By Dan Walsh
Filipe Toledo has one world title and another sitting squarely on the horizon, more than one million Instagram followers and more ink than a weekend newspaper.
Yet the ‘Teahupo’o tattoo’ he picked up wiping out five years ago - and squeezed an excruciating lime remedy straight onto - still looms large ahead of the Championship Tour’s most terrifying pitstop.
“Oh man, it only lasts for 10 minutes, but that 10 minutes is the most pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” the Brazilian laughs from Tahiti.
“You’ve just got to do it though. With that coral out there, if you don’t clean it up straight away you’re getting a very heavy level of infection and the lime juice, it’s been around for centuries.”
Teahupo’o scares, scars and a world of expectation are a fair summation of what swirls around Toledo - the WCT’s reigning men’s champion and current No.1 by a lengthy margin - on any given day.
Australian Ethan Ewing’s two fractured vertebrae in a relatively benign spill at Teahupo’o - by the brutal wave’s standards anyway - serve as an unnecessary reminder of what’s at stake in this weekend’s Tahiti Pro.
Filipe Toledo during the 2019 Tahiti Pro.Credit: WSL
Ewing has since returned home to the Gold Coast and hasn’t yet given up hope of making a shock bid for the finals at Trestles, California, in a month’s time.
For Toledo, the Tahiti Pro comes with extra mustard given his status as one of the best small-wave surfers in recent memory, and longstanding questions of his ability and commitment when tasked with tackling the world’s heaviest breaks - scene of next year’s Olympic surfing event for Paris 2024 as well.
In 2015, Toledo registered a score of 0.0 in a heaving heat at Teahupo’o, earning immediate and persistent dismissal of his appetite for big waves.
Last year he was widely criticised as well when the Tahitian terror cranked up again and he barely fired a shot while Kelly Slater and big-wave Australian veteran Nathan Hedge traded eye-watering barrels.
Filipe Toledo tucks into a Teahupo’o barrel during the 2022 Tahiti Pro.Credit: Damien Poullenot/World Surf League
Not all that long ago, the noise would have driven the 28-year-old under. But Toledo has been impressively frank for a while now when it comes to the mental health storm he weathered in silence before a breakdown in 2019.
And given his career-best form and recent Jeffrey’s Bay triumph in South Africa, despite an ongoing knee injury that keeps him out of the water except for heats, he’s more than comfortable in that inked-up skin.
“Everybody’s scared of this wave, they just don’t talk about it,” he says. “We just man up and try not to show any weakness with it. Of course there’s people who deal with the fear a lot better. There’s guys who have been surfing these waves their whole life and they know that feeling and how to control it a lot better.
“And yeah, of course I need to improve here and that’s what I’m trying to do. My result last year wasn’t that good but I was happy with that performance. I felt like I surfed it pretty good when it was pretty solid. You have to be smart about it too. There are risks when you surf this wave and when you’ve already qualified for the finals, you think about these things.
Winners are grinners: 2022 world champions Filipe Toledo and Stephanie Gilmore.Credit: Thiago Diz/World Surf League
“For me, especially right now with an injury I’m managing, I’m looking at the risks and working out what I need to be doing.”
Given he is odds-on to claim the all-important No.1 seeding for the upcoming final five - where the fifth-ranked surfer takes on No.4, the winner of that heat then progresses to take on No.3 and so on - Toledo is doing plenty of things right.
Talking, constantly, for one.
Long before last year’s breakthrough title, Toledo would find himself winning an event one day and crying uncontrollably the next - with no idea why.
Pressure from a more-than promising start to his professional career, legions of adoring fans in surf-mad Brazil and Toledo’s own head noise all became too much.
“The guy you’re talking to now compared to 2019, I’m such a different person,” he says. “I was still chasing that first world title and I got to a point where it was too much. I didn’t want to surf, there were days where I didn’t want to do this anymore. ‘I don’t have the fire for this, I don’t think I’ll ever win a world title’.
“There’s not just your own desire to win. There’s family, there’s sponsors, there’s fans, there’s a lot going on every time you compete.
“I went through a lot of bad moments in my career, in my personal life to learn how to take it easy on myself. Not to put all that pressure on myself.
“I think it does get easier, because I’ve started to understand how mental health works. That’s the big thing, keeping those conversations going.
“Sometimes you don’t want to. But I’ve got to keep doing it, keep opening up or things are going to go back to the bottom again.”
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