“We laughed, we cried” - surf star Rob Machado on the film that reunited the Momentum Generation

In the early 1990s, surfing underwent a seismic cultural shift. Just as soft rock bands were made to look like dinosaurs almost overnight by the emergence of grunge, so the muscle-bound power surfers who had dominated the sport in the late 1980s suddenly began to look like lumbering prehistoric beasts next to a new generation of nimble young acrobats – surfers who seemed to be able to conjure speed out of nowhere, and who tended to see the lip of a wave as a launchpad rather than simply something to smack as hard as you could with the tail of your board (although they could do that, too). The vanguard of this new crew included Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Shane Dorian, Taylor Knox, Pat O’Connell, Kalani Robb, Benji Weatherley and Ross Williams, and the remarkable story of their meteoric rise to the top of the surfing totem and its aftermath is told in a new film, Momentum Generation, released this week by Universal.