Why — And How — to Watch Women’s Surfing in the Olympics — Part 4 — The Wave

Now we journey into the details of the most torrid of love affairs, one with the most immediate consequences, and the most complicated relationship of a surfer’s life- the wave.

Unlike any other playing field, the constant in surfing is change. No wave is ever the same. Even in the most consistent breaks (surf areas), every wave poses a new challenge. It would kind of be like snowboarding, if the half-pipe kept shifting size and direction, if the mountain slid, rose, fell, and churned. If the snowboarder had to paddle to catch it to even try their graceful carves. If, in order to fly high above the edge, they had to choose the right one, and read the shifting banks, and navigate the angle of lift just as the edges collapsed.

Why — And How — To Watch Women’s Surfing in the Olympics -Part 2, The Wipeout

What you don’t see when a surfer falls off a wave, is what happens underneath it. Waves have a circular motion when they break that I could best describe as a churning combustion chamber. The foam, which looks soft and heaven-like from a distance, is actually more like a pounding, thrashing explosion, and when you are inside of it, you are a part of that explosion. Lest you think that smaller waves weaken in their intensity, smaller waves can be more hammering than large ones, because the enormous power of the wave is unleashed in a tiny corridor, with maybe just a foot or two of water to act as a “cushion,” — if you can call a thrashing explosion a cushion — between the surfer and the ocean floor.

Why — And How — to Watch Women’s Surfing in the Olympics (Hint: Because These Women Are Badass!)

It is not just because people don’t surf that they may not watch it. Very few people do gymnastics, or dive, or pole vault. Even fewer compete at an elite level, enabling them to grasp the subtleties of scoring. But it’s easier to understand what is at stake with these sports, because we understand the basic laws of gravity, the natural bend of the human body, the force it takes to spring to impossible heights, and the reasonable limitations of friction.

Surfing takes place in a world most people have never even entered — the ocean. And even those who may have ventured into the beckoning sea have rarely encountered the swirling, shifting, unpredictable environment once their feet no longer touch the earth.

Of those who have, while they may have felt the rise and fall as the waves move from swell to breaking crests, felt the majesty and buoyancy of salt water, few have a sense of what it feels like to fly along an open face, held by a force that confounds gravity, or to freefall from the height of a ten-foot building, leashed to a board with sharp points on its tip and bottom.