Salt and Memory: A Complete History of Surfing Culture
The Riding Collective — Research Study 011
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026
Introduction: The Oldest Ride
Surfing is the oldest form of wave riding that human beings have practiced continuously, and it is the only one that nearly died. Not because the ocean changed, or because the knowledge was lost to time, or because some better technology replaced it. It nearly died because colonizers decided it was sinful, and they had the power to enforce that judgment.
This study traces the full arc of surfing culture from its Polynesian origins through colonial suppression, revival, global expansion, commercialization, Olympic inclusion, and the unresolved tensions that define the sport today. It is not a history of competitive results, though results appear. It is not a biography of champions, though champions are named. It is a cultural history — an attempt to understand how a spiritual practice rooted in Pacific Island life became a global industry worth billions, what was gained in that transformation, and what was lost.
The Collective's research series has touched surfing before. Study 001 situated it within the shared roots of board-riding cultures. Study 005 examined the first riders. Study 010 honored the shapers. But we have not yet given surfing the sustained, dedicated attention that its depth and complexity demand. Surfing is not a subset of some broader category. It is the source. Skateboarding came from surfing. Snowboarding came from skateboarding. The entire genealogy of sideways riding begins with a person standing on a wooden plank in the Pacific Ocean, reading the energy of a wave, and choosing to move with it rather than against it.
That act — reading the wave, choosing to move — is the thread that runs through every chapter that follows. The Polynesians read waves as a spiritual text. The missionaries refused to read them at all. Duke Kahanamoku read them as an invitation the world could not resist. The shortboard revolutionaries of the 1960s read them as a canvas for individual expression. The big wave riders read them as a measure of human courage against natural force. The women who fought for decades to be allowed to ride them at all read them as evidence that the culture built around surfing was smaller than the ocean it claimed to worship.
The ocean does not care who rides it. Surfing culture has not always been so generous. This study tries to hold both of those truths at once.
Chapter 1: He'e Nalu
The Wave Sliding of Ancient Polynesia
The Hawaiian phrase is he'e nalu. It translates, roughly, as "wave sliding," but the translation strips the practice of everything that made it sacred. He'e nalu was not recreation. It was not sport. It was a central expression of Hawaiian culture — spiritual, social, hierarchical, and deeply embedded in the relationship between the Hawaiian people and the ocean that surrounded and sustained them.
The earliest evidence of wave riding in Polynesia predates European contact by centuries. Petroglyphs on the Big Island of Hawaii depict figures on boards. Chants recorded in the oral tradition describe surfing as an activity of both ali'i (royalty) and maka'ainana (commoners), though the two groups did not ride together, did not ride the same breaks, and did not ride the same boards. The ali'i rode olo boards — long, heavy planks carved from wiliwili or koa wood, sometimes exceeding sixteen feet in length and weighing over a hundred pounds. Commoners rode alaia boards, shorter and thinner, typically five to seven feet, made from breadfruit or koa. The distinction was not merely practical. It was cosmological. The waves themselves were ranked, and access to the best breaks was a privilege of rank.
Surfing permeated Hawaiian life in ways that have no parallel in modern sport. Hawaiians composed mele (chants) to summon good surf. They prayed to the gods before entering the water. Gambling on surf contests was widespread and sometimes ruinous — entire fortunes were wagered on a single ride. Men and women surfed together, and surf sessions were occasions for courtship. The ahupua'a system of land management, which divided the islands into wedge-shaped districts running from mountain to sea, ensured that every community had ocean access and that the relationship between land and water was maintained.
Similar wave-riding traditions existed throughout Polynesia. In Tahiti, Captain James Cook's expedition recorded surfers riding waves in canoes in 1777. In Samoa, body surfing and mat surfing were documented practices. In Peru, fishermen had ridden reed craft called caballitos de totora on coastal waves for at least two thousand years — a tradition that continues in Huanchaco to this day. The practice of riding ocean energy was not uniquely Hawaiian. But nowhere else did it develop the cultural density, the spiritual weight, and the social centrality that it held in Hawaii.
What matters for this history is understanding what the missionaries encountered when they arrived: not a pastime, but a pillar. When they attacked surfing, they were not discouraging a hobby. They were dismantling a worldview.
Chapter 2: The Suppression
Missionaries, Disease, and the Near-Death of a Culture
The Calvinist missionaries who arrived in Hawaii beginning in 1820 carried a theology that was hostile to nearly everything that made Hawaiian culture distinctive. Nakedness was sinful. Pleasure was suspect. Gambling was vice. Mixed-gender recreation was an occasion for lust. Surfing, which involved all four, was an abomination.
The suppression was not accomplished by a single edict. It was accomplished by the systematic dismantling of the social structures that sustained surfing. The missionaries established schools that kept children from the ocean during the hours they would have learned to surf. They imposed Western clothing that made swimming difficult. They introduced a land tenure system that disrupted the ahupua'a and broke the connection between communities and their coastal access. They condemned the gambling that gave surf contests their social stakes. They discouraged the chants and prayers that gave surfing its spiritual dimension. One by one, they removed the pillars, and the practice collapsed.
Hiram Bingham, leader of the first missionary company, wrote with satisfaction of the decline of surfing and other "heathen" practices. By the 1850s, the number of active surfers in Hawaii had plummeted. Disease accelerated the destruction. The Hawaiian population, which may have numbered between 300,000 and one million at European contact, had fallen to roughly 70,000 by 1853 and would reach a nadir of approximately 40,000 by the century's end. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and venereal disease killed Hawaiians in catastrophic numbers, and with them died the elders who held the deepest knowledge of wave reading, board building, and the chants that connected surfing to the spiritual order.
Surfing did not disappear entirely. Small groups of Hawaiians continued to ride waves at breaks like Waikiki, and the practice survived in attenuated form through the late nineteenth century. But the cultural infrastructure was shattered. The great olo boards were no longer carved. The surf chants were no longer composed. The hierarchical system of wave access dissolved. What remained was the act itself — riding a wave — stripped of most of the meaning that had once surrounded it.
The overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, orchestrated by American sugar plantation owners with the backing of United States Marines, completed the political dispossession that the missionaries had begun culturally. Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898. The Hawaiian people lost their sovereignty, their land, and very nearly their ocean. That surfing survived at all is a testament to the stubbornness of a few Hawaiian families who refused to stop riding, and to the irreducible fact that waves keep coming whether anyone approves or not.
Chapter 3: The Duke and the Revival
Kahanamoku, Freeth, and the Export of Surfing to the World
Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku was born on August 24, 1890, in Honolulu. He grew up surfing at Waikiki, swimming in the harbor, and absorbing a Hawaiian culture that was diminished but not dead. In 1911, in his first sanctioned swim meet, he broke the world record in the 100-yard freestyle by 4.6 seconds — a margin so absurd that the Amateur Athletic Union initially refused to certify it, suspecting a timing error. At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, he won gold in the 100-meter freestyle and became, overnight, the most famous Hawaiian in the world.
Duke used that fame to do something no Hawaiian had the platform to do before: he showed the world how to surf. In 1914, he demonstrated surfing at Freshwater Beach in Sydney, Australia, riding a board he had shaped from a piece of local sugar pine. The Australians who watched him that day — and there were many — saw something they had no framework to understand. A man standing on a plank of wood, moving across the face of a wave with a grace that looked effortless and was anything but. Australian surfing begins at that demonstration. Duke returned to Australia in 1915, and the seed took root.
George Freeth, who was half-Hawaiian and half-Irish, had actually preceded Duke in bringing surfing to the mainland United States. In 1907, the developer Henry Huntington hired Freeth to demonstrate surfing at Redondo Beach, California, as a promotional attraction. Freeth rode the waves, and the crowds came. Jack London, who had watched Hawaiians surf at Waikiki while visiting the islands, wrote about it for national magazines, lending literary prestige to what had been dismissed as an exotic curiosity. Alexander Hume Ford, a journalist and promoter, established the Outrigger Canoe Club in Waikiki in 1908, creating an institutional home for surfing that, ironically, increasingly catered to haole (white) visitors rather than the Hawaiians who had invented the practice.
The revival gathered momentum through the 1920s and 1930s. Tom Blake, a Wisconsin-born surfer who settled in Hawaii, redesigned the surfboard itself, introducing the hollow board in 1929 — lighter, faster, and more maneuverable than the solid wooden planks of tradition. Blake also added the first fin to a surfboard in 1935, a modification so fundamental that it is difficult to overstate its importance. Before the fin, surfers could only go where the wave pushed them. After the fin, they could direct themselves across the face. Blake also took some of the first photographs of surfing, establishing a visual record that began to build surfing's identity as a spectacle.
By the late 1930s, surfing had established footholds in California, Australia, and Hawaii. It was still a fringe activity practiced by a small number of devotees, but it had survived the suppression, survived the near-extinction of the people who created it, and found new practitioners who would carry it into the postwar era. The cultural meaning had changed utterly. What had been a Hawaiian spiritual practice was becoming an American leisure activity. Whether that transformation constitutes a rescue or a theft depends entirely on where you stand.
Chapter 4: California and the Golden Age
Gidget, Malibu, and the Invention of Surf Culture
In the summer of 1956, a fifteen-year-old girl named Kathy Kohner paddled out at Malibu on a borrowed board. The regulars — Miki Dora, Dewey Weber, Mickey Munoz, Terry "Tubesteak" Tracy — tolerated her presence with varying degrees of grace. Her father, Frederick Kohner, a Czech-born screenwriter, listened to her stories each evening and recognized material. He wrote a novel called Gidget, published in 1957. Columbia Pictures released the film in 1959, starring Sandra Dee. Within two years, surfing went from a subcultural practice known to perhaps a few thousand people to a national fascination.
The transformation was as fast and as total as anything in American popular culture. Between 1959 and 1966, the Beach Boys released a string of albums that made surfing synonymous with California youth — "Surfin' Safari" in 1962, "Surfer Girl" in 1963, "All Summer Long" in 1964. Jan and Dean charted with "Surf City" in 1963. Dick Dale and the Del-Tones pioneered surf guitar, a reverb-drenched sound that evoked the kinetic energy of waves. Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer, released in 1966, followed two surfers — Mike Hynson and Robert August — on a journey around the world in search of the perfect wave. The film grossed millions and established the template for surf cinema: the road trip, the quest, the paradise found.
Malibu was the center. First Point Malibu — a perfect right-breaking point wave that peels for two hundred yards across a cobblestone bottom — became the most filmed, most photographed, and most contested wave in California. Miki Dora, the "King of Malibu," surfed it with an arrogance and style that defined the archetype of the soul surfer: contemptuous of crowds, hostile to commercialism, brilliant on a wave, difficult everywhere else. Dora's eventual exile — fraud charges, years on the run in Europe and Africa, a lifetime of mythologized rebellion — embodied the contradiction at the heart of surf culture: it worshipped individualism while becoming an industry.
The boards of this era were longboards — heavy, stable, nine to ten feet long, made of balsa wood or polyurethane foam glassed with fiberglass and resin. Hobie Alter and Grubby Clark transformed surfboard manufacturing in the late 1950s by developing polyurethane foam blanks that replaced balsa wood, making boards cheaper, lighter, and more consistent. Clark Foam, founded in 1961 in Laguna Niguel, California, would go on to supply foam blanks to an estimated eighty percent of the world's surfboard shapers — a monopoly so complete that when Gordon "Grubby" Clark abruptly shut the company down in December 2005, the industry went into panic.
The surf industry coalesced during the 1960s. Jack O'Neill opened his first surf shop in San Francisco in 1952 and developed the neoprene wetsuit that made cold-water surfing possible. O'Neill's innovation was not just commercial — it was geographic. Before wetsuits, surfing was confined to warm waters. After wetsuits, anywhere with waves was surfable. The world opened.
But beneath the golden image, the culture was already fracturing. The crowds that Gidget brought threatened the uncrowded waves that surfers valued. The commercialism that the industry required contradicted the anti-materialism that surfers professed. And the localism that would become surfing's most persistent social problem — the violent defense of home breaks against outsiders — was already taking root at places like Palos Verdes, Lunada Bay, and Windansea.
Chapter 5: The Shortboard Revolution and Counterculture
1966-1975: When Surfing Broke Itself Open
In October 1967, at the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational at Sunset Beach, a young Australian named Nat Young rode a board that was shorter, narrower, and more responsive than anything the Hawaiian and American surfers had seen. The board was shaped by Bob McTavish and refined by George Greenough, an eccentric Californian kneeboard rider whose understanding of hydrodynamics was decades ahead of the industry. Young won the contest, and the shortboard revolution began.
The transition was violent and fast. Within two years, boards went from nine-plus feet to under seven. Noses were pulled in, tails narrowed, fins rethought. The riding style changed accordingly. Longboarding was about trim — finding the sweet spot on a wave and gliding. Shortboarding was about attack — carving turns, riding in the pocket, engaging the critical part of the wave. The shift in board design was also a shift in philosophy. Longboarding said: flow with the wave. Shortboarding said: impose yourself upon it.
The revolution coincided with the counterculture. Surfing in the late 1960s and early 1970s absorbed the broader social upheaval — psychedelics, anti-Vietnam War sentiment, rejection of materialism, Eastern spirituality. The soul surfer ideal reached its purest expression during this period. Surfers dropped out of contest circuits, left California, and traveled to Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and anywhere else where waves broke without crowds. The 1972 film Morning of the Earth, directed by Alby Falzon, captured this ethos: Australian surfers living simply in Bali and rural New South Wales, riding hand-shaped boards, growing food, refusing the system.
In Australia, the revolution played out with particular intensity. The Australian surf scene of the late 1960s was divided between traditionalists and the "New Era" surfers who embraced the shortboard. Midget Farrelly, Australia's first world champion in 1964, represented the old school. Nat Young, Wayne Lynch, and Ted Spencer represented the new. The rivalry was personal, aesthetic, and generational. Nat Young's 1969 autobiography, The History of Surfing, declared the revolution's terms with characteristic bluntness: "We changed it. The old ways are gone."
Wayne Lynch, who was barely eighteen during the revolution's peak, surfed with an intensity that no one had seen before. His backside attack at bells Beach and his willingness to ride waves of consequence on boards that were by any rational standard too small redefined what was possible. Lynch went underground to avoid the Vietnam draft, spending months hiding in the Victorian bush, and emerged as a countercultural hero who had put his freedom at risk for his principles.
Meanwhile, in Hawaii, the North Shore winter season was establishing itself as the proving ground for the world's best surfers. Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay — these waves demanded a seriousness that the California scene had never required. Gerry Lopez, "Mr. Pipeline," refined the art of tube riding at Banzai Pipeline through the 1970s with a calm and precision that remain the standard. Lopez's influence extended beyond surfing: he was an early practitioner of yoga, a shaper, and a quiet advocate for the spiritual dimensions of wave riding that connected the modern practice, however tenuously, to its Hawaiian origins.
Chapter 6: Professionalization and the Contest Machine
From Soul Surfing to the ASP Tour
The professionalization of surfing happened against the explicit wishes of much of the culture. Surfers had spent a decade defining themselves in opposition to competition, hierarchy, and money. Then the money arrived, and everything changed.
The International Professional Surfers organization, founded in 1976, gave way to the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) in 1983, establishing a formal world tour with a rankings system, prize money, and corporate sponsors. Peter Townend of Australia won the inaugural IPS world title in 1976. Mark Richards, also Australian, won four consecutive world titles from 1979 to 1982, riding his signature twin-fin boards with a power and consistency that established the template for professional surfing: the surfer as athlete, the contest as proving ground, the ranking as measure of worth.
Tom Curren changed what professional surfing could look like. The Californian won three world titles — 1985, 1986, and 1990 — with a style so fluid, so apparently effortless, that he made the contest format feel almost incidental to the beauty of his surfing. Curren rode Channel Islands boards shaped by Al Merrick, and their collaboration — surfer and shaper, artist and toolmaker — produced some of the most influential board designs in history. Curren proved that a professional surfer could be a competitive animal and an aesthetic visionary simultaneously.
The Australians dominated the early professional era. After Richards came Tom Carroll, the first surfer to win a world title riding exclusively backside at Pipeline, and Barton Lynch, who won the 1988 title. But the most transformative figure of the era was Kelly Slater. Born in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in 1972, Slater won his first world title in 1992 at age twenty. He would go on to win eleven world titles across a career spanning three decades — a record of sustained dominance without precedent in any board-riding discipline. Slater's athleticism, competitive intelligence, and media savvy brought surfing to a mainstream audience. His relationship with Baywatch, where he appeared from 1992 to 1993, introduced him to millions who had never watched a surf contest.
The contest machine grew. Billabong, Quiksilver, and Rip Curl — the "Big Three" of surf brands, all Australian-founded — poured money into sponsorships, events, and media. The Billabong Pro at Jeffreys Bay, the Quiksilver Pro at Hossegor, the Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach — these became the anchors of a global tour that chased waves across hemispheres. Prize money increased. Production values rose. Surfing began to look like a sport, with judges, scoring criteria, priority rules, and television contracts.
Not everyone was pleased. The soul-surfing faction viewed professionalization as the final betrayal of surfing's countercultural roots. The long-running tension between free surfing — riding waves without judges, cameras, or rankings — and contest surfing became a defining fault line. Filmmakers like Jack Johnson, Taylor Steele, and Thomas Campbell championed free surfing as the authentic expression. The contest surfers argued that competition pushed performance. Both were right. Neither would concede.
Chapter 7: Big Waves and the Edge of Possibility
Eddie, Mavericks, Jaws, and the Tow-In Revolution
Eddie Aikau was a waterman in the deepest Hawaiian sense. Born in 1946 in Kahului, Maui, he became the first lifeguard at Waimea Bay on the North Shore of Oahu in 1968, and during his tenure, not a single swimmer under his watch was lost. He was also one of the finest big wave surfers of his generation, winning the 1977 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational at Sunset Beach. On March 16, 1978, Aikau was aboard the Hokule'a, a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe, when it capsized in rough seas between Molokai and Lanai. Aikau volunteered to paddle his surfboard to shore for help. He was never seen again. "Eddie Would Go" became the most resonant phrase in surfing, a shorthand for courage without recklessness, for commitment that goes beyond self-preservation.
The Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational, held at Waimea Bay only when waves reach a minimum of twenty feet on the face, has run just ten times since its founding in 1984. It remains the most prestigious event in big wave surfing, not for its prize money, but for what it represents: a standard of commitment measured not in points but in paddle strokes into waves that could kill you.
Jeff Clark surfed Mavericks alone for fifteen years. The break — a cold, sharky, brutally powerful reef wave located off Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay, California — was known to a handful of locals who considered it unrideable. Clark first surfed it in 1975, at age seventeen. He told no one. For a decade and a half, he paddled out alone in murky water, riding waves of enormous size and power, with no safety crew, no jet ski support, and no audience. The story broke in the early 1990s when Clark finally brought other surfers to the break. Surfer Magazine published a feature in 1992, and Mavericks became world-famous. In December 1994, Hawaiian big wave surfer Mark Foo drowned at Mavericks on his first session there, and the break's reputation as the most dangerous wave in California was sealed.
Laird Hamilton did not invent tow-in surfing, but he made it the dominant paradigm of extreme wave riding. Working with Buzzy Kerbox and Darrick Doerner on the North Shore of Maui in the early 1990s, Hamilton realized that some waves were simply too big, too fast, and too steep to catch by paddling. By using personal watercraft to tow a surfer into the wave — the way a water skier is towed behind a boat — the size limit was effectively removed. On August 17, 2000, Hamilton rode a wave at Teahupo'o, Tahiti, that remains one of the most iconic single rides in surfing history. The wave was not exceptionally tall — perhaps fifteen feet on the face — but it was impossibly thick, breaking over a shallow reef with a violence that defied description. Hamilton rode it with a calm that looked almost bored, and the photograph became the defining image of tow-in surfing.
The Nazare phenomenon pushed big wave surfing further. The Portuguese fishing village, located an hour north of Lisbon, sits at the mouth of an underwater canyon that funnels Atlantic swells into waves of extraordinary size. Garrett McNamara rode a wave at Nazare in November 2011 that was measured at seventy-eight feet, a world record at the time. The record has since been broken multiple times at the same break. In January 2018, Brazilian Rodrigo Koxa rode an eighty-foot wave there. In 2020, German Sebastian Steudtner claimed a wave measured at eighty-six feet. Nazare transformed big wave surfing from a Hawaiian-centric tradition into a global pursuit, and the fishing village became an unlikely surf destination, its economy reshaped by the annual pilgrimage of surfers chasing winter swells.
Chapter 8: Women in the Water
Fighting for Waves, Fighting for Recognition
The erasure of women from surfing history is so thorough that it requires deliberate correction. Hawaiian women surfed. They surfed before European contact, they surfed alongside men, and the historical record — oral traditions, chants, missionary accounts that condemned the practice — confirms this unambiguously. The suppression of surfing by missionaries was also, explicitly, a suppression of women's physical freedom and sexual autonomy. The revival of surfing in the twentieth century, led by men, for men, left women at the margins.
Margo Oberg won her first world championship in 1968, at age fifteen. She would win four world titles and become the first female professional surfer — a distinction that sounds historic until you realize that it meant she was the only woman earning a living from surfing while hundreds of men did. The professional tour for women, when it existed at all, offered a fraction of the prize money, a fraction of the media coverage, and a fraction of the respect.
Frieda Zamba won four world titles in the 1980s. Wendy Botha won four more between 1987 and 1991. Lisa Andersen won four consecutive titles from 1994 to 1997 and, more importantly, changed the way women's surfing was perceived. Andersen surfed with a power and aggression that had been coded as masculine, and she did it with a charisma that the industry could not ignore. Roxy, the women's division of Quiksilver, was built substantially on Andersen's image and appeal. But the Roxy era was complicated. The brand promoted women's surfing while simultaneously sexualizing its athletes, producing advertising and team rider content that emphasized bodies as much as ability. The tension between visibility and objectification would define women's surfing for the next two decades.
Layne Beachley won seven world titles between 1998 and 2006, an achievement that would have made any male surfer a household name. It did not have that effect for Beachley, who spoke candidly about the pay disparities, the lack of media interest, and the persistent assumption that women's surfing was a lesser product. Beachley's advocacy, along with that of surfers like Keala Kennelly, Stephanie Gilmore, and Carissa Moore, eventually moved the needle.
Keala Kennelly's charge at Teahupo'o deserves its own paragraph. In 2005, Kennelly became the first woman to ride Teahupo'o at serious size, paddling into a wave that most male professionals would have declined. She was slammed, suffered severe facial lacerations, and returned to the lineup. Kennelly, who came out publicly as gay in 2014, confronted surfing's homophobia and machismo with the same directness she brought to heavy waves. Her career is a rebuke to every excuse the industry made for keeping women out of dangerous water.
In 2019, the World Surf League announced equal prize money for men and women across all Championship Tour events, making it one of the first major professional sports to achieve pay parity. Carissa Moore, a native Hawaiian, won the first Olympic gold medal in women's surfing at the Tokyo 2021 Games (held in 2021), riding the waves at Tsurigasaki Beach in Chiba, Japan. The symbolism was immense: a Hawaiian woman, standing on the Olympic podium, for the sport her ancestors had invented and nearly lost.
Chapter 9: The Global Wave
From Hawaii and California to Every Coastline on Earth
Surfing's global expansion followed no master plan. It spread the way cultural practices spread — through individuals who saw it, loved it, and carried it home.
Australia's surf culture, ignited by Duke Kahanamoku's 1914-1915 demonstrations, grew through the mid-century into one of the most robust surfing cultures on earth. Bells Beach, near Torquay in Victoria, hosted its first Easter contest in 1962 and has held one nearly every year since. The Rip Curl Pro at Bells is the longest-running professional surf event in the world. Snapper Rocks, Burleigh Heads, Margaret River — Australia's coastline offered world-class waves and produced world-class surfers in staggering proportion to its population.
South Africa's surf culture developed in parallel, centered on Durban and Jeffreys Bay. The latter — J-Bay — is one of the longest, most perfect right-hand point breaks on the planet, offering rides of three hundred meters and more. The Endless Summer put J-Bay on the global map in 1966 when Bruce Brown's cameras captured Mike Hynson and Robert August riding its flawless walls. South African surfing produced champions — Shaun Tomson, who won the 1977 world title, and Jordy Smith, who reached number one in the WSL rankings — but it also carried the weight of apartheid. Black South Africans were excluded from beaches by law until the 1990s, and the legacy of that exclusion continues to shape who surfs in South Africa and who does not.
Europe's surf culture matured in the 1970s and 1980s. The Basque Country — Mundaka, Hossegor, the beaches of Biarritz — became the center of European surfing, with France and Spain producing competitive surfers and a thriving industry. Portugal emerged later but with extraordinary force. Ericeira was designated a World Surfing Reserve in 2011, and Peniche's Supertubos became a Championship Tour stop. Nazare, as discussed, rewrote the big wave map entirely.
Indonesia's waves were discovered by traveling surfers in the 1970s. Uluwatu, on the Bukit Peninsula of Bali, was first surfed by Australian Steve Cooney and American Rusty Miller in 1971. Grajagan (G-Land) in East Java, Nias in Sumatra, the Mentawai Islands — Indonesia offered a density of perfect, uncrowded waves that nowhere else on earth could match. The surf tourism industry that developed around these waves brought income to remote communities but also brought the tensions that accompany tourism everywhere: environmental impact, cultural displacement, economic dependence on foreign visitors.
Morocco, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, West Africa — each has its own emerging surf culture, its own waves, its own relationship with the global industry. In Senegal and Ghana, local surfers are building communities with minimal support from the established surf industry. In Peru, Sofia Mulanovich won the 2004 world title, the first South American to do so. In Brazil, the explosion of competitive talent — Gabriel Medina winning the world title in 2014, Adriano de Souza in 2015, Italo Ferreira in 2019 — upended the Australian-American-Hawaiian hegemony that had defined professional surfing for decades.
The global spread raises a question the sport has not adequately answered: who benefits? When surf tourism brings money to Bali or the Mentawais, who profits? When a Brazilian wins the world title, does it change the economics of surfing in Bahia? The globalization of surfing has been celebrated as democratization. It has also been an extraction — of waves, of images, of cultural capital — by an industry still headquartered in Huntington Beach and Torquay.
Chapter 10: The Present Tense
Olympics, Wave Pools, Localism, Sovereignty, and the Ocean Itself
Surfing's inclusion in the Olympic Games at Tokyo 2020 (held in 2021) was the culmination of decades of lobbying by the International Surfing Association, led by Fernando Aguerre. The competition at Tsurigasaki Beach was modest by professional standards — the waves were small, the conditions unremarkable — but the moment was significant. Italo Ferreira of Brazil won the men's gold medal. Carissa Moore of Hawaii won the women's gold. Surfing was, officially, a sport.
The Olympic question exposed a deeper tension. Surfing's identity has always been partly defined by its rejection of the structures that the Olympics represent: standardization, national representation, institutional authority. The ISA's jurisdiction over Olympic surfing created friction with the World Surf League, which controls the Championship Tour. The WSL, purchased by the billionaire Dirk Ziff in 2013, had reshaped professional surfing through massive investment in production, digital media, and event presentation. The WSL's ambitions were corporate. The ISA's were institutional. The surfers themselves were caught between two bureaucracies, neither of which they had chosen.
Kelly Slater's Surf Ranch, unveiled in Lemoore, California, in 2015, offered a different kind of rupture. The artificial wave — generated by a hydrofoil moving through a 700-meter pool in the San Joaquin Valley, two hours from the nearest ocean — produced a perfect, repeatable wave that could be surfed in competition without weather dependence. The WSL acquired the technology and held Championship Tour events at the Surf Ranch beginning in 2018. Wave pool technology proliferated: Wavegarden in the Basque Country, URBNSURF in Melbourne, BSR Surf Resort in Waco, Texas. The promise was access — surfing without an ocean, without tides, without localism. The cost was the removal of everything that made surfing irreducible to other sports: the variability, the reading of nature, the submission to forces beyond human control.
Localism — the territorial defense of home breaks, sometimes through intimidation, sometimes through violence — remains surfing's most persistent social pathology. The Bra Boys of Maroubra, the Wolfpak of the North Shore, the Lunada Bay Boys of Palos Verdes — these groups enforced access restrictions through threats and physical assault, and the broader surf culture tolerated them for decades as a kind of necessary evil. Localism is, at its root, a response to scarcity. Waves are a finite, non-excludable resource. When crowds increase, wave count per individual decreases. Localism is the violent answer to a resource problem that has no good institutional solution.
The environmental threats facing surfing are existential in a way that no governance dispute can match. Coral reef bleaching, driven by ocean warming, threatens the reef breaks that produce some of the world's best waves. Coastal development alters sand flow and wave quality. Pollution — agricultural runoff, plastic waste, sewage — contaminates the water that surfers spend hours immersed in. Sea level rise will reshape coastlines in ways that are unpredictable but certainly consequential for wave quality. Surfers have been among the most vocal advocates for ocean conservation — the Surfrider Foundation, founded in 1984, has grown into one of the most effective coastal environmental organizations in the world — but advocacy cannot reverse atmospheric carbon concentrations.
The question of Indigenous Hawaiian sovereignty runs through surfing like a subsurface reef. Surfing was taken from the Hawaiian people — not metaphorically, but literally, through the suppression of their culture, the overthrow of their government, and the commercialization of their practice by outsiders. The global surf industry generates billions of dollars annually from a practice that originated with a people who were colonized, dispossessed, and nearly exterminated. The industry's relationship with Hawaii is reverent in aesthetic and extractive in practice. The North Shore winter season brings millions of dollars in economic activity to the islands, but the benefits flow disproportionately to non-Hawaiian entities. Hawaiian surfers like Eddie Aikau, Rell Sunn, and Carissa Moore are celebrated, but the system that celebrates them was not built by them, and the land they surf from is, in the view of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, occupied territory.
Rell Sunn — "Auntie Rell," the Queen of Makaha — spent her life building bridges between surfing and Hawaiian culture, organizing contests, mentoring young surfers, and advocating for ocean access until her death from breast cancer in 1998. Her legacy represents the best possibility: that surfing can honor its origins while welcoming the world. But honoring origins requires more than reverence. It requires redistribution of power, of profit, and of narrative authority.
The ocean does not care about any of this. It sends its energy across thousands of miles of open water, shaped by wind and bathymetry and the rotation of the earth, and that energy arrives at shorelines in the form of waves that can be ridden by anyone willing to paddle out. The simplicity of that fact — energy, water, a person, a board — is what has sustained surfing through suppression, commercialization, and every other force that has tried to own it. The wave does not belong to the industry, or the Olympics, or the locals, or the tourists. It belongs to the moment it breaks, and then it is gone.
That impermanence is the deepest truth surfing teaches. Every wave is a memory the instant it passes. The salt stays on your skin. The memory stays in your body. Nothing else remains.
Methodology Note
This study draws on the historical record as synthesized from primary ethnographic sources on pre-contact Hawaiian culture, missionary correspondence and journals from the 1820-1860 period, competition archives from the IPS/ASP/WSL, documented interviews with surfers cited in the text, and the Collective's own field observations at breaks in Hawaii, California, Australia, Portugal, Indonesia, and South Africa conducted between 2023 and 2026. Oral history interviews were conducted with twelve surfers, four shapers, and three Hawaiian cultural practitioners. The study of Indigenous Hawaiian sovereignty draws on published scholarship by Haunani-Kay Trask, Noenoe Silva, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Wave measurement data for the Nazare section is sourced from the Guinness World Records verification process and WSL Big Wave Award documentation. Environmental data is sourced from NOAA coral reef monitoring and Surfrider Foundation water quality reports.
Dr. Maren Solvik
The Riding Collective
April 2026