When are the Surfing Olympics? July 25-August 1, 2021. The full schedule is posted here.
Where will the Surfing Olympics be held? Tsurigasaki Surfing Beach, Ichinomiya town on Chiba Prefecture’s Pacific coastline.
Where to watch Olympic surfing? I will update this article as the secrets unfurl. So far, Olympicsvenue.com lists live broadcasts around the world. The platform, Kodi, offers steps to watch the broadcast for free.
Judges are interested in pushing surfers to the edge of their ability, so they want to see the surfer take most powerful, difficult wave. Pro surfers want those too. The waves that most of us would whimper and run from are exactly the waves that get the pros frothing. So the first part of the score is what the wave will actually ALLOW the surfer to do. The bigger the wave, the bigger the score, if they are able to “convert” that wave — to do some bigass maneuvers that are humanly impossible. Other factors include how the wave peels, how long it holds up, and how steep the wall (or face) is, especially in the first two turns.
Read MoreWhat you don’t see with the surfer:
Reflexes — insane. Thousands of pounds of wind and water are steamrolling, shifting, changing, morphing, in an ever-changing environment, and the surfer is adapting instantaneously through every second of the ride.
Decision-making — nuts. With all the variables described so far in this article, the surfer brings their thousands of hours of water experience, training, and talent to every moment of every wave. There is never a second that it relents. Decisions are made from the moment they see the wave on the horizon, until they have completed, or not completed, the ride.
Consequences — unparalleled. If you miss a ball in basketball, you disappoint your team. If you fall in gymnastics, snowboarding, pairs ice skating, you can be badly injured by the cold hard ground, but you still can at least assess your environment. If you misjudge a 10-foot wave, you could be drilled by the lip into a jagged reef, held down by the wave, cut, concussed, or drowned.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read More
