GOLDEN ASPIRATIONS

Lin Tianzhi

Dong Keying

Huang Moyu

Zhu Yan

Peter Townend

Zhao Yuan Hong

Qiu Zhuo.

IT was just past 11 a.m. a few weeks before the start of the Hurley Pro, and a solid south swell was producing overhead sets at Lower Trestles. The air was hot and sticky and the lineup was crowded, looking like a tepid pool dotted with gnats between sets. As I stood near the water’s edge, I watched Gabriel Medina, Ian Gouveia and Filipe Toledo trade lefts in preparation for the upcoming World Tour event. But it wasn’t Brazil’s best that brought me to the cobblestone break. I was there to meet the pride of another nation — one seldom mentioned in discussions about top-tier surfing.

Conversations in Mandarin filled the air as seven visiting Chinese surfers — three women and four men, ranging from 14 to 27 years old — sat to my left and right, watching a set pour through the lineup. A few of the surfers, already in their wetsuits, began a coordinated stretching routine. Two of the youngest boys, Qiu Zhuo and Huang Yige, stood next to each other, letting out ahhs of approval each time Medina or Gouveia smacked the lip and sent buckets of water skyward. One of the teenage girls, seemingly uninterested in the action in the water, was crouched over, drawing in the sand with a discarded tree branch.

Unlike Brazil, Australia or the United States, China isn’t exactly what you’d call a surfing powerhouse. In fact, before the 2010s, they were completely absent in almost all forms of competitive surfing outside of small domestic events or a few international longboarding contests. Among the almost 600 million people living along China’s coastline (the country’s entire population is 1.3 billion), only a couple hundred surfers exist, and almost all of them caught their first wave less than a decade ago. So when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced the inclusion of surfing in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo back in August of 2016, the Chinese government decided to take drastic