GOD FROM THE Machine
The August 1974 issue of SURFER magazine featured a satirical piece by Drew Kampion titled “How I Surfed And Won In The 1984 Olympics,” mocking the fast-approaching era of professional surfing. It opened like this:
“When the Olympic Games came to Hawaii in 1984, the Union of States, as has always been the custom, was allowed to name a new sport to the Program. Because of vast popular support in the Islands, and for many other reasons, the sport selected was Surfing.
“A huge Artificial Wave machine was constructed in a sleek concrete stadium; a Variable Reef and Wave Dissipator were added; Hawaii upped its promotion of Surfing. All competitive organizations within the organism of Surfing expressed delight with the elevation of the Sport to new heights of recognition and professionalism, albeit amateur professionalism. Many surfers, who had in their sights either World Contest goals or Pro Contest goals, raised their targets to the new apogee: Olympic Gold.”
That Kampion, over 40 years ago and a full year before professional surfing was even a thing, managed to so accurately satirize the state of professional surfing today was quite a feat of precognition. Wave pools, Olympics, right down to the collective hysteria their arrival has triggered. The future he so boldly predicted is here, and on a bleak November morning, across the road from a potato farm in Central California, we stood looking boldly into it—and it still looked like science fiction.
We were, of course, at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch in Lemoore, where a handful of surf writers had been invited by the World Surf League (WSL), the wave pool’s owner, to ride the futuristic break. While the “wave system,” as the WSL refers to it, has been public knowledge for two years, few have actual seen it in person, and there’s still a veil of secrecy (and a big-ass fence) around the facility itself. During construction it was passed off to locals as a fish farm. The secrecy is, in part, the WSL’s way of doing things, but they’re being especially cautious about rolling the wave pool out too grandiosely, as they themselves are still coming to terms with this technological wonder and what it might mean for the future of their organization—and the future of surfing itself. The wave pool is taking surfing across the Rubicon, a fact not lost on the woman in charge of
