Alejo Muniz did not win the Pipe Masters, but after beating Kelly Slater in their first ever match-up Alejo felt like he had, he said after his heat. Beating Mick Fanning must have felt even better – like he’d won a world title, perhaps.

In a way, of course, he had. By eliminating Mick he won Brazil’s first ever world title; the fact he had won it for Gabby rather than himself hardly seemed relevant, such is the spirit of solidarity in the Brazilian camp. You could be forgiven for thinking Medina’s title, rather than his own requalification, had been the primary driving force behind his own performance.

It seemed fitting that Medina’s title should have been sealed thanks to the efforts of a compatriot – a powerful image of the Brazilians standing firm in the face of hostility; clubbing together, as it were, against the rest of the world. But the contribution of another Brazilian, Filipe Toledo, would highlight a flaw in the simultaneous heat format. With two heats in the water at the same time, one starting halfway through the other and so on, the earlier heat of the two has priority for waves. Heats are scheduled to ensure that direct rivals never share the line-up in overlapping heats, to prevent one title-contender from interfering with another title-contender’s heat to his own advantage. There is nothing, however, to stop friends or fellow countrymen from working together.

Filipe Toledo and Miguel Pupo were joined halfway through their own heat by Medina and Dusty Payne, making Dusty the only non-Brazilian competitor in the line-up. Toledo advanced along with Medina, admitting in his post-heat interview that it had been part of his strategy to help out Medina by keeping Dusty off the Backdoor rights. How much difference this actually made to the way Toledo surfed is hard to gauge, for being a regular-foot he would probably have chosen the rights anyway. Even so, it was perhaps not fair on Dusty, who at the time was leading the Triple Crown ratings, nor on Fanning and Slater.

Medina required no assistance in any case; his performance throughout the day was outstanding. The fact that the final day played out in medium to small Pipeline inevitably gave the sizeable Anti-Gabe Brigade the chance to trot out the line that Medina’s a set-dodger who wouldn’t have sealed the deal in meatier waves. Whatever.