Sally Fitzgibbons is safely through to the Olympic surfing quarter-finals following Stephanie Gilmore’s shock elimination by South African outsider Bianca Buitendag.
Fitzgibbons ousted France’s last medal hope Pauline Ado to join the likes of world No.1 Carissa Moore as round-three winners on Monday.
Ranked fourth in Olympic competition, Fitzgibbons laid down two-wave scores of 5.83 and 5.03 with her combined 10.83 enough to overcome the 9.03 of Ado, who couldn’t manage any better than a 4.80.
Fitzgibbons will now face Japan’s Amuro Tsuzuki in the last eight at Tsurigasaki beach.
The result was a boost for the Australian surfers, stunned by seven-time world champion Gilmore’s loss to Buitendag, who hasn’t competed regularly on the world tour since 2016.
Posting the best score of the women’s competition on day one, Gilmore looked in fine touch again but the 33-year-old was left to rue her decision to cede priority to Buitendag, who used the wave to post a 7.10 – the biggest score of the match-up.
“I looked at that wave and I was like, it doesn’t look that good, so I let her have it and she turned it into a seven, so that was the most frustrating thing to me – like, man, I should have just taken that wave,” Gilmore said.
The South African’s scores of 6.83 and then 7.10 left Gilmore needing 7.76 to regain the lead and while she had 14 minutes up her sleeve, she couldn’t find the winning waves with the final margin 13.93 to 10.0.
“That’s just the nature of surfing, sometimes the waves are there, sometimes the waves are not,” Gilmore said.
Buitendag was ranked as high as world No.4 in 2014 but hasn’t had full-time status since 2016 and secured Olympic qualification through the 2019 ISA World Surfing Games.
Gilmore said she was already looking ahead to 2023, with Olympic surfing to be held in French outpost Tahiti.
AAP
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