If this email was forwarded to you, be sure to join the global tribe and subscribe! Like to get your itch scratched at another inbox? Pop that email in below and let's boogie! 👇

Welcome to the 19th Edition of The Bodyboard Report! 🤙

We got the world tour rolling straight into Peru and recently Paul Benco had a proper sit down with a rider I have admired since I was a teenager.

That took me back to dig up the move that made me jump out of my chair 26 years ago… something the new generation likely missed.

Then we have Garden Route’s with trees and waves aplenty…

And a quick look at the actual tree behind the waves we ride…

Let's boogie! 👇

The world tour barely takes a breath before rolling into its next stop.

From 3 to 4 August, the IBC World Tour lands in Punta Negra, a small beach district south of Lima known for the wave at Punta Rocas, a break that has hosted Pan American surfing events before bodyboarding ever showed up on its shores.

This one sits on the Rising Series side of the ledger, 2 500 USD on the line and 500 points up for grabs, a stop built more for climbing the rankings than headline prize money.

Peru has quietly become a proving ground on the South American leg, and a good result here can set the tone heading into the bigger stops still to come in August. 🤙

If you have followed bodyboarding for more than a minute, you know the name Ryan Hardy. Hardballs to his mates, and from what I saw 26 years ago, it is with good reason.

Ryan is one of the most stylish riders the sport has produced, and one of my personal favourites. Equally lethal either way with a flow that makes even the heaviest slabs look easy.

Ryan sat down recently with Paul Benco on the IBC Beyond the Tour podcast, and it is one of the most honest conversations to come out of the sport in a while.

He started bodyboarding at 8 years old in 1987, riding whitewash on Mach 7-7's with his older brother Gene pushing him into heavier water than he was ready for. But the moment that actually flipped the switch came a few years later, at his first competition in Perth. He was 12.

He watched Steve “Bullet” Mackenzie and Wingnut ripping the lineup from the beach, and something in him just locked in. From that day, everything else went to the back burner.

Getting there took sacrifice. No drinking from 17 to 21, while every mate his age was doing exactly that. Long stretches away from his partner Leah in his early 20s, chasing swells instead of staying home. He does not frame any of it as a complaint. It reads more like the price of admission for a life spent doing the thing you love most.

There is one wave that still lives rent free in his head. Cyclops, the mutant slab in Western Australia. Ryan calls it a session with no exit, a shallow rock shelf covered in barnacles with nowhere to go if you come off wrong. He surfed it once. He has never gone back, and he is honest enough to say he is not ashamed of that.

His advice to his younger self is worth sitting with. He points to Mike Stewart as the model, a rider who only ever paddled for waves he was confident he could make, and who is still riding at a level most people a third his age could not touch. Calculated risk over bravado, every time, if you want to still be doing this in your fifties and sixties.

The most striking part of the conversation is a story from the North Shore of Hawaii, somewhere around 2006. Andy Irons, deep in a world title race with Kelly Slater, got taken out on a wave by another Australian rider. Andy came up furious and went straight for Ryan instead, the wrong man entirely.

Ryan could have named the actual rider on the spot. He chose not to. He wore it, and by his own account, Andy believed until his final days that it was Hardy who had dropped in on him.

Andy Irons passed away in 2010. Hardy speaks about him with real warmth, and draws a quiet parallel to his own experience living with bipolar disorder, saying he recognised something familiar in the intensity Andy carried that day. It is a generous, thoughtful way to remember someone, not just as a champion, but as a person who felt things all the way to the edges.

These days Ryan splits his time between Margaret River and Canggu, Bali, where he runs the Ryan Hardy Bodyboarding Camps through Bali Bodyboarding, coaching riders of every level in the same wedgy, sand bottomed waves he still surfs for the pure fun of it.

He also shapes his own boards through Hardy Shapes, the brand he built with Todd Quigley, carrying two decades of wave reading into every model on the rack.

Some riders chase titles their whole careers. Ryan chased something that outlasted the trophies. Worth remembering that the two are not always the same thing. 🌊

Here’s something the next generation had likely missed out on…

June 2000, Teahupoo, Tahiti.

I was 19 and visiting mates in London, UK at the time. I distinctly remember this as being my first “WOW” moment of bodyboarding - The kind the makes you jump up out of your chair in sheer amazement. It took real hard balls to do something this amazeballs.

Ryan was 20 years old, competing in the first ever Tahiti Skins International, a genuine changing of the guard event that threw the sport's old guard (Stewart, Tâmega, Bullet) into the same lineup as the rising No Friends generation (Skipp, Hubb, Roach) and hungry young chargers like André Botha and Ryan himself.

He has called it the craziest event he was ever part of….

The moment came on his second wave of the final, an 8 foot set at heavy, lumpy Chopes. Instead of playing it safe, Hardballs went for gold and threw a whipping, super fast forward spin on a whim, under the unforgiving lip and into the barrel.

A spin so ballsy, so cool and so fast, I had to slow it down to 25% speed or I promise you’d miss it completely! 👇

Ryan had been drilling the spin back home in Western Australia but had never planned to use in competition.

But he did, and what came next is one of my favourite moments ever in the history of this sport, and a roar from the boats in the channel.

The win was his first major international title, and it landed him on the cover of 4 different bodyboarding magazines, including Bodyboarding Magazine's October 2000 issue.

Pick up a decent pair of bodyboard fins and there is a good chance the material tracing back to a single tree species, Hevea Brasiliensis, the rubber tree. Native originally to the Amazon, it was transplanted into Southeast Asia more than a century ago, and Malaysia's tropical rainfall and climate turned out to be close to perfect for it.

The rubber itself comes from tapping, a shallow cut made into the bark that lets the tree's latex sap run out slowly without killing it. That sap gets processed into sheets of natural rubber, prized in the fin world for its purity, its consistent supply, and a flex memory that synthetic alternatives still struggle to match.

It is not just one brand chasing this. Churchill went back to Malaysian rubber in their production, working with riders including Pierre Louis Costes, Iain Campbell and Amaury Lavernhe to dial in the exact stiffness and flex ratio.

Pride Bodyboards has built recycled Malaysian rubber into their swim fin line since 2019.

NMD's Alpha fins use a blend of virgin and upcycled Malaysian rubber in their moulds too.

There is a genuine tension worth knowing about underneath the eco branding. Hevea plantations need a lot of land to produce raw rubber at scale, and that land use competes directly with rainforest and biodiversity in the regions where it is grown. That is exactly why the upcycled and recycled rubber approach several brands are now using matters, it takes pressure off needing more virgin plantation to keep supply moving.

So next time you are choosing fins, the tree behind the rubber is doing more work for your kick than most riders ever think about. 🤙

Disclaimer: The Bodyboard Report is published for informational and entertainment purposes only. All images, media, and referenced content remain the copyright of their respective owners and are used for editorial commentary and community sharing. The Bodyboard Report does not claim ownership of any third party content.