Italo Ferreira Vs Brazil’s New Metropolitan Wavepool – Who Wins?
PerfectSwell + American Wave Machines tease their newest tech in São Paulo, Brazil.
The drone shot lingers over the São Paulo skyline, the Estaiada Bridge casting its long shadow over a city where the ocean is a distant memory. But below, beneath the steel and glass, a mechanical wave unfurls—a ribbon of cobalt rolling through the São Paulo Surf Club’s PerfectSwell basin. And on its first-ever wave? Surfing’s first Olympic gold medallist and 2019 World Champ Italo Ferreira, a human cannonball clad in swooshes, launches skyward, limbs sprawling in midair before reattaching like a Transformer returning to its battle stance.
Brazil has, rather quietly, become a superpower in the wave pool arms race. While the United States and Australia bicker over prototypes and proprietary tech, Brazil has been laying foundations. There’s Boa Vista Village. There’s Surfland in Florianópolis. There’s Praia da Grama, with its artificially chlorinated take on the Mentawai Islands.
And now there’s São Paulo Surf Club, a private sanctuary for the city’s elite, where the usual trappings of wealth—beach tennis courts, pickleball, a spa, a restaurant curated to match the aesthetic ambitions of its patrons—are now accessorized with a surf break.
Spanning 220 meters in length, the São Paulo Surf Club’s surf pool features PerfectSwell technology from American Wave Machines, which JHSF has exclusive rights to in Brazil. The McFly wave, a newly designed wave combining a barrel section followed by an aerial section, was put through its paces by Ferreira and company. The system is capable of generating a variety of wave types, lasting up to 22 seconds.
“I was eager to see how the project was coming along. Being one of the first surfers to test this technology at the club, especially in the heart of São Paulo, was a unique experience. Seeing wave pools grow and introduce surfing to more people makes me really happy. I tested it, and it’s more than approved—I can’t wait for the grand opening,” reported Ítalo Ferreira.
And yet, São Paulo Surf Club is just a prologue. Another PerfectSwell pool is already breaking ground. Gabriel Medina has his own Wavegarden-powered operation in the works. Elsewhere, yet-to-be-announced projects whisper in the wind.
Once upon a time, Brazil’s CT surfers honed their craft on windblown beachbreaks, fighting for waves in lineups as cutthroat as the favelas were unforgiving. Now, their heirs—sponsored at age six, trained in high-performance facilities, and raised on a steady diet of artificial perfection—will be learning to land their first rotations in chlorine.
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