Hawaiian Ezekiel Lau posted on Instagram that the situation that arose at the beginning of his series with Jack Robinson in the Vans World Cup of Surfing final should be reviewed since he believes that the Australian violated section 3 of rule 168, which details that by getting in front of him, he was interfered with in his course.

Just five minutes into the grand final, Lau was coming into the tube. As he was coming out, Robinson, who had caught the previous wave and was paddling in, let go of his board and caused the Hawaiian to fall.

The judges did not call interference and the series continued with Robinson winning easily, Lau placed second but the 2000 point difference between first and second meant that the Hawaiian was unable to re-qualify, at least not through the QS (he could still achieve this at the Pipe Masters).

According to Fred Patacchia, Lau will make a formal presentation of her case to the WSL.

This whole issue comes down to whether the WSL can act retroactively on the decision, and all indications are that it cannot. There have been re-surfings of series where a priority-setting error was made, but not interference of this kind.

In the comments, support for Lau was overwhelming, with Billy Kemper, Johnny Boy Gomez, Paige Alms and Torrey Meister among others expressing their disgust at what happened.

 

See this post on Instagram

 

“When a surfer is put in a position while paddling out that they cannot get out of the way and a collision happens due to this, it is up to a majority of the judges to call interference based on whether it is determined to be accidental or not.” My opinion is that we are “professional surfers”. The best of the best! Going off the rule, surfer in white COULD have gotten out of the way. From this video clip you can see surfer in white has enough time to make a conscious decision where to paddle. Just so it happens that the line he chose is directly where I drew my line to come out of the barrel, which is the ONLY option I had. The surfer paddling out has options to avoid the surfer on the wave. He should be in the channel paddling back out. It should come down to who had priority over the situation. These 2 surfers are not equal in this specific case and the rules should benefit the surfer on the wave utilizing priority. This ride would have been the first major score of the heat, but was deemed incomplete because surfer in white chose to BAIL his surfboard causing me to fall off, hindering the scoring potential of my wave, breaking my board, and leaving white with priority. How is it okay for the interfering surfer to gain so much advantage from a collision and an interference not be called? The highlighted rule 168 section 3 ENABLES controversy and should be addressed. Thanks to everyone for all the supportive messages. Let me know what you guys think! Aloha 🤙🏽 @wsl

A publication shared by Ezekiel Lau (@zekelau) the 4 Dic 2019 has 11: 06 PST