Photo by please: WSL/Heff 

On January 7, 2016, one of the most experienced Latin surfers at Pipe, Peruvian Gabriel Villarán, came out of the water in a manner almost identical to that of Carlos Muñoz yesterday: holding his arm and showing clear signs of great pain.

Although Muñoz's clinical diagnosis is still unknown, after he went to the hospital yesterday after the championship, more than one person mentioned a shoulder injury and a dislocation after hitting the Pipe reef in his penultimate wave in his round of 16 heat in which he beat Frederico Morais.

Villarán told DUKE that the scenarios in the case of an injury of the type he faced depend on whether it requires surgery or not. Without surgery, natural recovery, which consists of “reducing inflammation and strengthening,” takes four months.

If the injury is more serious and requires surgery, in that case it is six to eight months out of the water.

The key to determining one thing or the other is the magnetic resonance, Villarán said.

The risk of not having surgery, Villarán said, is that if you get it again, there is no other option and you have to go to the operating room no matter what.

If such a scenario were to be confirmed, it would be the worst possible scenario, regardless of whether it is four or eight months, because it would mean missing the first half of the tour, which qualifies for the second.

It is clear that the WSL should give him an injury wildcard. What happens with injury wildcards is that if there is more than one injured player, several criteria come into play, such as previous rankings and also the discretion of the WSL.

At the moment, the other injured member of the CT is the Australian Liam O'Brien who seems to have suffered a less serious injury, presumably in the ankle. He has a better seeding than Cali, so if both are out for the entire first season, it would be expected that the WSL will give him the title.

Of the five stages in the first half of the circuit, four count towards the ranking that determines the 22 who make it to the second half.

The last thing that was known about Muñoz was that his team, which included Jim Hogan and Luis Real, among others, were taking him to the hospital in Honolulu, the capital of the island of Oahu.