Photo: photobom via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
Vegan surfer Tia Blanco has been crowned The Ultimate Surfer. The 24-year-old from San Clemente, California won the women's title on ABC's surfing competition, whose finale aired on Tuesday, September 21, beating her best friend Brianna Cope in the final at Kelly Slater's Surf Ranch wave pool in Lemoore, California.
The final came down to the last waves. Cope led going into them, but Blanco came through with a 9.8 to take the title, the World Surf League reports. Honolulu's Zeke Lau won the men's competition with a perfect 10, the first ever awarded at the Ranch.
The prize is a big one. Blanco and Lau each take home $100,000 and wildcard entries into three events on next season's WSL Championship Tour, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports. All 14 surfers on the show said a place on the tour was the thing they wanted most.
Blanco was raised vegetarian and went vegan in 2013, after reading up on diet and seeing how animals are treated. She told Great Vegan Athletes:
I did a lot of research about diet and saw what they did to animals in a documentary called, 'Behind Glass Walls'. I also read 'The China Study' and watched 'Forks Over Knives'. What I found was pretty horrific and informative at the same time. I knew from that point on I was going to switch to a vegan diet.
She eats raw where she can, with plenty of fruit, vegetables, beans, nuts and grains, and admits that traveling to remote surf spots sometimes means a lot of pasta and brown rice. She has heard every protein question going, and it hasn't slowed her down.
We first wrote about Tia back in 2016, when she was dominating the surfing world as a teenager. Fittingly, the wave pool she won on was designed by Kelly Slater, the 11-time world champion who announced he had gone vegan in 2018 and gave the finalists coaching tips.
No meat, no problem.