Italo Ferreira , of Brazil, has enjoyed a day at the beach.- The 27-year-old surfer posted a record-high score at the Olympics, snapped a board, and won gold.
- Winning the Olympic title "was a dream come true," Ferreira said.
Italo Ferreira's preparations for the men's shortboard gold medal match Tuesday at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics could not have gotten off to a weirder start.
The Brazilian athlete snapped his favorite board in half on the opening wave at the Tsurigasaki
But rather than get frustrated at the mishap, Ferreira got back out on the water and performed so impeccably that he won the Olympic title in style.
"That board gives me good speed, the other one is more slow," he said, according to CNN. "It's super hard out there, but I knew that there was a lot of opportunities around. That's why I started to catch a lot of waves and get scores."
Unpredictable water forced organizers to reschedule the quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals into one day, and Ferreira - the 2019 World Surf League Champion - returned the highest-scoring wave a 9.73/10 early on.
That was the quarterfinal, and any confidence and momentum he took into the semi, and then the final against Kanoa Igarashi, a 23-year-old Japanese athlete, may have ebbed away when a wave consumed him in the very first minute.
Ferreira resurfaced with half of his board. The other half was swept away in the tide.
The confidence, or ability, never faltered, though. Ferreira is in his prime years as a surfer, he took the lead, and just stayed in front for the whole final.
See some of the extraordinary photos right here:
"I was super confident," Ferreira said. "When I broke a board, I was like, 'Let's get on the beach and get another board, go back and try again'. And that's what I did."
On the victory, he added: "It was a dream come true."