You would be forgiven if you’d forgotten the Chinese wave pool footage that surfaced online back in January. It came with almost no explanation, but rumors put the cost of it anywhere between $4 million and $26 million.
Located in Anyang, a city in China’s Henan province, that first video seemed… odd. The waves were far ahead of the foil itself, which led to more than a bit of online speculation about the veracity of the video. But now, some five months later, it appears that there is indeed a real wave pool with a real wave. The quality of the wave looks a little iffy, but had this video dropped even just a few years ago, the surfing world would have lost its collective mind. Now, however, with Kelly’s wave and the Waco pool, our expectations for recreating the ocean’s awesome power has gone from knee-high to triple overhead.
Of course, with the global interest in wave pools at an all-time high, China’s tendency to create just about anything it puts its collective resources towards, the upcoming Olympics, and the country’s famously-fierce attitude towards training for the Games, it’s not all that surprising that the pool is real.
According to reports, a few members of the Chinese national surfing team, including Jairui Yang, Jingwei Wang, Moyu Huang, and Wei Huang, took three days out of the ocean to test the new facility, called the China Qingfeng Extreme Sports Center Wave Pool.
