ABSTRACT
This chapter explores surfing’s paradoxical journey from alternative lifestyle to Olympic sport, showing that the IOC has embraced surfing’s dominant populist discourse to symbolise youthful, “cool” and adrenalin-fuelled lifestyles. We map tensions in both the cultural and economic realms showing how different interest groups within the surfing industry and wider Olympic stakeholders were seeking control and ownership of surfing’s cultural, physical, and economic capital. The emergence of the artificial wave pool as a potential venue for Olympic surfing is used as a case study to reveal these intertwined interests in the run-up to Tokyo, and to Paris and beyond. While this new technology was highly contested among surfers centred on debates about “authentic surfing”, for the surfing industry it provided opportunities to solidify power in this rapidly expanding market. Yet for Tokyo, surfing was important in creating a particular Olympic legacy centred on “re-connecting” the Japanese people with the coast and life by the sea in the aftermath of the “triple disaster” of the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown in 2011. Lastly, we unpack the claims made by the International Surfing Association (ISA) and IOC about surfing’s potential impact for implementing aspects of Agenda 2020 such as diversity and universality, showing competitive surfing is an increasingly elitist sport, with limited geographic and demographic reach.
