I’ve just been watching footage of Kelly Slater’s new wave park in Abu Dhabi, and having seen this marvel of hydro-engineering alongside Slater and friends discussing which board is best for surfing it, I was struck by how far surfing – like most sports these days – has come a long, long way from its laid-back, ‘alternative’ roots of the mid-20th century.
Indeed, when it comes to wave parks in particular, surfing is now almost up there with sports like F1 in terms of engineering and technicality – it requires huge amounts of money and scientific know-how in order to develop and build a wave park, and the average surfer is hard pushed to afford more than two or three sessions at one over the course of a weekend; you can enjoy a track day in a Ferrari for little more.
For older surfers like myself there’s a definite disconnect between this and the haphazard search for waves that made up a surf trip back in the seventies and eighties when I first began surfing; for younger surfers, groomed on internet surf reports and webcams, surf camps and easy access to quality equipment and world class surf breaks, it’s no doubt just another part of the natural progression of the sport.
Whatever you think of the technology behind modern day surfing (even without wave parks there’s an enormous amount of tech goes into board, wetsuit and other equipment manufacturing), there’s no doubt that along with the tech there’s been an exponential rise in the level of surfing prowess – moves that would have been considered impossible and waves that would have been considered unrideable forty years ago are now the norm, from Arctic Norway to Tahiti.
Along with this has been an equally exponential rise in the popularity of surfing, with any reasonably accessible stretch of coastline that gets waves – of whatever quality – invariably busy to the point of insanity on a good or even not-so-good swell – but that’s another issue.
Pretty much any sport is big money these days – look at the recent Paris Olympics, which featured not only surfing, but skateboarding, mountain biking, climbing and breaking, all fringe activities until quite recently, and all now cash cows for all manner of people and businesses.
The positives of this are that it makes more sports more accessible to more people as well as providing a great spectator experience, but for some sports – from the list above, surfing and climbing come to mind – increased accessibility can quite easily ruin them; few people want to surf crowded waves or climb busy crags, but that’s the norm these days unless you have the money to pay for access to remote locations that the hoi-polloi can’t easily access, when you may get a feel for how it was forty or fifty years ago.
Shame it now takes a fat wallet to enjoy something that could once be accessed with little more than a spirit of adventure.