Non-surfing public: “What are they saying up there?!” Photo: ASP/Cestari
The Winter Olympics, or the planet’s two weeks of becoming semi-knowledgeable about obscure arctic sports, has me in a fog. It’s turned into a daily backdrop of arcane technicality, made only slightly clearer by general nationalism. Bob Costas’ eyes closed shut after only a weekend of it.
Few large scale athletic competitions are judged so drastically by style and technique that seems impossible to identify to the non-professional eye. Tiny slips on ice, minor shakes on the slope, a hand on the snow: Deductions, deductions, deductions.
The minutia is often lost on me. Barring outright falls or incredible stand-out tricks; all the judged competition has looked pretty similar. And of course there are many Winter events that are based on time and speed, but even these require intimate technical dissection to determine the cause of said time and speed.
Then again, it’s the Winter Olympics, and I was born and raised in Florida. I’ve seen snow about a half a dozen times. The only skating I’ve done was of the roller variety, and although I have many friends who have ventured up mountains for snow sports, I stay at or below sea level by trade.
Hey, we had a couple of cold fronts in a row this season and the local water temp hit about 67 for a few days (it was horrible).
So because of all this, the Winter Olympics is truly alien to me. Humans competing on a distant freezing planet; ice-people capable of flying on snow.
That said, and in spite of this, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.
And watching it nightly, feeling like a 15th century astronomer with new telescope, it occurred to me that my vague understanding of the winter events must be really similar to how people feel when they watch surfing. And professional surfing, to the rest of non-surf literate public, must feel absolutely incomprehensible.
During the Olympics, I was listening to, and digesting, the opinions of the commentators. These on-air people talking us through the procedures, giving us the info on the all important technical aspects of each event, it made sense to assume that they were former athletes themselves, or at the very least, overly-enthusiastic broadcast hobbyists. And if these Official Commentators were agreeing or disagreeing with the judging, over-amplifying the moment or the athlete, unfairly criticizing the trick or the turn: I didn’t have much room to think for myself on the matter. I had to trust them.
I wasn’t going to spend four hours a day on ski jumping message boards trying to sort it all out.
It never occurred to me how important the narrative must than be. Surfers, and those who often watch competitive surfing but haven’t actually ever surfed (let us assume, for a moment, that some minor tribe of these people exist), can decide and judge the sport for themselves. We know what moves really take upper level talent, what take-offs are actually critical, the difference between groveling and turns made with necessity and flow. We don’t actually need the judge’s scorecard to tell us what we’ve seen. We don’t need anyone to explain to us which style we like best, and why we should. The commentators, the industry, and the judges: they can create the narrative they want, but the narrative and the truth are distinctions we all have the ability to see and make for ourselves.
But subtract our sum experience, and obviously, all one is left with is trusting the knowledge of others and the narrative given. That’s all I’ve been doing for two weeks of Sochi gazing. Accepting that the scores given, or how a singular commentator interprets those scores, have got to be at least mostly right.
As pro surfing tries to expand, that general public trust is why it really does matter that they get it right. You don’t get a chance to explain why someone won a two week water event: they just win it or don’t.
And surfing itself has merit well beyond that of reward and ranking. The very act is individually gratifying in a way that most sports never approach. It requires no judge, no scoreboard, not even a spectator. But as a new season on the WCT dawns, it should be noted that there is no point in squandering all three when you have them.
