Surfing is perhaps the oldest “extreme sport” in existence, and though its precise origins are unknown, most authorities agree that the sport originated in Polynesia over 800 years ago. The first written accounts of surfing appear in the journals of English explorer Captain James Cook, who witnessed Tahitians body surfing and riding waves in outrigger canoes in 1777 and a year later saw surfers riding waves while standing atop long wooden surfboards in Hawaii. Before the arrival of Westerners to Polynesia, surfing was an important cultural and recreational activity, particularly in the Hawaiian Islands where the chiefs maintained exclusive rights to the best surf breaks while commoners surfed elsewhere. By the early nineteenth century, the sport fell into a rapid decline under the influence of Western missionaries who discouraged surfing as a frivolous pastime [ 1 ].
Surfing’s revival is widely credited to the charismatic Hawaiian waterman and Olympic swimming champion “Duke” Kahanamoku who introduced the sport to California and Australia in the 1910s. Commercialization of the surfing lifestyle through movies and music in the early 1960s led to rapid growth of the sport along both coasts of the United States and Australia and a gradual spread into Western Europe, Japan, Brazil, and Peru. During this era, the introduction of lighter foam-core fiberglass surfboards and neoprene wetsuits catapulted expansion of the sport beyond a small cadre of rugged individualists and into the mainstream [ 1 ] .
The 1970s witnessed a revolution in surfboard design, with boards getting ever shorter, lighter, and more maneuverable. Shorter boards led to a new style of surfing which featured aggressive, carving, short-radius turns up and down the face of the wave, in contrast to the straight-line trimming and nose-riding of the past. These boards encouraged surfers to ride steeper, more tubular-shaped waves and allowed the surfer to generate speed along the length of fast-peeling waves. By the mid-1980s, surfers began experimenting with airborne maneuvers above the lip of the wave. A few years later, eleven-time world champion Kelly Slater began routinely landing aerials, giving him a competitive edge in surf contests.
Interest in big-wave surfing, which first developed along Hawaii’s North Shore in the 1950s, was rekindled in the late 1980s as surfers ventured out to previously unridden surf breaks such as Maverick’s (California), Dungeons (South Africa), and Killers (Todos Santos Island, Mexico) where waves over 10 m in height could be ridden given the right conditions. Catching these swiftly moving mountains of water required fast-paddling, long, tapered surfboards which tended to lack maneuverability and could become dangerously airborne during takeoff due to their large surface area. Though surfers were eager to push the size envelope, there were a few breaks such as Jaws (Maui) that on rare occasion produced even larger, faster-moving, gargantuan-sized surf. These waves appeared to be moving too fast to be caught by conventional means; no matter how daring, it seemed as if a paddling surfer could not generate the speed required to catch these behemoths.
Read more: Chapter 7: Surfing Injuries
Written by:
Andrew Nathanson, MD