It’s been a bizarre two-year stretch for O‘ahu’s Joy Monahan. She was the 2008 Roxy ASP Women’s Longboard champion and the No. 1 ranked ASP longboarder on tour before falling out of the Top 32 elite list and a last-second
It’s been a bizarre two-year stretch for O‘ahu’s Joy Monahan. She was the 2008 Roxy ASP Women’s Longboard champion and the No. 1 ranked ASP longboarder on tour before falling out of the Top 32 elite list and a last-second replacement at the 2010 championships in France.
Yet she was back in top form at Biarritz, France over the weekend, taking home an Equal 3rd place finish by making her way to the semfinals.
It took a major effort to eliminate Monahan from the event, as she put up a 16.00 in her semfinal heat, a score that was the event’s highest to that point.
But eventual champion Cori Schumacher stepped up to the challenge and scored a 17.25 to head to the final.
Schumacher then went on to knock off Kaitlin Maguire, 13.15 to 8.10, which won the Roxy Women’s Longboard championship for the American, Sunday.
O‘ahu’s Kelia Moniz also made a deep run into the tournament, just getting edged out in her quarterfinal head-to-head heat by France’s Justine Dupont, 12.40 to 12.00.
Claiming her first ASP World title after several years amongst the world’s best female longboarders’ contingent, Schumacher, 33, stepped up to her reputation to dominate the last action-packed day of the contest, posting the event’s highest single-wave and heat scores at 9.25 and 17.25, respectively.
“It feels so good right now,” Schumacher said after the victory. “It was like six minutes to the end and feelings just all washed over me and I was tingling. It’s such an amazing feeling to win. I had some pressure though when I paddled into a wave and left Kaitlin (Maguire) on her own because she can pull a world championship out of her hat anytime.”
Coming out atop a series of intense exchanges in a well-fought final after eliminating two former world champions in the quarterfinals (Jennifer Smith) and the semifinals (Monahan), Schumacher’s 13.15 score to Maguire’s 9.80 confirmed her domination over the weekend, her smart heat tactics and strategy giving her the final sot at the title.
“I took a gamble to paddle into that last wave and hope for the conditions to slow down as it hd been doing the last three days,” Schumacher said. “It paid up, the gamble went well.”
Maguire, who was surfing her first final in an ASP World title decider event, came short of five points leaving the 2010 edition with the runner-up spot, a promising result and a guarantee to return in next year’s ASP Women’s World Longboard Championships along with the event’s top 16 surfers.
“I was really exhausted for the final,” Maguire said. “Doing the semis and the final in a row was a tough one but it was a good heat. I surfed my best and she surfed. I was really aiming at the title coming to France so it’s disappointing to come one spot short.
“The way the contest was judged following the new criterias was great,” Maguire said. “To value progressive surfing more and still count the traditional longboard style helped push the level higher and it’s promising for next year.”
Making the seminfinals for the second consecutive year, French favorite and and former ASP Women’s World Longboard No. 2 Justine Dupont had to accept Maguire’s unstoppable run to the final in a high-scoring battle. One of two French representatives to make the final-eight, Dupont had to face the domination of Hawaiian and United States’ natives over the 2010 edition.
