This summer, surfing is on TV. The nine channels of the Réseau 1ère, the overseas antennas of France Télévisions, broadcast the events of the WSL Championship Tour, the world surfing championships. Eleven stages organized in the four corners of the planet (in Hawaii, Brazil or even Tahiti), decisive for the pro surfers who collect points there for the qualification of the 2024 Olympic Games. On the program? Action, spectacular figures, beautiful powerful and threatening waves.
But for that, the camera that immortalizes these moments must be able to get as close as possible to the athletes and their boards. A technical feat much more complicated than we imagine. Between random weather conditions and equally unpredictable waves, how are these competitions filmed?
“You always have to adapt”
“For TV, surfing is a horror”, loose Marc Antoine Guet, specialized journalist. “It’s very complicated to film because unlike a football pitch, the surf spot, by its very nature, moves all the time,” he explains. This is particularly the case when the event takes place on beach breaks where the waves evolve according to the tides and the sandbanks, as in the Landes for example. “During the big competitions that take place in Hossegor, the spot can be at 2 p.m. just in front of the judges’ tower, and 200 meters further north or further south two hours later. You have to know how to adapt all the time with cameras that are mobile,” adds Marc Antoine Guet.
The reef (rock) beaches, lined with coral reefs, as in French Polynesia where the surfing events at the 2024 Olympics will take place, are a little less subject to these movements. But that does not make them more accessible spots. Surfers must cross the lagoons, where the water is shallower, to reach the depths offshore where the waves form. To film these spots, which can be up to several hundred meters from the beach, the production teams use cameras on board jet skis and drones.
So doesn’t the ideal spot to film exist? “No, you have to adapt all the time,” repeats Sébastien Vaïsse, former editor-in-chief of the magazine. Surf Session and production manager of the company ELOW, which produces a lot of live sporting events. “It’s up to us to take the initiatives to organize ourselves as well as possible,” he continues. There are, for example, incredible spots like Arica in Chile, these are landscapes with cliffs… And yet the lives are pretty.
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“Surfing is a sport of patience”
To the geological specificities of each place, we must add other difficulties, those related to time. Starting with the weather. We still keep in mind the driving rain in Japan in 2021, during the very first surfing events of the Olympic Games. A decor far from the postcard. Journalist Marc Antoine remembers a thick fog hanging over a competition organized one fall in the Landes. “It’s not like a stadium where lighting is possible. We had to wait for an hour for the mist to dissipate,” he recalls.
And then there is above all the very essence of discipline. “Surfing is a sport of patience, recalls Sébastien Vaïsse. We try to stall the competitions when the waves are the best possible. But despite this, changes in tide, wind, swell etc., a whole host of uncontrollable parameters, come into play and can vary the quality of the wave flow taken. »
In Tahiti, however, the spectacle is almost assured in advance. “The spot is super pleasant, there is a good frequency of waves. And then it’s a spot that’s already part of the World Championship Tour (WCT) so it’s already something that’s in place and that’s been mastered. It will give beautiful waves and beautiful images. »
“The real question is: who produces? »
When the waves are there and break regularly, is it the jackpot? Not really. In terms of audiovisual interest, another parameter complicates the task of the production teams. “The surfed waves represent 5% of the time filmed, and again, I include the replays in them…”, explains Sébastien Vaïsse. He develops: “In competition, a surfer who is in the water has a limited number of waves to take, 10 over twenty minutes for example. Knowing that a surfed wave, if it lasts twenty seconds, it’s huge! In Tahiti, it’s a five-second ride on the longest waves. That’s fifty seconds in total, so we have to fill in the rest.”
Insufficient alone to mount a program, these sequences must be integrated into a set of journalists, commentators and add replays or subjects edited upstream. It is also necessary to multiply the points of view and the angles to produce more images and to satisfy the televiewer. “We don’t want to see just a wide shot, we want to get into the action and we therefore need several cameras to feed that”, notes Sébastien Vaïsse.
Other considerations then arise, economic this time. “The real question is: who produces? If you have someone who is going to put a lot of money on the table, yes, there we will be able to deploy big resources, ”he said.
“What day will the final be? It’s impossible to say”
So many issues that make surfing a fairly rare discipline on television. Because if it is a particularly complex sport to film, its distribution is just as complex. “A football match that starts at 7 p.m. is easy to program on TV from the point of view of sponsors and advertisers. But for surfing, you never know when it starts,” says journalist Marc Antoine Guet. And to continue: “The judges look at the forecasts the day before an event. The next day they do what is called a call in the morning for a possible departure of the surfers at 8:30 am for example. And depending on the conditions, they decide to launch the competition if the waves are deemed good enough, or to shift. »
Surfing is one of the first sports to be streamed. It is watched mainly through the various channels of the World Surf League (WSL) or through a myriad of short sequences of replays on social networks. But what can we expect from a major event like the 2024 Olympic Games, with events that promise to be as spectacular as they are historic?
For Marc Antoine Guet, their distribution will be “a big constraint”. “Where everything is timed to the minute for each event, surfing risks putting them in a bit of trouble. I think there won’t be a lot of live, or on very specific sections, but the rest will be rebroadcast. They will have great difficulty fitting the events into their calendar, they will never be able to know when they will be launched, at what time and how. And when will the final be? It’s impossible to say,” he said. Surfing is a sport that puts patience to the test, on a board or in front of the small screen.