Big Wave Surfing and the Useless Quest for Surf Immortality

By now, pretty much every surfer on the planet has heard about the big-wave exploits of Carlos Burle at Nazaré late last month. If you didn’t, well, all you missed was Carlos saving tow partner Maya Gabeira’s life, then going back out and surfing what is potentially the largest wave ever ridden. At the same Portuguese hell-wave where earlier this year Hawaiian Garrett McNamara broke his own world record for the largest wave ever surfed, Burle, Gabeira, and a few other big wave chargers were out on a ridiculously huge day at Nazaré Canyon, one that saw the smaller sets serving up 60ft-plus waves.
 

Thankfully, tragedy was avoided that day and the worst to come of it was Maya’s broken leg. However, the fact things were almost disastrous has the surf world talking: do women have the skill to ride waves of this magnitude? At what point is a wave too big to attempt to surf? Should Burle’s ride even count toward the world record? A lot of the discussion stems from an interview Laird Hamilton gave to CNN following the day at Nazaré. Never one to shy away from speaking his mind, Hamilton ruffled a few feathers with sound bites like: “Maya doesn’t have the skill to be in these conditions. She should not be in this kind of surf,” and “If he’s (Burle) claiming he rode the biggest wave ever ridden, I’d say maybe he wiped out on the biggest wave ever ridden.” Strong words from a guy who wasn’t even there that day.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with Laird’s take on the whole thing, the question in my mind that we should be asking is this: at the end of the day, does surfing really benefit from this quest to ride the biggest wave? Sure, if Carlos’s ride at Nazaré does in fact break McNamara’s current world record, the surfing world will cheer and congratulate him on his accomplishment. It’s already happening now on surf website forums and message boards. But other than eye-popping photos and video footage and maybe some new hardware for Carlos’s mantle, what is really gained by continuing to push the limits of big wave surfing? To me, the consequences of the practice far outweigh any type of benefits that may come from a human hurling themselves over the ledge of a 100ft wave.
 

Would a wipeout here be "worth it"?

In a particularly well-written article on The Inertia, Teddy Endo plainly laid out why the continued quest for surfing immortality will only result in tragedy. “We are reaching a critical moment in extreme sports in which the meaning of life, and the meaning of sport itself is cannibalized by the search for the torrid spectacle of tempting death. It will be a hell of a show, but when it comes, let us never say that the blood of the young and reckless isn’t buried deep under our fingernails.”

He’s right. The only reason we as spectators take notice of such daring and dangerous feats is because there is the potential that something bad could happen, something as bad as a person dying trying to ride a wave. While I think that pushing one’s own limits is absolutely essential to personal growth, there is a fine line that extreme athletes like Carlos and Maya toy with in which they are no longer trying to advance their own personal limits, but rather defying death in order to satisfy the masses and achieve some sort of ‘hero’ status. As Endo explains, “The deepest problem in all of this is that in the age of the extreme arms race, our culture has bred a class of people who are pathologically incapable of turning away from risk, who are compelled by the very worst of their unique instincts – instincts that celebrity culture and hero worship have nurtured in them to the sharpest of edges – to seek out, over and over, the moment that will potentially destroy them.”

And make no mistake, someone will be destroyed in the continued quest for surfing immortality. It’s happened before – guys like Mark Foo and Sion Milosky, both incredible surfers who weren’t even trying to set any type of world record when their lives were tragically cut short. It’s only a matter of time before we as the consumers of surf media – through our demand for bigger, faster, scarier, deadlier – aren’t talking about the achievement of a record, but an unnecessary loss of life. And what good is surfing immortality if you aren’t around to enjoy it?