A Typhoon, a COVID Peak, Devastating Exits—and Tokyo’s Olympic Surfing Is Awesome
When Olympic organizers heard Typhoon Nepartak was heading their way across the Pacific, it must have felt like a storm too far. Delayed for a year by a still-raging global pandemic and with athletes forced to compete in empty arenas, these Tokyo Games have had no luck.
But one group of athletes—in the brand-new Olympic sport of surfing—celebrated the news and even moved their gold-medal rounds forward by 24 hours to make the most of the perfect storm conditions. The result, with the three final rounds of the shortboard event crammed into a single day on big if messy swells on Tuesday, was spectacular.
The first medal to be awarded was in the men’s bronze-medal round. Australian Owen Wright, who had to learn to walk again after suffering a traumatic brain injury in an accident in Hawaii in 2015, celebrated more like he’d won the gold.