Surfing in the Olympics: New BBC Alba doc connects surfing’s past with its present

On Saturday, waves permitting, the first heats of this year’s Olympic surfing competition could hit the water at Teahupo’o – the mind-bogglingly beautiful Tahitian reef pass which (as French Polynesia is very conveniently an “overseas collectivity” of France) has been chosen as the surfing venue for the Paris Games, even though it is situated approximately 15,700km away from the Champs-Élysées.

Over the course of a ten-day waiting period, running until 5 August, a total of four days of competition are due to be held when the waves are at their best. As in other sports, points will be awarded, podiums mounted, medals dished out, winners crowned. Unlike many of the other disciplines in this year's Olympic programme, however, surfing is one of those sports that’s more than a game. Don't believe me? Then you should check out the new two-part BBC Alba documentary, Surfing – Marcachd an Tuinn/Riding the Wave. Sample quote: “Surfing is one of those sports that’s more than a game”.

As explained by presenter Ceitlin Lilidh – a surfer herself, based on the wave-rich Isle of Lewis, not to mention an award-winning singer and member of all-female traditional band Sian – surfing is “the expression of a culture associated with the people of the water”, those people, of course, being the Polynesians. “The art of gliding over the waves,” she continues, “forms part of their ancestral heritage.”

Ceitlin Lilidh presents Surfing - Marcachd an Tuinn / Riding the Wave on BBC ALBA PIC: BBC ALBA

And so, early in the first half of the documentary, long before we get to the pressure cooker of the World Surf League – surfing’s equivalent of golf’s PGA Tour, in which the sport’s elite battle it out for points and giant cardboard cheques – we are met with a slow-paced, almost meditative interview with the great Hawaiian surfboard builder and tradition-bearer Tom Pōhaku Stone. We see him walking barefoot through a Hawaiian rainforest, evidently fully immersed in its sounds and smells; we see him shaping a traditional Hawaiian surfboard out of a locally-felled tree, and we see him saying prayers and making offerings over the finished craft.

“It’s bringing back the spirit of that tree in a different form,” he says of the process of creating a traditional board, before adding: “Everything that everyone surfs on today, all originates from the boards that were designed by my kapuna, my ancestors.”

For the ancient Polynesians, who set out from southern China roughly 6,000 years ago in huge pirogues, landed in Tahiti just as the Roman Empire was on its last legs and discovered Hawaii at the time of the birth of Islam, mastery of the sea was a way of life. As Stone puts it: “That migration took us through so many islands, so many places... and surfing becomes an extension of that migration.”

Inevitably, perhaps, surfing came to play an integral role in this ocean-based culture, where it served not just as a form of recreation, but also as a status symbol. Everyone got to surf, but the best waves were reserved for royalty, and, on Hawaii, so were enormous “olo” boards, the plebs having to make do with shorter craft.

Tahitian surfer Vahine Fierro surfing at Teahupo'o, Tahiti, where she will represent France in the Olympics next week. PIC: Manea Fabisch / BBC ALBA

As Lilidh explains, however, this thriving culture was brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of Europeans in the 18th century, who introduced hitherto unencountered diseases to the Polynesians, decimating populations, and who also found it tricky to reconcile naked frolicking in the surf with their own religious beliefs, so did their best to ban it.

Just as it seemed as if the flame of surfing culture might be snuffed out for good, however, it was rekindled, in the late 19th and early 20th century, in the gentle rollers of Waikiki, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. First writers like Herman Melville and Jack London wrote enthusiastically about what they saw the locals doing out in the water – something London called “a royal sport for the natural kings of earth”. Then, the Waikiki beach boy Duke Kahanamoku amazed the world with his swimming skills, winning an Olympic gold medal for 100m freestyle in Stockholm in 1912, and proceeded to tour the world giving swimming and surfing demonstrations, introducing the sport of kings to California and Australia, which would soon become hotbeds of the sport. To illustrate just how far surfing has spread across the world since then, Lilidh also takes the opportunity to meet some of the leading lights of Scottish surfing, from 1960s pioneers like Andy Bennetts and Malcolm Findlay to current Scottish champions Craig McLachlan and Phoebe Strachan.

The central premise of the BBC Alba doc, however, is that when the Olympic surfing contest begins at Teahupo’o the wheel will have come full circle, and surfing will have returned home. There’s even a possibility that a Tahitian surfer could win gold – Teahupo’o locals Vahine Fierro and Kauli Vaast are both representing Team France. “It feels like time stands still,” says Fierro, of the experience of riding through the hollow, pitching centre of a wave at Teahupo’o. And, in a sense, time really will stand still when she catches her first wave of the Olympics, Tahiti’s surfing past reconnecting, if only for a few brief seconds, with our global surfing present.

Surfing – Marcachd an Tuinn/Riding the Wave Episode 1 is on BBC iPlayer now; Episode 2 airs on 30 July