Gold medalist swimmer Duke Kahanamoku a century ago had a dream that his other passion, surfing, would one day make it into the Olympics.
But in 1920, only a handful of people were wave riding – and mostly just in Hawaii, off the mainland of the United States and Australia.
Fast-forward 100 years and there’s millions of people around the world catching waves not only in the ocean, but in rivers, lakes and in a growing number of artificial wave pools.
Kahanamoku’s dream will come true in July as the world’s best surfers paddle into waves off Japan’s coast, for the first time competing for Olympic gold.
“He knew how powerful surfing was. For me, it was like a source of inspiration,” said Fernando Aguerre, president of the International Surfing Association and the man who, for almost three decades, relentlessly pushed to get the sport included in the Olympics.
When asked what took so long? “We were busy surfing,” he said with a smirk.
Surfing’s start
A hand-drawn image hanging in Aguerre’s La Jolla beach home shows Capt. James Cook’s ships off the Hawaiian coast sometime in the late 1700s.
It’s a pivotal moment illustrating the dawn of colonialism in Hawaii, but to Aguerre something else about the image is also significant: a small figure toward the bottom paddling prone on a surfboard – one of the first-ever documentations of a surfer.
Even then, surfing was a popular pastime in the islands. Hawaiian royalty rode longer, bigger boards while other islanders rode waves on belly boards, known as alaias, Aguerre said.
When Europeans arrived, bringing their religious beliefs, they thought surfing to be too hedonistic, taking away from time the Hawaiians could instead be working, so they banned wave riding.
By the early 1900s, there were only a handful of surfers still riding waves – one of them Kahanamoku, who not only gained fame around the world for his multiple medals as an Olympic swimmer, but who traveled the world helping to popularize surfing in Australia and the mainland United States.
Aguerre’s home is filled with museum-worthy artifacts that tell the history of surfing, including a sweatshirt signed by Kahanamoku and the other pioneers who revolutionized modern-day surfing.
Among the historical memorabilia are highlights of Aguerre’s own accolades: images of him with surf stars past and present, certificates from the International Olympic Committee and awards recognizing his accomplishments.
But who is this fast-talking, flamboyant surfer known for his extravagant outfits who has made getting surfing into the Olympic his life-long passion?
“He could have just enjoyed his life surfing, without ever working,” said Greg Cruse, CEO of USA Surfing. “Instead he decided to dedicate himself to getting surfing in the Olympics and running the ISA.”
The feat was like “pushing rocks uphill trying to get this thing to happen,” Cruse said, “with no recognition really, just behind the scenes doing this. It was a complete uphill battle.”
Just a fantasy?
When Kahanamoku died in 1968, Aguerre was just a kid living in Argentina, where his mother introduced him and his brother, Santiago, to the ocean.
At the time, Argentina was under a military dictatorship with kidnappings and murders not uncommon.
“Surfing saved my life,” Aguerre said. “I was a little into politics, but I was more into surfing.”
In 1984, the Aguerre brothers created Reef sandals, growing it into a wildly popular flip-flop brand, quickly becoming part of surfing’s elite.
Aguerre landed in Huntington Beach when he first migrated to the United States.
“It allowed us to make a living and help thousands of people make a living as surfers,” he said.
In 1992, Aguerre surfed as a longboard competitor in France representing Argentina in the International Surfing Association World Games. That same year, he was named the first president of the Pan American Surfing Association, and in 1994 he was elected president of ISA.
The ISA, which was formed in 1964, once managed all surf competition, but the pro tour branched off in the ’70s, today known as the World Surf League. The international federation branch of the ISA remained in place.
Aguerre said he liked what ISA stood for – promoting surfing and competition around the world, even in places without an ocean – and that’s why he got involved.
“I didn’t know what I got myself into,” he said, remembering receiving a box full of papers and a check for $5,000 when he took the reigns of ISA – and that was it.
At that time, the organization had the motto: “A Better Surfing Future.”
“I believed surfing could have a better surfing future than what we had at that time,” he said. “It was basically a sport for white people, mostly male. No people of color, no Latinos, Asians.”
But he envisioned how that could change. The ocean is one of the few remaining free places in the world, he points out.
“It has everything to be a place where you breach the differences between different parts of society: economical, social, cultural,” he said. “You can go surfing anywhere you want and no one is going to stop you.”
Aguerre remembers conversations during those early years about surfing one day getting into the Olympics. He had read several biographies on Kahanamoku and was inspired by the Hawaiian’s dream.
“It wasn’t much more than a fantasy” at the time, he said. “But someone had to do something about it, to put together an effort to make it happen.”
So in 1995, Aguerre took a surfboard to the International Olympic Committee headquarters for a meeting with then president Juan Antonio Samaranch, donating the board.
While Samaranch was intrigued and even excited about the prospects of including surfing, it was too late. New sports for the 2000 Olympic Games held in Sydney had been decided two years earlier.
“The sports were selected seven years before the games,” Aguerre said. “I didn’t make the cut.”
In 1996, the ISA created its own version of the Olympics, the ISA World Surfing Games. Aguerre created a “Sands of the World” ceremony where athletes pour sand from their home lands together to symbolize peace through surfing, trophies were swapped out for gold, silver, bronze and copper medals and surfers competed not just as individuals, but for their countries.
All of this was done by design, created to show that surfing could be held with an Olympic-style format. Huntington Beach hosted the first competition in 1996, shutting down Main Street with a elaborate parade and marching band, perfect offshore-winds and epic waves showing up for the week-long event.
“This was the beginning,” Aguerre said.
Part love, part lunacy
Many Olympic decision-makers knew nothing about surfing, Aguerre said. Most had not ever seen surfing first-hand.
“They didn’t have waves where they came from, that was one problem,” he said. “We had everything against us.”
Even people in surfing’s professional circles doubted it could happen. Aguerre said he couldn’t convince the agents representing Kelly Slater and Rob Machado – two of the hottest surfers at the time – to allow them to compete in the 1996 ISA World Surfing Championships. The USA was represented by Taylor Knox and Shane Beschen.
“So many people thought I was a lunatic, a smart businessman but pretty stupid in putting my effort into (the Olympics),” Aguerre said.
When the brothers sold Reef in 2005, having made a more-than-comfortable living, Aguerre was able to dedicate even more time to getting surfing into the Olympics.
For the past two decades, Aguerre has traveled the world making presentations at Olympic meetings, hobnobbing with a global collection of decision-makers who would dictate surfing’s future. He also met with surfers to convince them to get behind the sport’s inclusion – no easy task.
“Getting surfers together, to work together, is like herding cats or nailing Jell-O to the wall,” he said.
A businessman, Aguerre knows how to run numbers. By his calculation, he spent 12,000 hours to get surfing into the Olympic games. And as an average surfer, he catches six waves per hour, he estimates.
That’s an estimated 84,000 waves he did not surf, he said, instead spending that time lobbying to get surfing into the Olympics, he told pro surfers and the World Surf League managers at a meeting three years ago in Hawaii.
“This is pretty crazy, that somebody, instead of going surfing, does this,” he said. “For me, it was part love, part lunacy, part determination. Then when I got into it, I said, ‘I’m just going to paddle harder, see if I can catch this Olympic wave.’”
In the meantime, millions more people were learning to surf and more countries became part of the ISA membership, going from 30 countries to 108. The more countries involved, the more likely Olympic decision-makers would see the global reach of the sport.
Then, in 2016, efforts paid off: Surfing made the cut of new sports added to the Olympics. The ISA, with Aguerre at the helm, already was recognized by the IOC as the world governing authority for surfing, officially becoming an Olympic Federation.
Aguerre was the perfect person to work within the confines of the IOC, Cruse said, fluent in several languages, flamboyant, a huge and memorable personality.
“He was able to get in there, get into committees,” Cruse said, adding that advancements made in serious competitive surfing also helped. “He’s a brilliant guy. He’s the guy to do it. He persisted, he used all his resources.”
A historic feat
Surfers from around the world this week have been competing in the 2021 Surf City El Salvador ISA World Surfing Games, where the final 12 of 40 surfers will earn spots to compete at the Olympics.
“This historic feat is something that will live with them forever,” Aguerre said of the final original class of Olympic surfers that will be determined this weekend.
But 2021 won’t be the last time surfing will be showcased at the Olympics. Surfing has already been approved for Paris 2024, with the massive waves at Teahupo’o, Tahiti, part of French Polynesia, selected as the competition site.
Four years later, in 2028, the Olympic Games come to Los Angeles. While not yet approved for those games, surfing a few years ago was named California’s official sport.
As surfing gets ready to debut at next month’s Olympics, Aguerre thought it fitting to change the ISA’s motto from “A Better Surfing Future” to “A Better World Through Surfing.”
“I’ve seen what surfing does to people, to people who are having health problems, autism, war injuries, people with low self esteem, people with psychological problems, mental problems. I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s not just a hedonistic pleasure to surf. It is something else.”
