Tahiti Surf Style: The Medal Runs, Results, And Winners’ Celebration

The world’s second-ever surfer-invasion of the Olympic Games in history is done and dusted. Gauging from the beaming faces of the winners and the runners-up at the medals ceremony overlooking some fantastic sundown wavesets in Teahupo’o, Tahiti’s harbor on Monday evening, quite a number of these surfers will be hanging ten on a few barstools in some of the French Polynesian surf capital’s clubbier bars and hitting the beaches until they have their fill later in the month.

That’s the drill out in Tahiti: The “Olympics” may be technically over as a medal-rush convocation for these superb athletes, but the Teahupo’o wavesets haven’t gotten the memo that the Olympics are over for now. Some people did get that memo. Lightweight sometime surfer/actor-boy, Saturday Night Live jokester and erstwhile NBC surf presenter Colin Jost turned in his mic, slipped out of his snappy NBC blazer and was safely winging it back from French Polynesia to Europe, mysteriously ignoring the finals yesterday. Poof, parachuted back into his “real” American-tv life.

But the Endless Summer of global surfing is madly up and running and will be doing that well past Labor Day down into the nether regions of the year — which is not to imply that “Labor Day,” as a concept or even just as a long barbecue opportunity has ever struck a great impression on the surf community. By definition, the surfers’ Endless Summer has no such back-to-school punctuation mark as that lone September weekend. Seventy-one per cent of the planet’s surface is water. The global littoral belongs to these water people, so they’ll keep on keeping on.

Among the aqua-people, one surfer who will certainly be sticking around Teahupo’o is local boy, Polynesian-Frenchman, and Monday’s rather spectacular men’s gold-medal winner Kauli Vaast, who was literally raised on these wavesets and who remains arguably the one surfer in the world who knows the peculiarities of these waters as no other does. Pictured above onboard his tender after his medal-winning heat, Vaast raised his shortboard in salute and motored in to great acclaim from the assembled boat-and-shore audiences. He was promptly thronged, pictured below in the red rash guard on the forward tender between the two larger spectator boats.

Boldly styling his ur-Polynesian arm-and-leg ink, certainly one of the most fashionable and politically important spectators at the celebration was the president of French Polynesia, Moetai Brotherson, below right, bestriding his own chauffeured jet-ski tender, as per the rules for political bigwigs worldwide. Presidents Biden and Macron have nothing on Brotherson in stylish transport, nor in snappy celebratory gangsta/hipsta-hand-sign vocabulary, nor in serious-looking security sidemen, nor do the French and American presidents have their own island-grown gold-medalist surfer. So, there! French Polynesia will be the coolest surf joint and will have the coolest president on any littoral, period. From his Gauguin-like goatee to his amazingly counterintuitive black-and-white beflowered shirt, Brotherson’s cool-as-a-cucumber fashion message to the world is: Bonjour, le monde! Come on out to surf in Teahupo’o, the water’s fine!

The Olympic women acqua-people did well on their shortboards on August 5, with the ebullient, much-garlanded Caroline Marks providing Team USA with its lone gold. Running her a close second was Brazil’s graceful Tatiana Weston-Webb, and, yelling with delight in her final heat as she nailed bronze was France’s second medalist, Johanne Defay, pictured right on the podium set on the medal-party point overlooking the bay. Superb athletes, bright faces full of life, theirs is the beauty unlike any other, honed in competition.

Australian champion and silver medal winner Jack Robinson, pictured left on the podium with Vaast, below, gave Vaast a splendid go, as Robinson himself was given a great fight in the semifinal heat earlier in the day by the ebullient men’s bronze winner and irrepressible aerialist from Brazil, Gabriel Medina.

The camaraderie among surfers is at once more flexible and more intense than we might find in other sports, flexible in the sense that it can wax and wane as the individual competitions sharpen out on the water. There’s a simple reason for that: The ocean in this quite dangerous sport remains, always, the boss. What the athletes fight as they look to harness the right wave under the pressure of timed heats is Nature itself, and they fight that in common, together, while, also, fighting each other. Except for the sailors, no other set of professionally competitive athletes, Olympic or not, has to fight the ocean and its mighty whims as part of their drill.

All of which is to say, the August 5 semifinal and final heats were of high intensity, as befits any fight in any sport for Olympic acknowledgement. Below, the eventual silver medalist Tatiana Weston-Webb, every bit the falcon on the prowl, performs a textbook drop into into a big one in the final heat. Note the graceful arc of her wake to build momentum for the ride.

The “drop-in,” or for the laity, the moment at which a surfer “catches” a wave is a vertiginous affair, requiring precise positioning, and split-second burst of speed, then a jump up to get the footing right, and a swift drop into what surfers hope is the barrel. Below, silver medalist Jack Robinson drops into one of his semifinal waves, a heat that he won before stepping up into the finals against Kauli Vast.

Below, Vast demonstrates some of that gold-medal barrel-chasing form in the quarterfinals. Note his left forearm skimming along the wall of the “greenroom” as he moves. That’s not just for fun: it provides just tiny, extra — if highly oscillating — third point of support in addition to his legs, locked down by the downforce of his crouch on the board.

But trailing your arm in the wave goes far beyond this minor touch of support. It gives the surfer another highly sensitive avenue of communication with the grand natural motor of the ride. As all surfers know, waves talk back.