Flo Puritscher

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Flo Puritscher

Since the last Sundance film festival and the success of Zen & Zero the surfing world knows that there are Austrians – yes, you´ve read correctly, Austrians, not Australians – who know how to surf a wave.

Than we got that picture of Flo, shot by his buddy Jacob Polacsek, showing Flo surfing in a very serious wave somewhere in Indo. Despite having seen Zen & Zero we were very surprised, seeing a guy from the mountains riding such a solid thing.

We had to find out more about that guy.

So we startet interrogating Flo online during 4 weeks this winter. As Flo was suffering from a bad back injury at this time he couldn´t really defense himself.This is what we found out:

Flo is 31 years old – maybe that´s why he has these back problems – and lives in Innsbruck / Tirol (Austria) as professional snowboarder. He gets paid for freeriding his local slopes (the world is so unfair) and organises the “check-the-ripper” Contest, an event that seeks the complete snowboarder. Only the complete boarders who master freeride and freestyle have a chance to win the event.

Complete is also the right word to describe Flo. Besides snowboarding he does freeclimbing and mountaineering – no wonder with that home – swimming, windsurfing and, here we go, surfing in real waves. A surfer he became on a way that is typical for people living far from the coast. He picked it up at windless days on a windsurfing trip. But he rode his first wave at Baja California which is a thing that not many of us have done for starting.

As Flo is now riding non frozen waves since quite some time, he allready has a few solid trips on his scoreboard. Amongst other places he´s been tripping to Europe, Morocco, the Azores, the Canaries, Indo, Sri Lanka, Newseeland, Mexiko, USA, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala and he surfed a couple of riverwaves in Austria.

Meanwhile Flo has picked up filmmaking too and initiated the „leave the track“ projekt. The plot is simple and comes right out of Flo´s live: a crew of snowboarders from Austria and Swizzerland leave their element and goes searching for perfect waves in Indonesia.

The film will be shown as extra section on the new freeride dvd of Seppi Dabringer. The boys liked the trip that much, that Flo is allready preparing the next journey of the tracks. This year it will be Madagaskar and plans are to make a film about that trip again.

But now read, how our agents grilled Flo:

>>> forward to interview