Gollito Estredo

By now the entire windsurfing world has learned that Gollito Estredo has won the Lanzarote freestyle event, or maybe not.  The PWA is not that well followed here in the U.S. But you can bet, back home in the ABC's and on Margarita everyone knew what happened on "tour" or maybe not.

Gollito had bulldozed the competition in the first 2 rounds. Each round  consists of one single and one double elimination bracket. And if you don't know how it works in a judged event, in the single elimination bracket the field is divided into heats, usually one against one or the best 2 in a 4 person heat. Winners advance, losers sit on the beach. This goes on until there is a final and a winner, wins. Before you can be declared the winner of a round you must then win the double elimination. In fact the winner of the double elimination is the overall winner no matter who won the single elimination bracket.

In round 3 Kiri Thode beat Tonky Frans in the final to win the single. What happened to Gollito? His first heat was a bye: odd man count, so he advances automatically. But unknown to everyone else Gollito was taking a nap and subsequently missed his next heat and was eliminated from the 3rd round.

In a double elimination bracket the top 8 single finishers are seeded to the last 8 heats. The field, the rest of the single elimination losers, fight it out until one competitor remains, then he goes against those top 8 finishers one at a time. You can only imagine the strength and endurance necessary to start in the "losers field" and fight your way through all that talent and then, one at a time, take on the those 8 seeded best finishers from the single.  After taking them down, heat by heat, you face the winner of the single and beat him too. Then you must redo the final to win. That's right, you've got to beat the winner of the single twice !!!

All of this Gollito did. He battled through 10 heats to win the 3rd round and a clean sweep of the entire event !!! Any doubt that he is the best freestyler in the world?  If this wasn't a big enough story, the entire competition was done in huge surf not the traditional flat water conducive to all those spinning, sliding tricks. Like I said yesterday, don't miss those videos of probably the best ever PWA freestyle contest.

PWA Videos http://www.youtube.com/user/PWAWORLDTOUR

Gollito's Blog http://gollitov01.blogspot.com/