Jeremy Flores shows a shiney shoulder absolutely no mercy in Hossegor. Photo: Andrew Christie
Words by Ben Mondy

You can keep your too-cool slob air and your emperor’s new nose pick, coz when it’s two foot the only way to maintain an earnest heart and a pure soul is underwater rail, baby!

That’s how the Editor told me to start this piece about this cutback by Jeremy Flores. And why not? It kinda makes sense, in a stoned-16-year-old-has-just-read-Jack-Kerouac-for-the-first-time kinda way. And it has the word baby in it, which has a retro creepy appeal. More importantly, if anything about surfing can be considered important, it contains the phrase “earnest heart and pure soul”. And with these words and this turn, maybe for the first time, the Editor has finally struck some type of balance or hit some type of nail.
There is definitely something pure in each of these high shutter speed frozen moments. It’s a small wave sure, but it’s green and clean and something we can all deal with. It isn’t a 15 foot Teahupoo bomb, or a free-falling sandspitting Portugal Pipe. We know this wave, we like this wave, and it contains no threat, and in its fun ordinariness it doesn’t force us to try and comprehend something beyond our own limited experience.
This also helps in making the turn extra-ordinary. We might have all raced along waves like this, but very few have ever executed a re-direction with such precision. I could maybe harp on about the technical aspects of Jeremy’s body torque, his core positioning over the fulcrum of his centre of gravity, his shoulder transition, but that would only cloud and cheapen this ripe chunk of clean, hard and pure surfing.
He has simply done what surfers have done since the dawn of time; changed the direction of his surfboard. Only he has done it faster, and harder, and with more control and more style. It’s a love letter to Andy Irons, a thank you note to Michael Peterson or an I Owe You to Richard Cram. It is beautiful, and with fins free finish, it is now. It is earnest heart and pure soul. It is, well, exactly what it is. – BM