Gymnasts on narrow beams, kids in helmets sliding around skate parks… these are dangerous activities, sure. But at least the wood and concrete don’t rise up and try to crush you on teeming razor reefs and run you over them like a meat slicer. Before the final rounds, Teahupo’o had already injured two surfers, and that was in less-than-favorable conditions, with a bigger swell expected to build. Australian Jack Robinson received five stitches in his foot in practice alone. The injury didn’t stop Robinson from eliminating American John John Florence in a third-round heavyweight heat amid a rising wave that handed both early eliminations. Frenchman Johanne Defay suffered a head injury in a heat Saturday that required four stitches.
“It’s a cheese grater,” legendary big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton said by phone from his home in Malibu, California. “If you fall, you’re going to tear yourself apart.”
Be sure of this: if bigger waves come for the quarterfinals, many surfers will “If it’s serious, it will eliminate most of the drivers,” Hamilton predicted.
Teahupo’o is the most philosophically interesting competition of the Paris Games, and not just for the question of whether it’s right to impose a judges’ tower on surfing or to build it on a shimmering coral reef. The place feels sacred. There’s something about the churning energy of that wave resolving into a smooth, glassy cylinder. It makes that word sacred feel powerful again, reminds you that it means something about true domination.
“It’s the most perfect wave in the world, the scariest and meanest in the world,” said Moroccan Ramzi Boukhiam. “It has two faces. You see it from the outside, you look at it from the boat, you think: ‘Wow, it’s beautiful.’ But when you’re inside, you fall, poof, it’s less beautiful.”
In 2000, Hamilton stunned the world by riding the wave at Teahupo’o, now known as the “Millennium Wave.” A photo on the cover of Surfer magazine immortalized it, a ledge of deadly water hanging over Hamilton’s head with the caption, “Oh my God…” The photo effectively opened Teahupo’o, once frequented only by a handful of locals and elite pros, to the world. “It changed people’s perspective on what’s rideable,” Hamilton said. The feeling of all that majestic green-blue energy was so profound that Hamilton cried afterward.
“It’s not so much the immensity of the wave that matters,” Hamilton told me a few years ago, about why he chases seemingly insurmountable masses. “It’s our insignificance. It’s when we become insignificant that we really start to participate. That’s when we become a harmonious act.”
Peruvian surfer Sol Aguirre had a similar reaction when she took on a wave in training. At first, she was scared, but then it transformed into a beautiful translucent tunnel and a cloud of white foam. “I started crying because it was such a beautiful ride, and I made it through,” she said, according to the official Games website. “You get through it, and it’s like, ‘I’m alive. I’m living it.’”
A harmonious act. That’s what Teahupo’o really needs to bless riders. There’s no subduing the wave. Water is 800 times denser than air. Saltwater weighs 65 pounds per cubic foot. Combine that heaviness with Teahupo’o’s unique oceanography, and it creates a unique hydraulic problem: The wave is a centrifugal reversing cylinder. It sucks water from the base of the shallows abruptly and powerfully up its face—and will carry you with it. Pick a line too high, and the water’s backspin will catch your board and spin you up and over the falls. Even a small blow from that heavy lip can do a fair amount of damage: A year ago, during a training camp, New Zealander Saffi Vette took a small step forward on her board, and the lip broke on the back of her leg. The blow was so hard that it tore her medial collateral ligament.
But if you survive the initial drop — the suction, the angle, the speed — it’s heaven. “This wave, because of how fast it comes up, you have to get out there early and be prepared to take the drop, the descent, and then ride it back up,” Hamilton said. “It’s all about the start. If you’ve got a good start, then you’ve got a good chance, and it can lead to a more spectacular descent. If someone does it right, there’s going to be an ease to it that’s deceptively difficult.”
Ease, harmony, this is what the competitors seem to feel when they get off to a good start. The best, those who win medals, will demonstrate a sense of collaboration with all this excitement. If Teahupo’o gains momentum, look at the Tahitians in the round of 16, Kauli Vaast in the men’s race and Vahiné Fierro in the women’s race. They are the ones who know the terrain best, who know the limits of the competition well.
Why does Teahupo’o evoke such strong emotions in surfers? Perhaps it’s partly a physical response, a release of tension. Surfing is a whole-body experience. The transfer of all that high metabolic energy excites neural signals. We are all creatures of light and electricity and tissue—within us is a swarm of fireflies. The chemical and emotional reactions triggered by stress produce a heightened clarity, an “alertness,” Hamilton said, “and we’re meant to experience that.”
Teahupo’o is a challenge, even on the easiest days. Nothing can surpass it. You can’t beat the ocean by going home to these cliffs. You just have to cooperate with it, until it lets you down.