Fool’s Gold

A sector of surfing now exists as an Olympic sport. Rather than being a mainstream honor, many of us believe this is a sad concession indeed. Such participation abandons surfing’s thus far unique role as a nature-sourced, noncompliant, all-too-rare life expression in an otherwise greedy, grabby, leveraged, conformist world. Further, what the Olympics represents as “surfing” contains only bits and pieces of what makes riding ocean waves uniquely beloved.

Olympic surfing was conceived by individuals who personally and wholeheartedly believe the act of riding waves is long overdue for acceptance by the very mainstream that surfers once escaped. Meanwhile, those who oppose it lament it as contrary to what surfing has always been and as something it has never whatsoever required.

Wave riding in the Games does not represent surfing as we know it. The ride adapts itself into something else to fit a mold, valid in its own right but far less elegant and natural. Presenting surfing as a more packaged, constricted, and rule-conform- ing sport for the sake of what? Heaven knows the world has plenty of the former while little of what surfing has traditionally represented. It’s an extraction of what’s usually been surfing’s uniquely invaluable difference.

Olympic surfing is an obscuring of a treasured and genuinely unique, rare, philosophical aberration, one born within the confines of its own conformations yet morphing outside and beyond to escape that strident system.

[Feature image: Early ’60s games- manship. Long before medals and national pride were at stake, the first-place prize was a T-shirt. Photo by Ron Church.]