When South Korea prepared to host the 2018 Winter Olympics they dedicated a reported $109 million to build Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium. By modern standards, that’s chump change for a sports venue built to accommodate 35,000 spectators. The catch was that Korean officials never intended for the structure to be used outside of the 17-day international event. So once the Games left Pyeongchang, the stadium was demolished. According to a study by the University of Michigan, South Korea’s Olympic venue cost around $10 million per hour.
It’s just one example of the wastefulness and intrusion of local life that can come with hosting the world’s largest sporting event. Several venues built for the XXVIII Olympiad’s return to its home in Athens in 2004 are abandoned today, putting much of Greece’s €9 billion investment to waste. Part of Bosnia’s Olympic Sports Complex built for the 1984 Winter Games is now, literally, a graveyard. The list goes on.
All this, of course, provides fuel for the skepticism and doubt that plagued the latest Olympic infrastructure controversy — the judges’ tower built in Tahiti for this summer’s Olympic surfing competition. Local Tahitians spoke out against its construction, a petition calling for the event to use the existing wooden tower for WSL Championship Tour events earned 257,000 signatures, and international headlines touched on every angle of opposition. Those opposed argued that the planning had been done without local involvement, many believing they were misled. ‘Transparency” was, and still is, a word associated with the ordeal. Ultimately, the worries of local Tahitians were simple and straightforward: building a new tower could cause permanent damage to the reef, endanger marine life, and maybe even change the wave itself. With that in mind, was it really worth the risk?
A barge meant to carry construction supplies to the building site got stuck on the reef, damaged coral, and put heat on organizers insistent on building the tower. The International Surfing Association proposed alternatives in the eleventh hour. A group of scientists from Hawaii’s Mega Lab had mapped the reef and issued a public statement advising against planned construction. Still, the project moved forward.
“It’s a fight between David and Goliath,” local photographer turned Save Teahupo’o Reef activist Romuald Pliquet called it during the height of the opposition.
But after weeks of bad, high-profile publicity, suddenly, the tower was up. It was just there. Construction wrapped seemingly almost as fast as it’d started. Organizers were committed to building the revised $5-million collapsable structure on a total of 12 foundational pilings — a smaller version of the tower than originally planned. The international noise dulled. The war seemed over. Was this a case of Olympic organizers strong-arming locals, or had there been some kind of coordination and compromise? Had Goliath won and suddenly nobody cared? Or was it simply not that big of a deal after all?
“The Olympics have a long history of building these white elephant projects all over the world,” Surfrider CEO Chad Nelsen said during The Inertia’s EVOLVE 2024 in Laguna Beach, recalling how local surfers had gotten Surfrider Europe involved in the movement. “We ultimately decided, ‘Hey, this is going to have some impact on the reef. And more importantly, they’re not consulting with the local community that’s been stewarding and attending to those reefs for generations and generations and generations.’”
Dr. Cliff Kapono, whose research with the Mega Lab had been used to support the statement advising against the project, says scientists collaborated with locals to identify the potential impacts a new, larger structure might have.
“They showed us where the tower would be built. They showed us where the old wooden tower was, and working with the community, we brought this attention to the French Polynesian government and also the International Olympic Committee,” Kapono said. “They went ahead and built it. Despite the science that showed there’s an impact.”
Photographer Tim McKenna was the first person to give the public a look at Teahupo’o’s shiny new (scaled down) structure once it was finished. His images and footage became the outside world’s first objective view of the project.
“The fact that they did have that movement really helped us to get the authorities to be careful and downscale and do things right,” he told me in May, just before the tower was to be used for the first time ever in the WSL’s Tahiti Pro (Understandably, the WSL didn’t exactly advertise the brand new structure throughout their broadcasts of the event). He points out a short list of things that were nixed altogether, like a proposed trench that would have run from the shore to the original tower, for example. He says that plan would have provided things like power and water, but the local movement inspired officials to find other solutions. “They would have had to break a lot of coral.”
According to McKenna, a small minority of locals were the most vocal in their opposition and even the most radical during the media fervor leading up to construction. Not every Tahitian is against the project. But while the opposition demanded no changes at Teahupo’o — demands that weren’t met — their voices ultimately contributed to compromise. He also feels that the tower would eventually need to be replaced due to use anyway, given the WSL’s yearly stop at Teahupo’o. Granted, the existing tower has served the league without issue for two decades and there’s no reason to believe future events will require a bigger one, but the new addition is still assumed to solve any needs for the next 20 years.
“The wooden tower wouldn’t cut it (for the Olympics) because it was too old. The foundations were too old. There’s no way you could get proper insurance for a big event like the Olympic Games or even the WSL in the future years,” McKenna said.
Other infrastructure intended to last beyond this year’s three-day surf contest include updates to roads, an old marina, and even the pedestrian bridge — all longterm investments made by the Tahitian government.
Updates to one of the island’s marinas, including a new fuel station, now look like an entirely new facility for the locals. Photo: Tim McKenna
Whether or not this will add up to a net-positive or a net-negative remains to be seen. The tower is up now. Many say their initial worry was that they simply weren’t consulted when plans were brought forward. By the time their protests gained international attention and eventually the backing of objective researchers and even the ISA, local authorities had committed to upgrading the village’s existing structure. Pliquet, for example, still feels that lack of transparency in the early planning process continued through much of the construction too. He says locals were involved in the Mega Lab’s research project but not so much when it came to working alongside the developers associated with the construction.
“When we did the assessment using different kinds of cameras and technology known as photogrammetry, we saw that there was potentially about $1.7 million worth of potential impact to this reef,” Kapono says. “And that’s not knowing if that’s a good impact or a bad impact. But we say ‘Hey, over a million dollars potentially could be impacted for this indigenous community who depend on this resource through fishing, through recreation, through culture, and through surf.”
I’ve asked Kapono his stance on the whole issue now that the tower stands.
“The overall message was do we, as outsiders, support an institution that is exploiting indigenous peoples, for our pride? And that’s all I feel like what we wanted to do was just bring that attention and provide science as a tool to suggest an informed decision.”
He says the Mega Lab handed over the tools and technology they’d developed for their research to the local community.
“Now they can go back the next year, a decade, two decades and see — is there a change in the reef? And was the Olympics a part of that change? Maybe we’ll be able to make that correlation, maybe not. But to me, the win is people who wanted to know how to assess a risk were given a technology (to do that),” he explained. “We want those people from that community to be able to monitor their own spaces and make their own decisions. Some Tahitians wanted the tower. Some Tahitians wanted the Olympics. Others didn’t. That’s not for me or the lab that I belong to to decide.”
As Dr. Chad Nelsen points out, the people of Teahupo’o, with the world’s surf community behind them, showed that speaking up may not shut down a global event like the Olympics, but it can still affect change. Who knows what would have been constructed without the protests turning into a global headline?
“This one spot’s not going to make or break global coral reef health,” Nelsen says. “But it showed how much people care.”
Sadly, Pliquet admits feeling a sense of both eagerness and loss with the event finally here. But that eagerness isn’t excitement for the Games.
“The (people) of Teahupo’o are eager to regain their freedom,” he says. “The village no longer belongs to them.”
Once the Olympics have wrapped, the giant cruise ship sitting just off shore has left, and the tower itself is taken down until next year’s visit from the Championship Tour, he says they plan to do the first reef check. They’ll be applying the methods and technology shared by the Mega Lab researchers just as Kapono outlined.
“They hope that the reef check after the games will show a low impact on the lagoon,” Pliquet adds. “That’s all they want.”
And that’s really what the fight was about all along.
