Olympic Surfing Crashes on Tahiti Like a Wave

The 2024 Olympics are as Parisian as they can be. An opening ceremony float down the Seine, beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower, equestrian and pentathlon at the Palace of Versailles.

Except for surfing.

While most athletes are staying on cardboard beds in the Parisian Olympic Village, surfers are in a tiny, lush village in Tahiti called Teahupo‘o, sleeping on a cruise ship or in local residents’ homes. When surfing made its debut at the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021, athletes competed roughly 90 minutes away from the host city at Tsurigasaki Beach in Chiba, Japan. And as remarkable as the separation was then, surfing is now nearly 10,000 miles away from the 2024 Games’ core action.

With the event’s early timing, athletes skip the opening ceremony, but Olympians such as Team USA’s John John Florence says being in Teahupo‘o makes up for it—it’s one of his top three favorite surfing locations for the tropical beauty, deep blue water, and epic wave. And for anyone who follows surfing, designating Teahupo‘o as the Olympic competition host makes sense: The French Polynesian wave is one of the best in the world, and the village of about 1,500 people routinely hosts World Surf League competitions.

Any surfing competition in Teahupo‘o—Olympics included—can’t happen without help from the locals. For WSL competitions, locals host or rent out their homes to athletes, and watch the action on a kayak or surfboard. The same will happen during the Olympics, with several national teams choosing to stay on land instead of the cruise ship, as well as other people coming into town for the Games. (This includes one hundred international media members from outlets including Paris Match, Libération, and Figaro. Colin Jost is among them—the Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” anchor, who is a surfer himself, will interview athletes as part of NBC’s crew.) Roughly to 70 employees will be working full-time on the event, and 267 volunteers have also been recruited as well, according to Tahiti Tourisme.

Yet for all the experience residents have with hosting elite surfing competitions, many aren’t used to how the Paris Games are imposing on the village. There are marked upsides, as hoped—at the same time, however, some locals are also conflicted about hosting the Olympics in their quiet spot at the end of the road.

Marc-Antoine Bouvant, a Tahiti resident since 1966, tells Front Office Sports it’s “very, very good” for the Olympics to come to Teahupo‘o. (Bouvant is hosting a physical therapist for the Italian team.) According to Tahiti Tourisme, the country and the state will have invested nearly $3.92 million to host the surfing events. For instance, thanks to the Games, the island has seen infrastructure improvements: a new road, bridge, marina, gas station, and surfing watchtower. The extra security is also nice, he adds: He appreciates the police presence to keep locals safe from Olympic threats.

The arrival of Olympic surfers not only produces an economic spin-off effect of an estimated $11 million, but also gives locals extra economic opportunities, as they ferry eager fans to prime-viewing spots. During the events, Olivier Riou (who is hosting an Italian surfer) will charge a fee to load a dozen family and friends of surfers onto his boat and drive them to watch the competition. Some ticketed spectators will stand on the beach, but Riou will bring his patrons right next to the wave. “It’s the best place, I think, to watch,” he says.

But the crowds that descend on Teahupo‘o can be a mixed blessing.

Josh Humbert says the Olympics were actually more organized than the WSL in their housing rollout, knocking on residents’ doors to ask for a room at the inn. But Humbert, who is renting out his house and taking his family on vacation during the Games, has also been disappointed by a push for construction around town in preparation for the Games. Six bungalows have been built around his property in just one year. “​​That’s to me been the hardest thing to see, is that it’s basically turned into this big real estate grab,” he says.

The increased security presence has also made it harder for locals to come to the Games. Bouvant, for one, didn’t secure his ticket in time, so he can’t paddle out to watch the surfing like he normally does. Humbert says, “Everything’s going to be on lockdown for security reasons, so I wouldn’t expect it to be festive like the WSL event is every year.”

Plus, to accommodate Olympic surfing, the island has undergone physical changes. Organizers cleared a large swath of agriculture the size of a few football fields to build a parking lot. The gray slab sticks out like a sore thumb amid the island’s sprawling greenery.

“It’s nothing … for [the] Olympic Games, but for us in Tahiti, Teahupo‘o, it’s a really small village,” says Bouvant of the lot.

Humbert, a resident for a quarter of a century, is friends with the farmer who lost his taro field to the Olympics. “This is temporary stuff. So to see that kind of waste and that kind of poor planning, it’s really disappointing on the part of the local government, to be sure, and the Olympic Committee,” he says. 

Some locals including Bouvant and Humbert say they want to see longer-term investment from the Olympics, including for the town’s children. “There’s a huge lack of resources, so it would have been really nice to just see the Olympics come in and be like, ‘Oh, hey, yeah, we can help with that,’” Humbert says about the local grade school. “But instead they chose to tear out a giant taro field.”

Locals’ biggest environmental concern has been the judges’ tower, replacing the wooden one used for WSL competitions.

The original design of the tower would’ve weighed 14 tons and fit 40 people, requiring notable drilling into the coral reef and underwater pipelines to connect toilets to the island’s sewer system. Locals protested with marches, petitions, and campaigns on social media, arguing the plans were excessive and harmful to the coral reef. After all, the reef is one of the reasons why the surfing is so magnificent. Bouvant and another resident, Anuanua Lucas, made a documentary film about the opposition movement, while Humbert was one of the “members of the resistance” who opposed the watchtower.

In response to the criticism, organizers in November 2023 scaled back their plans to a lighter tower with fewer amenities and less drilling. The next month, things reached a tipping point when a barge used for tower construction got stuck on the reef and broke some of the coral. The tower was eventually completed in March.

It’s not the first time locals have butted heads with the Olympics over environmental concerns. Denver won the bid for the 1976 Winter Olympics, back in the days of having all events within an hour of the host city. Colorado’s mountains—a key location—are more than an hour away, which caused residents in the foothills closer to the city to protest, and eventually vote to block public funding to prevent the Games from coming. The 1972 bid for an Olympics in Banff also never passed due to environmental resistance.

The argument the Olympic organizers always make is that there’s going to be a legacy and that there’ll be benefits for your community after we’re gone,” says Adam Berg, who authored a book about the Denver bid called The Olympics That Never Happened. “If they were to [build the original watchtower in Tahiti], that would really be a salient example of how the Olympics and Olympic organizers are exploiting local communities for their own interest, like we’re going to use your waves and leave nothing behind that’s useful.”

When Olympic competition begins Saturday, fans watching all over the world will take in the tiny village and its massive wave, and quickly understand why the world’s best surfers are stationed so far from Paris.

“[Teahupo‘o] is a sacred place. You sit in the lineup [where the wave starts breaking] and you look back at the mountains, and there’s a real power or energy there. It’s something that you can’t really describe without experiencing it,” says Humbert. The Olympics, he says, are “an honor, in a way, for such a small town.”