Silvana Lima Sells House To Pay For World Tour & Wins Major Event
Brazil’s Silvana Lima Puts Her Name Back In The Headlines With Win At Swatch Pro Trestles Event
One of the surf world’s best writers Sean Doherty brought to light one of the harsh realities of being a professional surfer is that to compete you should be prepared to give up everything. That’s exactly what the 32-year-old did. Doherty explains in his event wrap on Coastalwatch. “While the guys in the top 10 buy up whole streets in their hometowns, Silvana Lima has had to sell her modest house at home in Brazil just to fund her tour this year. She sold her house and pretty much everything in it…”
When you know you can do it, there’s nothing that can stand in your way of getting there. Carefully, strategically and sometimes sub-consciously everything in your life becomes part of the pathway to achieving the one thing that consumes your mind. Silvana Lima is a fighter, not only that she is one of the most talented surfers in the world and she wasn’t going to let anything get in her way today. She was chaired up the beach at Lower Trestles surrounded by hundreds of people. She was celebrated and congratulated on social media by nearly the entire women’s world tour surfers. She made that win her own, and she owned it.
Silvana made her debut on the WCT in 2008 at the Roxy Pro on the Gold Coast. That year she two-second places and finished runner up on tour. The following year she won the Roxy Pro and Beachley Classic and again runner-up. Plagued by a severe knee injury she was forced off tour in 2012. The following year after rehab she lost her spot on tour and was sent back to the QS to regain her points but without a major sponsor she found it an impossible job travelling the world to surf and compete. In 2014 she started up her own crowd-funding campaign ‘Silvana Free‘ and asked the world to help financially support her quest to get back on tour in her vision to become World Champ. Without the results she needed and a feisty, competitive top 10, she lost her spot again in 2016 but after working her butt off on the QS she gained first place and was offered her place back in the top 16 for this year.
There’s no doubt that the 5’1 power-house has the ability to mix-up the current top tier, she just needs the consistency event-after-event to move up into the pointy end of the ladder where she has the ability to change what the judges are looking for and put some real grunt into the women’s arena.
Today’s win for Silvana means a whole lot more than a pay cheque – it’s the confidence that it was worth it. It’s the support and respect that she will receive after going ham in this event with a level of risk, grit and determination that the lone Brazilian surfer in the top 100 can do what she needs to do to get the job done.
She’s been dominating the headline all event with some of the most dynamic surfing we’ve seen all year. In the final of the Swatch Pro Trestles today Silvana came up against fellow outsider Keely Andrew. Together the two showcased the extraordinary ability of women’s surfing in clean, but average conditions of the ‘world class’ Californian wave. They also made some noise perhaps signalling a change in the guard.
“I still can’t believe I won over here,” Lima said. “All I could think about after the last event was coming here to Lowers. It’s my favorite wave on tour because I can surf how I like, do turns how I like and I just had to keep going. Heading into that Final it took me back to my last Final at Bells and I just wanted to smash it. When it came down to the last five minutes having Keely in a combination, I realized I won and couldn’t believe it.”
Silvana turns 33 in two weeks and you’ll be that this win has put her drive into fifth gear for the remaining three World Championship Tour events. After this event, Silvana has propelled up two places on the leaderboard into 13th position but is currently holding the top spot on the Qualifying Series leaderboard, as she did last year. There’s no stopping her. Not age, not finances, not ability. Silvana Lima brings a spice to women’s professional surfing and we can’t wait to see what this injection of success does for her in the final events of 2018. This is the fourth WCT event win of her career.
The results of this event have put Sally Fitzgibbons into first place and the yellow leader’s jersey heading into Europe, with Courtney Conlogue trailing in second and Tyler Wright relegated into third place.