Olympic Surfing Requires a Perfect Wave — This 58-Year-Old Tech Can Bring It

The surfing competition for the Paris 2024 Olympics will not be staged at any of France’s famous mainland surf spots. Not at Biarritz or Anglet or even the thumping sand-bottom beach break at Hossegor. Instead, the competition will be held at Teahupo’o, a Tahitian reef break 10,000 miles from Paris. Pronounced Cho-pu, the name “Teahupo’o” loosely translates to English as “to sever the head” or “wall of skulls."“

The wave is the first wonder of the surfing world, a total freak of nature: Massive storms in the southwest Pacific send 55-knot winds over a narrow band of ocean on a perfect track for the southern tip of Tahiti. That intense energy, traveling over 2,000 miles of ocean, builds into huge swells that double up into thick-walled caverns breaking over fields of razor-sharp coral. Teahupo’o’s waves on a big day have as “liquid napalm” that detonate on the reef. This is to say the Olympic competition will be thrilling, taking place during a window from July 27 to Aug. 4 — typically a period of meteorological activity that generates the south and southwest swells necessary to bring Teahupo’o to life.

Teahupo’o is located in a remote, rural fishing village in a fragile ecosystem. And while the World Surf League (WSL) has been holding contests at Teahupo’o for 25 years, the island wasn’t prepared for what it meant to host an Olympic event. In October of 2023, residents of Teahupo’o protested the construction of a three-story aluminum judging tower constructed in the ocean shallows to replace an existing wooden structure used by surf judges for years, fearing that it would irreversibly damage the coral reef, the ecosystem, and potentially even the wave itself. French Polynesia President Moetai Brotherson responded that the event could be moved to Taharuu Beach, on Tahiti's West Coast. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) refused to move the contest. Tensions between locals and Olympic organizers further escalated in December 2023, when a barge building the controversial judging tower snagged the reef and damaged coral near the contest site. The incident prompted the French Polynesian leaders to pause construction of the tower. “The first test they did with a barge broke apart a patch of coral,” environmental activist Cindy Otcenasek told Surfer, “so Paris 2024 has sacrificed a patch of coral … in order to hold these Olympic Games.”

Environmental concerns aside, the Olympic surfing experience at Teahupo’o isn’t likely to deviate all that much from what fans of the World Surf Tour have grown accustomed to seeing. The contest rules are the same. The surfers are mostly the same. The judging guidelines are the same. The problem here is that the World Surf Tour at Teahupo’o is spectacular but one-dimensional — and hardly shows off all that the sport of surfing has to offer.

At Teahupo’o, the exercise of wave riding doesn’t actually involve maneuvers or tricks or even flow. With its massive, seething barrels, it is entirely about catching a wave, making a critical drop; setting a line; getting as deep into the tube as you can without being swallowed alive; and praying you can hold the line and outrun the massive foam ball speeding behind you. Thrilling? Yes. But hardly representative of all types of surfing. Other stops on the WSL tour test other wave riding skills — aerials or open-face power surfing — because surfing, like skiing or snowboarding or ice skating, can be a relatively specialized sport. What the IOC is presenting this summer will be spectacular to watch and will surely garner huge ratings, but it’s not a traditional Olympic treatment of a diverse sport. All along, the IOC and France, the host country, had a better option. A more Olympic option: building a wave pool.

The Future of Surfing, Away From the Shore

The idea of a perfect man-made wave that breaks on demand has been around for well over half a century. According to The Encyclopedia of Surfing, the 1966-built Summerland wavepool near Tokyo, Japan — aka the “Surf-a-Torium” — was the first to invite surfers. Board riders were given 15 minutes of every hour to grovel around in the waist-high rollers and the rest of the hour let floats bob up and down. Three years later in Tempe, Arizona, a 20-acre Polynesian-themed complex located in the middle of the desert gave surfers something more to chew on. By dropping millions of gallons of water down a vertical 40 feet high and refracting the flow into the pool through underwater metal gates, surfers could take over a thrill ride.

Since then, surf wave technology has improved, but the idea of competing in man-made surf has remained mostly fringe. Sure, there were some highlights. Matt Warshaw, the founder of The Encyclopedia of Surfing, writes that “in 1985, pro tour champion Tom Carroll won the World Professional Inland Surfing Championships, the first pro tour wavepool contest, at the Dorney Park Wildwater Kingdom in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Australia’s Matthew Pitts, a former world tour pro, spent nearly five years in the early and mid-’90s performing nightly as Sabu, the valiant sword-wielding surf prince, at the $100 million Ocean Dome wavepool in Miyazaki, Japan. In 1997 at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, six-time world champion Kelly Slater won the Typhoon Lagoon wave pool contest, with Rob Machado taking the event the following year.”

Some real surfers made do, but the weak, small, crumbly, surf made wave pools an inside joke amongst surfers to such an extent that it’s features prominently in the narrative of North Shore, a late-’80s cult classic about an ambitious Arizona kid named Rick Kane who wins a wave-pool surf competition at Tempe’s Big Surf and uses the prize money to try his hand at the famed Bonzai Pipeline, where he is mercilessly humbled. Because, the movie teaches us, nobody who learns to ride waves in a pool could possibly ride waves of consequence.

This whole wave pool conversation took a turn with the development of a wave-making foil that runs along a track attached to the bottom of the pool basin. While the first iterations were mechanically fraught in 2015, some 10 years after its invention, Kelly Slater — surfing’s 11-time world champion — unveiled video of him shredding the gnar of his very own man-made wave. Developed in Lenmore, California, over the span of a decade, Slater’s wave generates a variety of wave-types and shapes. The waves are big enough, fast enough, and clean enough to challenge pro-level surfers. The WSL immediately began holding events at Surf Ranch and subsequently purchased it. Wave pools like Slater’s have become the new training ground for surfers working on complicated maneuvers but also resort settings with high-end accommodations, shopping, and restaurants.

Some purists bristle at the man-made wave — so much of surfing is about solitude, hunting, waiting, judgment — but surfing’s biggest stars have co-signed the contemporary wave pool. Just a few weeks ago, Olympic surfer Kanoa Igarashi announced a six-figure investment in a Portuguese wave pool a few miles from the ocean. “I think pools are the future of our sport,” Igarashi tells Inverse. “There are so many unique ways to do a pool. They’re building the pool in a place where it’s 10 minutes away from the ocean, where I go and surf all the time in Peniche, [Portugal]. Basically you’re guaranteed fun waves. You can schedule your whole day around surfing. ... You don’t have to worry about the conditions.”

Which is a huge selling point. Ocean conditions can be fickle, sensitive to wind and tidal conditions. Participants in the first heat of the day could surf in significantly better conditions than surfers in later heats when winds pick up and turn on shore and the tide drains. And when you’re running the biggest, most high-profile sporting event in the world, who wants to risk good competition for the weather?

Surfing Worthy of the Olympics

The World Surf League’s stated purpose for decades has been to put the world’s greatest surfers in the world’s best waves. But the Olympic mission ought to be different. Showcasing a sport’s diversity and an athlete’s well-roundedness is linked to the very idea of “Olympism.” According to the IOC, the authority responsible for running the Olympic Games:

“Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will, and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort. ... The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind.”

You can easily argue that “balanced whole” pertains to the sports themselves — helping them to defy a one-dimensionality that you often get in professional sports. Look at Olympic kayaking, snowboarding, ice skating, and gymnastics and you can see how the breadth of the discipline of surfing could be represented at the games. Skiing is another prime example: You can compete in the Olympics in cross-country skiing, Alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, ski mountaineering, and ski-jumping. So why can’t there be, say, aerial surfing, high performance surfing, long-boarding, tandem (mixed doubles), and body surfing?

The wave pool, which can generate identical waves — each wave containing multiple barrel riding sections and opportunities for surfing the open face — would allow for all of this. At the end of the day, it is a superior choice for judging speed, power maneuvers, and the integration of maneuvers into a stylish ride.

“I do think that a wave-pool technology is necessary for the Olympics,” Kelly Slater told Olympics.com, the official site for the games, back in 2018. “I really do. To have that consistency — to please the Olympics as it were. To please the [International Olympic] Committee so that they [see] what can really be on display for our sport.” Athletes could specialize or compete in an all-around competition, a sort of surf decathlon. The reliability and versatility of modern wave-pool technology creates almost limitless possibilities. And the wave itself — reliable, adjustable, mechanical in its predictability — would allow the judges to pick true champions.

No less important, a predictable wave machine wouldn’t require the Olympic Committee to set up shop for a few months every four years on a fragile piece of beach. Instead, you can find some in-land acreage to build an Olympic wave pool — something that will offer a home for future surfers to learn, train, or partner with a profitable resort that pulls in tourism dollars. More shredding for all. What’s not to love about that?