⅔ Of The Drilling Has Been Completed On Tahiti’s Olympic Judging Tower

Well there goes the all important surfers vote.

In case you’ve been living in a Puka shell, the Paris Olympics plans to hold their surfing event 15,705 kilometers away from the Eiffel Tower at Teahupo’o, Tahiti – the largest and highest island in French Polynesia’s collectivity of more than 100 geographically dispersed islands and atolls. 

Originally the International Olympics Committee (IOC) announced plans to unveil a new $5 million, 14-ton, 40-person, air-conditioned, toileted aluminum tower, which required knocking the old wooden tower town and drilling holes in the reef until it resembles swiss cheese to lay the new foundations.

Things came to a grinding halt when a barge carrying building materials ran aground, destroying a part of the reef and further enraging locals. The IOC pivoted by shrinking their plans and designing a “new tower”, which has the same dimensions as the current, ol’ faithful wooden tower that has served the ASP and WSL for decades.

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Scientists at the Mega Lab completed a study of Teahupo’o’s reef and concluded that the work from the barge path and tower construction could potentially impact 2,500 square meters of the reef and cause damage worth $1.3 million USD to the living habitat. 

Locals have argue ad infinitum that trusty old wood is good and sustainable enough to serve the 2024 Paris Olympics’s three-day surf event, and more tersely, that the Olympic committee is “lying” about their sustainability goals to trojan horse their real goal of poshness over environmentalism. 

More than 250,000 people signed a petition against the project. The International Surfing Association (ISA), the organization behind Olympic surfing, also made it clear they would not support the construction of the tower and proposed other options. 

But that’s all irrelevant now because the big boss, President Moetai Brotherson is “totally happy with how the work is going after the controversy over the judges’ tower,” he announced in a statement yesterday.

“Polynesians have accepted the solution that was proposed. “So far, around two thirds of the drilling has been done and they are going to start laying the foundation blocks,” he added.

“All the work is being followed by our services and everything is going well… We’ve not had any (more) coral broken.”