Lost Shore founder Andy Hadden on how the Edinburgh wave park will help Scotland's next generation of surfers

This autumn Scotland will get its first artificial surfing wave, when the new Lost Shore resort opens in a former quarry at Ratho, just outside Edinburgh. With a price tag of £55 million, it will be the most expensive sports infrastructure project to be completed in the country for more than a decade. It’s also a development consisting of many different but complementary elements, so we’re exploring these in a four-part series. The first three instalments, all available to read on scotsman.com, dealt with the mechanics of the wave pool, how the resort will focus on the health benefits of surfing, and food and accommodation. This fourth and final instalment looks at how the wave pool will enable Scotland’s elite (and not-so-elite) surfers to take their surfing to the next level.

Andy Hadden, founder of Lost Shore Surf Resort | Courtesy of Lost Shore

It is now almost exactly a decade since Lost Shore founder Andy Hadden first revealed his plan to create an artificial surfing wave in Edinburgh. “It’s been a long journey,” he smiles, “but a great journey, and we’re almost there.”

In many ways, the length of that journey has been a help rather than a hindrance. “Time has been one of the best commodities we’ve had," Hadden says. “If somebody had just handed me a bag of money a few years ago I would’ve been tempted just to push the button, but the reality is that [because of the time it’s taken] we’ve been able to do this correctly.”

Having previously worked in investment surveying and insolvency surveying, Hadden has an understanding of both how to manage financial risks and the consequences of not doing so. As a result, he says, he has been “trying to piece this thing together in the most risk averse way you can possibly do a surf park in Scotland.” His primary motivation, however, comes not from his background in finance but his background in sport.

“I come from a sporting family,” he says. “When I was growing up, my father [Frank Hadden, who coached the Scotland Rugby team from 2005-2009] was a PE teacher at an all-boys school, Merchiston. I grew up in the school grounds there, so I had access to tennis courts, I could go and do the high jump if I wanted to... I took all this stuff for granted, and it was only later in life that I realised what it had brought me, and I thought, ‘Well, not a lot of people have had these opportunities.’”

Dinner table conversations with his father, Hadden says, would often revolve around elite sports performance, particularly in “countries that are punching above their weight”. He also cites two books in particular that have inspired him: The Goldmine Effect by Rasmus Ankersen (“about pockets of sporting excellence around the world, so Jamaican sprinters, South Korean female golfers”) and Bounce by Matthew Syed (“all about the 10,000-hour practice rule”).

Creating high-achieving athletes, Hadden believes, has a lot to do with facilities. “Look at the ‘Fridge Kids’ down in Sheffield,” he says, “Jenny Jones and so on. They built a great facility, and then all of a sudden GB started medalling in snowsports. It became really apparent to me that if you could create a world-class surfing facility [in Scotland] there would be nothing stopping us. Do we now have the tools to create 10,000 hours for our Scottish kids very quickly? Absolutely.”

Young surfers enjoying the waves at an existing Wavegarden facility | Courtesy of Wavegarden

According to Hadden, however, simply building a wave pool isn’t enough. For Lost Shore to work as a centre of surfing excellence, it must also be integrated into Scotland’s existing surfing culture. “The best sporting cultures have always come from places of authenticity,” he says. “Look at All Blacks Rugby or Jamaican sprinting. The thing about cultures is, every new CEO who joins a business says ‘let’s try and change the culture’, but no – cultures are built over decades, and when you get them right, you don’t have to do much work.”

To this end, Hadden has served for several years on the board of the Scottish Surfing Federation, and he also says he wants to drive customers to surf schools all around Scotland by encouraging those who have learned to surf at Lost Shore to view taking their skills into the sea as a logical next step. “I see [Lost Shore] as a way of creating a much, much bigger surfing economy,” he says, “so we want to stimulate the surf schools around the coast. We want to be pushing our surfers out there and saying, ‘Yeah, you’ve learned how to ride waves here, now go out to the coast and go and surf in the ocean. It’s a different experience and it’s an extremely fulfilling experience.”

The Lost Shore Surf Resort being built at Ratho. Picture - supplied

Working in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, Lost Shore will have a Surf Lab on site: a room adjacent to the wave pool where, among other things, surfers will be able to watch instant video replays of their waves with their coaches. And, of course, unlike in the ocean, it will be possible for surfers to ride the same wave over and over again, allowing coaches to get “really detailed and nuanced about the exact movements they’re making”.

Coaching will be available for recreational surfers, too, Hadden says, both individually and in groups. “And the better you get, the adventure only gets bigger, because you can start looking around the coast and things really open up. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about seeing, people starting out on their own surfing journeys.”

For more information on Lost Shore, visit www.lostshore.com

To find out more about the mechanics of the wave pool at Lost Shore, click here

To find out how Scotland’s new surf resort was built using the latest health science research, click here

To read about the food and accommodation options at Lost Shore, click here