An American's Guide to Olympic Surfing

Surfing has a reputation as the chillest Olympic sport, and it is 100 percent earned. Both Americans and Tahitians could win medals in Paris... errr... Tahiti!

This is part 4 of RINGS RODGE, a roughly 15-part series where Olympics obsessive and journalist Rodger Sherman breaks down a different sport every day heading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics. Rodger didn’t really time things right so he’s not going to be able to get to all the sports BUT HE’S GOING TO TRY HIS BEST TO DO AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

Today: Surfing!!!

Why should I care about Olympic surfing?

Surfing has a reputation as the chillest Olympic sport… and it is 100 percent earned.

Yeah, skateboarding is in the Olympics too. Not close. Turn into skateboarding and you’ll hear announcers YELLING about TECHNICAL MOVES WITH SPECIFIC NAMES and SAYING HOW MANY DEGREES THE SKATER ROTATED. That’s math. MATH! You say your sport is chill and bring me MATH?!?!?!?!

Turn into surfing and you will be treated to the ultimate ASMR sporting event. Your living room will suddenly be filled with the sounds of crashing waves and gorgeous drone shots of the ocean. When the World Surf League has a competition, I like to just cast the live stream on their YouTube channel to my TV and just leave it there while I’m writing. The heats are about 30 minutes long and roughly 85 percent of that time is spent watching the surfers peacefully bob up and down, waiting for the perfect wave. And when the wave comes, they’ll show you some beautifully shot slow-motion drone footage of the surfer riding the wave. It’s straight-up soothing.

Where exactly are they surfing in Paris?

Sadly, there are no waves in the Seine. The Olympic surfing competitions are in Teahupo’o, Tahiti, home to some of the biggest barrels in the world.

Tahiti???

Tahiti!

They… they can just do that?

Yeah! It’s actually not uncommon for a handful of Olympic events to be held outside the city where the games are held. The sailing events at this year’s Olympics are being held in Marseille. It’s common for most of the soccer matches to be played outside of the main city. And the LA 2028 games will have softball and canoe/kayak events in Oklahoma City instead of LA. (Obviously not difficult to find a surf spot near LA—although it is confusing that they’re simply using Santa Monica beach and not one of the famous breaks elsewhere on the SoCal coast.)

Tahiti is a bit extreme, though. It’s about 10,000 miles from Paris to Tahiti, the longest ever distance between an Olympic main site and an outlier Olympic event. The previous record was held by the equestrian events at the 1954 Melbourne Olympics, which were held about 9,000 miles away in Stockholm due to Australia’s equine quarantine rules.

However, people in Tahiti are not necessarily thrilled that the Olympics are there. In fact, they’re not necessarily thrilled about being a part of France—the President of French Polynesia is from a pro-independence party, as is one of the three legislators they just sent to Paris in the recent French elections.

So is this like Point Break?

No, idiot. It’s like Blue Crush, the movie where Hawaiian hotel housekeeper Kate Bosworth gets a pep talk from the famous quarterback she starts hooking up with during Pro Bowl week to bolster her confidence ahead of her first pro surfing event.

Unfortunately, since all the surfers are 10,000 miles from the Olympic village in Paris, they are excluded from any potential cross-sport sex-related confidence boosts which power so many Olympians to gold.

So who can win in Paris Tahiti?

In a neat twist: Tahitians and Polynesians!

Home-field advantage in your favorite sport has absolutely nothing on home-wave advantage in surfing. Each beach has its own unique break which creates a unique wave which can be surfed in specific ways. Brazil’s Italo Ferreira won the gold medal at the Tokyo games with sweeping turns and massive acrobatics—sometimes launching his board off the Japanese waves and into the air. That doesn’t work at Teahupo’o, where the wave is too heavy. Ferreira won this year’s WSL event in Tahiti by getting deep into big barrels and riding them out rather than performing big tricks.

Every year, the WSL hosts an event at Teahupo’o, and gives out a handful of wild card slots in the event to Polynesian surfers. And year after year, the locals significantly outperform expectations, often taking down elite surfers in head-to-head heats due to their years of familiarity with the wave. In the men’s competition, Tahiti-born Kauli Vaast finished second in 2022 and made the quarterfinals in 2023—even though he finished those seasons ranked 44th and 28th on the second-tier WSL Challenger Tour.

And this year, Vahine Fierro used her wild card berth to outright win the Tahiti Pro after making the semifinals in 2022 and 2023.

Fierro is from Raiatea, the second-largest island in Tahiti’s archipelago, and trains at Teahupo’o. She’s currently listed as the favorite to win Olympic gold, even though she’s never been a part of the top-tier WSL Championship Tour. (If the current standings hold, she’ll be in the final spot to qualify for the 2025 tour.) She’s not the world’s best surfer, but she might be the best at surfing the wave the whole world will be watching.

So Tahiti could win a gold medal?

Not quite—Tahiti doesn’t have an Olympic team. Vaast and Fierro are competing under the French flag, and if they win, they’ll play La Marseillaise.

Tahiti is part of French Polynesia, an overseas territory of France. They vote in French elections but have a decent amount of autonomy and also elect their own president and legislature. Some international sports associations do recognize French Polynesian teams, including FIFA, which is how Tahiti was able to qualify for the 2013 Confederations Cup. They were outscored 24-1, including 10-0 and 8-0 losses to Spain and Uruguay… but the one was worth the trip!

But the IOC defers to the United Nations on which countries to recognize as countries, and French Polynesia is considered France by the UN. (A handful of non-UN countries, like Puerto Rico and Aruba, already had IOC status before they adopted this policy in 1996, and are grandfathered in.) That means Tahitians almost never get to compete in the Olympics, since they have to make the French national team, and there are so many more people and resources in mainland France. There have only been about 10 Tahitians in Olympic history, including Tahiti-born Anne-Caroline Graffe, who won a taekwondo silver medal in 2012. But people from mainland Europe tend not to be elite surfers, so Vaast and Fierro were able to earn Olympic spots.

How exactly is surfing scored?

Surfers get about a half-hour to catch as many waves as they can. Each wave they catch is graded on a scale of 1-10, but only the two highest-scoring waves count. They’re graded on five criteria—this isn’t vibes-based.

But on the other hand… it’s kinda vibes-based. Two of the criteria ”commitment and degree of difficulty” and “speed, power, and flow,” and both are extremely relevant in Teahupo’o. Last month Brazil’s Tatiana Weston-Webb got a perfect 10 for riding the hell out of a huge barrel—no twists, no turns, just going full send on a massive wave.

She still lost the heat to Fierro, who had a 9.63 and a 8.07 while Weston-Webb had a 10 and a 6.07.

Can Team USA win any medals?

We’d better! We invented this sport! (And by “we,” I mean pre-contact Hawaiians in lands that were later annexed by the United States.)

If Fierro doesn’t win, on the women’s side, an American should get gold. The top two women in the current World Surf League standings are Caitlin Simmers and Caroline Marks, who finished first and second at Teahupo'o in 2023.

Most countries only get two athletes per gender, but Team USA earned a third spot at the 2022 World Surfing Games… and that spot is going to Carissa Moore, the 5-time World Champion and Tokyo Olympic gold medalist. An all-USA podium is entirely possible.

The top two ranked athletes on the men’s side are also Americans: John John Florence and Griffin Colapinto. (John John’s middle name is actually “Alexander,” but he was named after JFK, so “John John.”) Florence finished second at Teahupo’o last month, so he’s a real medal contender.

What sport should I cover next? (Well, not next, but maybe next week.)

There are 16 days to the Olympics and about 23 sports left on my list, so I can’t get to all of them. Drop a comment if there’s a sport you’d like to know more about—or a sport you deeply care about that doesn’t get enough coverage—and I’ll make sure I get around to it. (I’ll be extra sure to get around to it if you’re a paid subscriber!)