This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
France is not known for its breakers, so when the International Olympic Committee settled on Paris for the 2024 games, it needed to decide what to do with the 48 surfers competing for the podium. Install a set of artificial wave machines along the coast of Nice, morphing it into a Potemkin Redondo Beach for two weeks? Drop them off along the Portuguese coast and let them fend for themselves? Ditch the sport entirely in favor of, I don’t know, darts? Bodyboarding? A half-dozen more handball brackets? Nope, instead the surfers have been blessed with one of the best deals at the tournament. All of them have been flown to Tahiti—all expenses paid—to catch the titanic and immensely terrifying waves of Teahupo’o, one of the world’s most iconic (and remote) surf breaks.
Tahiti is six hours behind Eastern Standard Time, which means that the Olympic surfing competition is implanted in the pocket of North America’s simmering late-summer afternoons and evenings, long after the daily slate of events has wrapped up. That has given the sport an unlikely spotlight. July and August are notoriously absent of agenda-setting entertainment—the NFL season doesn’t kick off till September, and unless you’re a House of the Dragon fan, HBO Sunday nights are fallow. So, please, allow me to recommend the sublime virtues of professional surfing after a long day at work. There is simply no better way to unwind than to watch these brave men and women get pulverized by the untamed South Pacific sea.
The Olympics seem dead-set on ensuring that the surfing broadcast be preternaturally mellow and ASMR-like—totally conducive to a no-plans weeknight weed gummy. The camera is pulled back to a distant vantage in order to capture the surging waves in all of their terrible majesty, while commentator Joe Turpel adopts a whispered, PGA Tour–esque solemnity as he addresses the action. The structure of competitive surfing is fluid and metamorphic—matches are divided up into heats, in which the athletes bob out into the ocean and catch any waves they deem worthy of cresting. Their performance is judged by a panel of five judges, and at the end of the heat, their two highest-scoring waves are combined. (The best you can do is 20 points, and the worst is 0.2 points.)
In practice, that makes watching competitive surfing remarkably similar to parking on the beach for an afternoon, enjoying a couple of cold ones, with a gaggle of wetsuit-donned thrill-seekers on the horizon, who are all attempting to catch glory. This sport is peaceful, narcotizing, and relaxing. Yes, Olympic surfing lacks the spleen-squeezing tension of, say, a dicey figure skating triple axel or a break point in tennis, and though that drama makes for good television, I do enjoy the chance to decompress and leave the competitive angst behind, at least for an hour or two. It also helps that there are only three Americans—including 22-year-old phenom Caroline Marks—left in the bracket, and although I’m absolutely rooting for them, their downfall wouldn’t be quite as heartbreaking as, say, the high stakes facing the U.S. women’s soccer team and its opportunity to recapture Olympic gold. It’s surfing! You gotta hang loose, man.
It also needs to be said that Tahiti is beautiful and much more pleasant to look at than the antiseptic athletic pools or half-filled track-and-field stadiums that provide the backdrop for the rest of the Olympic offerings. Most Americans won’t get the chance to visit the island in their lifetime (travel costs to the South Pacific are notoriously prohibitive), so projecting its enormous volcanic mountains and crystalline oceans on our televisions for a few hours a night is the next best thing. We get to watch Olympians conquer the coastline with verve and creativity—disappearing into aquamarine tunnels of tumbling water, cresting the foamy tips—in a way that we never will. And afterward? They get to savor the best vacation anyone could ask for. That is the essence of competitive surfing: euphoria cut with a pang of melancholic wanderlust.
To be clear, the physical process of catching these monstrous, existentially threatening Tahitian waves is far less blissful than it appears on-screen. Teahupo’o translates to “wall of skulls,” after all. In a story about this year’s event in the New York Times, Australian surfer Jack Robinson compared the experience of latching his board to such a raw force of nature to “being in a massive tumble dryer or washing machine, but with reef.” It’s a sport not for the faint of heart, is what I’m saying. But don’t let the terror turn you off. We laymen have only two more glorious nights of Olympic surfing before the sport returns to its cordoned-off niche for the next four years. (The finals air Thursday night!) Let the immaculate vibes wash over you. Literally.
