Australia has the Men’s World Champ, the Womens’ World Champ, and now for the first time in 10 years, an Australian has won the Vans Hawaiian Triple Crown. Congratulations Bede Durbidge.

For a year now, Bede has been mentored by Gary Elkerton, a two-time Triple-Crown winner and one of the few surfers worthy of Sunset royalty status.
As Elko recently explained: “We worked on a program that we don’t want to give too much away about. Basically, you’ve got a goal, you want to achieve it, so the visualisation exercises have been really strong ... but that means nothing without speed and endurance work, and Bede knows how to hit a bag!”
And Bede hit more than bags this Winter, he clobbered lips with his roundhouse snaps all up and down the North Shore. On finishing first at Pipe, 2nd at Haleiwa and 9th at Sunset, Bede says: “Haleiwa was crazy, maxed out; (and Sunset) was big, South West, and really tough, I was pretty happy just to get a 9th there.”
The numbers don’t stop there; Bede picked up the keys to a $30 000 Chevy Colorado truck, put his wrist out for a $10000 Nixon watch, and carried away a board shaped by Pipe god Gerry Lopez.
On handing over the board, Gerry re-iterated the importance of the Triple Crown: “It’s almost as important as a world title.”
Second and third place in this, the 25th year of the Hawaiian Triple Crown, went to fellow Australians Ace Buchan and Parko.