Surfing Will Be In The Olympics, But Not In Rio

After a few hundred years of existence and around half a century of mainstream popularity, surfing will finally be featured in the Olympics, though it won’t be a sport in Rio. Rather, surfing will be featured in the 2020 Games which are scheduled to take place in Tokyo. The competition will be composed of twenty men and twenty women from a number of different countries. Of course, not all surfers are so happy that their sport will be in the games.

Well, surfing made the olympics. Another step in trying to cram surfing and surf culture into a pill that the mainstream will swallow.

— Mark Healey (@healeysurf) August 3, 2016

It’s going to be a very interesting event since surf competitions aren’t really like any of the other sports in the games. If it’s raining then they can still play golf or baseball or almost any other sport. But if there aren’t waves then nobody is going surfing. There are a few decent breaks in Japan but what will they do if the games land in Chicago? It has to be a really big day on The Great Lakes to host the best surfers in the world.

Today the IOC formally selected surfing as a sport for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games ? https://t.co/X1yDeHxGmb pic.twitter.com/cQFT8TUpWP

— World Surf League (@wsl) August 3, 2016

America’s superstar and wunderkid in surfing for the past few years has been Hawaiian John John Florence, and according to the WSL (The NFL of surfing) the blonde beach boy said “being accepted onto the Olympic stage is a great step forward. Surfing continues to grow and seeing it reach the Olympic level is really exciting”. However, it’s going to be odd to see how the sport progresses and how they decide to go about hosting the waves and choosing which surfers will compete. The sport is incredibly localized, the Brazilians would win if the sport was in Rio just like the Californians would win if the Games were in Huntington Beach.

Featured Image: [Flickr/Daniel Ramirez]

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