Way way back, nearly lost in the mists of time, I did an interview with a man named Jose Odriozola. It was 2011, and Odriozola and his team had just released images that took them six years to take. He was the co-founder of Wavegarden and excited about what the future held. At the time, no one had built a wave pool with a wave that looked quite so perfect, and Wavegarden’s shin-high, glassy runners were so good, relatively speaking, that the surf world sat up in their chairs and took real interest. Now, of course, things have changed considerably. Wave pools are dotting the globe. Different companies have different waves. The rate at which the technology is progressing is frightening. And on May 1, a Wavegarden wave poolopened a pool in the Swiss Alps.
Naysayers are, as usual, vocal. “Soulless!” they shout. “Sucking the soul from surfing!” And to each their own. They are allowed to say their nays, shouting them from the internet rooftops. But it cannot be denied that wave pools, for better or for worse, will push progression in surfing to new heights. When people started building parks on mountains, no one was shouting about taking the soul from snowboarding. When skate parks were developed, no one screamed about soulless skateboarding. They simply moved along with their lives, accepted the fact that a different aspect of the same thing was afoot, and went along their merry ways. Don’t want to ride a park? Don’t. Want to only skate in the streets? Only skate in the streets. And although, in my opinion, it should be the same thing in surfing… it is not. But that’s surfing for you, I suppose.
The new pool in the Alps, developed in Sion by the Alaïa Group, sits about an hour from Lausanne and a stone’s throw from the Matterhorn. It uses Wavegarden Cove technology, and the founder, Adam Bonvin is only 25 years old. His goal, one assumes, isn’t to suck the soul of surfing like an evil soul-sucker, but to simply bring surfing to the landlocked masses — and bring in a few bucks along the way, no doubt. So far, it seems, it’s successful. Pre-sales are through the roof.
Depending on how you look at it, it could be a good thing for surfing in general. With any luck, as more and more wave pools spring up inland, less people will feel the need to head to the coast, where, depending on where you live, lineups are clogged. The other side of the coin is that those pools might simply fuel a lust for the real thing. Only time will tell, but for now, Swiss surfers have a hell of a view from their new lineup.
