Starting Saturday, 48 athletes climbed onto their surfboards to compete in the Olympics for just the second time. The 2024 Summer Games surfing events are taking place in Teahupo‘o, Tahiti—nearly 10,000 miles away from Paris in French Polynesia. This extreme distance means athletes are isolated from the vast majority of Olympic fanfare, now for their second straight Games.
Surfing made its Olympic debut in the Tokyo Games in 2021. It was already a strange Olympics due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but surfers also competed roughly 90 minutes away from the host city at Tsurigasaki Beach in Chiba, Japan. Team USA rented a house for the surfers, so they didn’t stay with other athletes in the Olympic Village in Tokyo.
In both Tokyo and Paris, surfing falls early in the Games, meaning athletes skipped the opening ceremony. (This year’s proved to be a wild spectacle.) And although organizers tried to replicate a smaller Olympic Village aboard a cruise ship to maintain another core experience, a number of countries, including the U.S. and Italy, instead organized their own housing in local residents’ homes on land (where athletes normally stay for World Surf League competitions in Teahupo‘o).
“It’s kind of a bummer we don’t get the whole experience of being in the Village and experiencing that part of it, because I think that’s a big part of the Olympics, being on this world stage with all these other types of athletes,” Team USA’s John John Florence, the world’s No. 1 male surfer, tells Front Office Sports. “I always thought that would be such a cool thing to be a part of it, and we’re kind of separate off on our own little thing over here.”
Florence (above) says some surfers will fly to Paris after the competition wraps for the closing ceremony. A direct flight from Tahiti to Paris is roughly 20 hours long.
Surfers should finally get their full Olympic experience in 2028, when Los Angeles puts on the Games. The host city is near some of the world’s top surfing destinations, including Lower Trestles in San Clemente, Calif., where the WSL routinely stages competitions including the world finals.
What surfers are missing in the full Olympic experience this year, however, being in Teahupo‘o might make up for it. Florence says it’s one of his top three favorite places in the world to surf, and it is a spot widely beloved by the surfing community.
“It’s so beautiful down there and it’s so mellow and it’s a place that I’ve gone to since I was really young, and so I feel really good being there,” Florence says. “That wave is incredible, it’s so powerful, it’s so beautiful. It’s hard not to watch it and be amazed, even if you don’t even know what surfing is.”
