflips, rodeo flips, skateboard-like kick flips, and his signature move: The Board Transfer, in which he launches off the barrel from one board and does a backflip onto another board that he was formerly carrying under his arm. That was enough to earn him a 3rd place at a contest in early April, behind old pro Lazarus and a high school kid. His major expected Alt Games rival, McIntyre, made it as far as the semis.
“I didn’t have a good day,” says the 24-year-old Art Institute culinary major, who hopes to work as a chef after he graduates in two years. “But I’ll be back.” With a frighteningly deep record in the sport — he was the 2005 and 2006 flowboarding national champion, and took 2nd and 6th at the 2007 and 2008 collegiate championships, respectively— McIntyre is a man to be reckoned with. Stocked with a quiver of 360, 540, and 720 spins, plus his blockbuster Whirlybird, a rotating 540 rodeo flip, the surfer/snowboarder/ skateboarder says he’ll count on consistency to keep him in contention.
“If I can pull together full runs, use the entire wave surface— the lip, the shoulder,” he says, “I’ve got a good shot. Stamina will play a big role.”
That’s a fact. It’ll be a long day for the flowboarders on Saturday. Morning ‘til night, over 12 hours, four preliminary heats and, if you make it, the quarters, semis, and finals. If you hope to win this monster of skill and endurance, you’re definitely gonna have to go with the flow.
