Air Shows Or SUP Racing: Where Does Olympic Surfing Go From Here? 

Ah, the Olympic Games. 

Created nearly 3000 years ago to celebrate the Greek god Zeus, the Olympics are one of few ancient traditions that is still widely practiced in the modern world. 

Granted, they’ve changed a lot. 

The Games are no longer a six-month ordeal featuring oxen sacrifices. The most significant change is that they have become larger and more inclusive. When the first modern iteration of the games occurred — after a brief 1000 year hiatus — in Athens in 1896, there were around 280 male athletes from 12 different countries in 43 events. At Tokyo 2020, 11,000 athletes of all genders from 205 countries competed in 339 events.

Married women are no longer thrown off mountains if they wish to participate, and a variety of new sports and activities are introduced regularly. Tokyo 2020 saw the arrival of skateboarding, sport climbing, karate, softball/baseball and — the reason we’re all here — surfing.

Despite being held in lackluster conditions, the first ever Olympic surfing competition was a success. As a result, surfing in the 2024 Olympics will feature 24 spots each for the men and women, an increase from the 20 respective spots in Tokyo.

Surfing is growing independently of the Olympics, so there’s no reason to assume it won’t continue to grow within the Olympic system. But how exactly will it grow? How should it grow? 

Let’s look at a similar “sport” and its trajectory. Snowboarding made its Olympic debut in Nagano, Japan in 1998. There were two events for men and women, Giant Slalom and Halfpipe. Eight years later in Turin, a third event was added to the roster: Snowboard Cross. 

By 2018, there were 5 separate snowboarding events for both men and women: slopestyle, halfpipe, cross, big air, and parallel giant slalom. Twenty years — or five Olympic iterations later — snowboarding’s role in the Olympics had more than doubled to accommodate unique aspects of a growing sport, attracting different athletes and new viewers. Each event also has slightly different qualification paths, of course.

The guy and gal who win surfing’s next Olympic gold medals may be the best surfers on that day at Chopes, or maybe even the best surfers in heavy left-hand tubes. But for a sporting spectacle as significant as the Olympics, to crown a “best surfer” based only on one very narrow — albeit very cool — category of surfing feels limited. Surfing has many nuances and unique scoreable criteria. Why not have a handful of different events?

The 2028 Olympics will be in Los Angeles. Surfing has already been confirmed, but what exactly it will look like is still being fleshed out between the IOC [International Olympic Committee] and the ISA [International Surfing Association].  

Why not run a longboard contest at Malibu, a high performance event at Lowers, an air comp at the soon-to-be finished Palm Springs wave pool? 

A qualification system already exists for high performance surfing. For the longboarding event, we could draw top seeds from the Longboard World Tour and the ISA could potentially run a Longboarding World Games, similar to what exists for shortboarding now — or introduce it as a division to run alongside the shortboarding event. 

That leaves my proposal for the air event. More complex, seeing as this discipline does not have its own competitive system. Stab High could morph into a qualification route for an Olympic Air event, but there would need to be more to it than just one event. A possible ISA World Games Aerial division would be ideal, even if it were just as a side-addition to their usual hi-pro events. 

Even an Olympic Air Division with 10 competitors sounds priceless — but it is not. The major issue with all of these ideas is, as always, money. Adding new sports and athletes to the Olympics is a sensitive subject because, due to Agenda 2020 (now called Agenda 2020+5), the IOC is trying to make the Games more affordable for hosts. Each discipline and athlete added to the Games implies a lot of cost, so it’s not as easy as “add 4 new disciplines and 100 new athletes” without major pushback. 

The IOC did not respond to our emails (nerds). But what does the ISA think about my propositions? 

“We’re currently in a detailed review process with the organizers and the International Olympic Committee who are taking into account many factors including global participation, popularity, costs and media appeal,” says ISA Marketing/Media Director Federico Ferroni. “We’ve proposed the inclusion of Longboard and Stand Up Paddle racing in LA.”

Wait, Stand Up Paddle racing? Are the ‘Lympics about to get Lairded? 

Per their site, “The ISA governs and defines Surfing as Shortboard, Longboard & Bodyboarding, Stand Up Paddle (SUP) Racing and Surfing, Para-Surfing, Bodysurfing, Wakesurfing, and all other wave riding activities on any type of waves, and on flat water using wave riding equipment.” 

So, they have to look after more than just surfing as we know it. But it’s a good sign that they pitched longboarding over wakesurfing — we like the idea of Joel Tudor in The Games. Hopefully the Court Of Arbitration of Sport will have his back should any herb related discrepancies arise. 

Federico said it’s too early to know where, exactly, surfing will be held in 2028, but he did make it clear that wave pools would not be a part of the Olympics in the near-future. “We don’t expect wave pools will be used until after 2032, since the 2028 and 2032 Games will be held in wave rich areas (Southern California and Gold Coast). In addition to the new disciplines, we will continue to push for a larger quota of surfers, which will not only benefit the world’s top surfers, but also help us always push for greater global diversity.”

One can only imagine how much wavepool technology will have developed by 2036. The growth of surfing — the surfing that we all know and love, not SUP Racing — will eventually be reflected on an Olympic level. While it’s easy to grumble about more exposure, the reality is that we have an incredible pastime and the world has picked up on it. 

So, we might as well give them a fucking air comp.