How surfing legend Kelly Slater is rewriting the rules of sporting retirement

Just when you thought it was safe to shelve any serious sporting ambition and slide comfortably into middle age, Kelly Slater comes along and wins the World Surf League event in giant waves at Pipeline just a week shy of his 50th birthday.

It was an outrageous achievement, but during a blizzard of Winter Olympics coverage, it might never receive the recognition it deserves.

Surfing big, hollow waves is so diabolically difficult and dangerous it is almost impossible for the casual spectator to properly appreciate.

Slater did so in spectacular fashion in a competition against the world's best, 30 years after he first won the event.

Remember how golfer Phil Mickelson was lauded when he won the 2021 US PGA Championship, at the age of 50?

Now imagine two-storey-high trees falling all around him as he lined up a fairway shot over a bunker full of quicksand.

Champion surfer Kelly Slater gives a rare emotional account of the moment he learnt Hawaiian surfer Sunny Garcia had been hospitalised after trying to take his own life.

That is something like what Slater confronted at Pipeline, a notorious wave on Hawaii's north shore where raw Pacific Ocean swells smash onto a shallow lava reef.

There is no continental shelf to slow down those swells and the reef features caves that can trap the unwary underwater.

Yet with the title safely in the bag in the dying seconds of this week's final, Slater took off on perhaps the biggest, ugliest wave of the entire event.

He avoided the cascading lip by millimetres, pulled up into a gaping tube and was spat out in a firehose stream of condensed air and water.

It was the sort of thing only a handful of the sport's true elites could pull off, requiring a battery of fast-twitch responses that mere mortals