SURF SCENE with Andrew McKinnon

IT'S BEEN a long time between drinks for Kelly Slater to win a world tour event and that's pretty funny considering Slater seldom drinks alcohol. But all jokes set aside, it's been a couple of years since Kelly was on the winning dais. In fact it was back at the end of 2013 when he won the Pipeline Masters from, strangely enough, world title aspirant Hawaii's John Florence.

Slater's four 10-point rides en route to the final set up the winning momentum. At 44 years, he is the undisputed King of Teahupo'o, notching up his fifth title to deny John Florence again. The young Hawaiian wanted to even up the score and get one back on Kelly but the 11-time world champion was on a date with destiny and unbeatable.

After the semis, Slater was awarded for the first time the AI (Andy Iron) Teahupo'o trophy for fearless charging at Chopes with a certain touch of irony attached.

Back when Slater and Irons were the two main world title combatants from 2002 to 2004, during Andy's three-year world title reign, their rivalry sparked a whole new excitement in professional surfing. On receiving the prestigious award Kelly quipped, "Andy would be equally mad and stoked that I won this and would have equally hated this going to me as much as he would have been happy for me.”

The last time Slater surfed against Irons was at Teahupo'o 2010 where Irons got the better of the exchange in the semis and went on to win his last world championship tour. A month later he was tragically found dead in a hotel room that shocked the surfing world. There have been some great rivalries in surfing: Australia's first world champions Midget Farrelly and Nat Young were never able to resolve their differences, which was kind of sad. Whereas the Irons/Slater rivalry was settled once Kelly got Andy's measure from 2005 onwards. They buried the hatchet then surfed together, their last surfing session being in Tahiti prior to Andy's winning.

You have to hand it to the ultimate King of Surfing, Kelly Slater, who has dominated world surfing since entering the tour back in the early 1990s. In recent years his experiments with boards and his indifference to the tour, side-tracked by all his projects including the artificial wave pool, has taken his eye off the ball. However one thing is for sure, you never discount Kelly Slater, who is revered as not only the best surfer in the world but the greatest ever and arguably the greatest sporting champion of the modern era. He continues to amaze the public and even though he recognises Gabriel Medina as the most competitive and John Florence as the best, when a comp is held in waves of consequence like Teahupo'o, Slater has once again proved that he can still mix it with the best and opponents more than half his age.

The consolation prize for John Florence is that he has finally taken the lead on the world ratings, overtaking Australia's Matt Wilkinson who had been dominating for the first half of the season. We are now into the Grand Slam leg, as the commentators were calling it, where events like Teahupo'o are the turning points on tour. There's four more events on the World Surf League Championship tour and while Florence leads from Wilkinson in number two and Medina is number three on the ratings, they will all be looking over their shoulder to see if the old warhorse can get into his stride and mount an unprecedented twelfth world title assault. It's a long shot for Kelly, now eighth in the ratings, but he has a mathematical chance. If anyone can give it a decent run, the champ knows all the breaks and his adversary's moves.

As they say anything is possible.