Surfers on the ASP World tour aren’t allowed to compete in any event that the ASP doesn’t sanction. If they neglect the papers and choose to compete in such an event regardless, the board of directors could kick the surfer off tour and take back that year’s prize money. Strict, huh. To a surfer, it sounds a lot like playing with fire.

Which is exactly what the X-Games is all about. Fire, explosions, Mountain Dew, bad tattoos — these are the lifeblood of the Extreme Games. In the early 2000s, surfing had a brief and nervous romance with the X-Games. A gaudy team format combined with Huntington Beach dribble to create a relationship that was of little worth to anyone. There was attempt to salvage by relocating the event to Puerto Escondido, but the damage was beyond repair. And after a few short years, the X-Games ditched us stone cold in the sand. To their credit, they did leave
us with a few cases of Monster energy drink and a pretty cool lanyard.

But they came crawling back. And this time around, they’ve changed. There will be no teams or Huntington Beach. There won’t even be bullhorns and singlets. Instead, there will be video cameras and Final Cut Pro. In an event called Real Surf, a sweet sixteen surfers were invited to compete by producing 90-second video clips. The segments were put on the web, matched into man-on-man heats and voted on by fans of democracy and slob grabs.

read more @ surfingmag

Marc Lacomare, Dimitri Ouvré, Artiz Aranburu, Hodei Collazo, Miky Picon and Romain Lauhlé were lucky enough to be in town when La Graviere pumped last week.

Imagine a stylish, watch-type device that not only tells the time but can track stats ranging from airtime to number of times you paddle surfing, knows what sport you’re participating in automatically, spits out stats on your mobile device, and lets you build contests to one up yourself and your friends.

This futuristic idea came to the crew at NZN Labs and Vapor Studio, and they’ve turned their dream into reality with a new action sports-specific activity tracker called LIT, which debuted on Indiegogo April 2, raising $27k of its $100k goal in just one day.

Conceived by NZN’s Ricardo Camargo, Michael Ford, and Richard Zinn, the crew’s goal is to do for the activity tracking market what GoPro did for camera world, and after looking through the functionality, it looks like they’re onto something big.

read more @ transworld