“But I think people are putting that aside nowadays, which is great.” “Obviously, you look cooler if you don’t have a helmet on,” said the professional surfer Kalani Chapman, 38, of Hawaii. Nobody wants to look like a child out for a bike ride with their mom and dad. The community celebrates bravado and prowess so much that it has a pejorative term - kook - for those who are oblivious, overly cautious or unskilled. Wearing helmets pushes against the cultural tide at Pipeline, where surfers have always aimed to display how skilled and stylish they are, not necessarily how safe. “But it’s all about having the proper knowledge and skill level and the right equipment to reduce all those risks.” “The ocean can be risky,” Brian Keaulana, one of the retired lifeguards who led the charge in Hayden’s rescue, said. But the dangerously close call - witnessed by the sport’s biggest names - sent a ripple through the local community. Today, many at Pipeline - a surfing mecca in part because it is so perilous - are wearing helmets when they drop in, a somewhat grudging acknowledgment that the sport can be as dangerous as it is cool.
#Surfs up. grab helmet full
Hayden, now 15, has made a full recovery in the year since and has returned to surfing on the North Shore of Oahu. He was moments away from a fate far worse. After two forceful compressions to his chest, he coughed up a torrent of sand and sea. He had collided headfirst with the reef below. Hayden’s motionless body bobbed up and down in the sloshing foam. Hundreds of spectators watched as safety workers gunned their Jet Skis toward the impact zone, where the distance between the water’s surface and the jagged, lava rock reef below can be as little as several feet.
Shortly after the conclusion of the 2019 Billabong Pipe Masters, Hayden Rodgers, the under-14 national surf champion of San Clemente, Calif., took off on a 10-foot wave. PUPUKEA, Hawaii - The celebratory mood at the Pipeline surf competition on Oahu’s North Shore shifted quickly.
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