Explained: Why one Olympic event is being held more than 15,000km from Paris
Less than two hours before the sun rose over Paris on day two of the 2024 Olympics, day one was still going.
Paris may be the city of love and New York the city that never sleeps, but thanks to an island that sits more than 10,000km from either metropolis, this year’s Games might come to be known as the Olympics that love to never sleep.
So how is it possible that the first official day of the Paris Olympics lasted about 20 hours?
Did the DJ at the foot of the Eiffel Tower turn the beach volleyball into an all-night rave? Did another football match get delayed for several hours due to a pitch invasion?
No, it’s because of something far cooler and stranger than that.
It turns out the Paris Olympics aren’t confined to France. Not even Europe. They stretch from the French capital all the way to French Polynesia, more than 15,000km away.
That’s where the surfing competition is being held - more specifically, at Teahupo’o, the legendary Tahitian reef break.
So how did this seemingly bizarre decision to stage an Olympic event 13 time zones away from the actual host city come to be? And is it really as bizarre as it seems?
Let Olympics Explained answer that for you.
Where is the surfing for the Paris Olympics?
The surfing competition for the 2024 Olympics is being held in Teahupo’o, a small village on the island of Tahiti, which is in French Polynesia.
How do you pronounce Teahupo’o?
The anglicised version is something akin to “chow poo”, and that’s how you’ll hear it pronounced if you watch the surfing on TV. But as the video below shows, that’s actually quite far off from how the locals say it.
Why is the Olympic surfing in Teahupo’o?
The most obvious answer is because the waves there are awesome.
The competition itself doesn’t take place by the beach, but about a kilometre out to sea, by the famous coral reefs that are as synonymous with Teahupo’o as the waves themselves.
But those waves. Wow.
They are simultaneously terrifying and beautiful, perfect rolling barrels that thunder into the shallow reef with such force that it can’t help but make a boardrider wonder what would happen if that water was replaced by, I don’t know, a human head.
The surfing there is so good that Teahupo’o has been a regular stop on the professional World Surfing League tour for almost 30 years, having first come to the surfing world’s attention in the 1980s.
Now, like Pipeline in Hawai’i, Cloudbreak in Fiji and Bells Beach in Australia, it is one of the must-watch competitions on the global surfing calendar.
OK, so the waves are good, but there are plenty of beaches in France, too. Why not just hold the surfing competition on the French mainland?
It’s true that the surfing could have been held in France itself. Four venues there - Biarritz, Lacanau, Les Landes, and La Torche - put their hands up to host the Olympic event, and had decent cases to make given a World Surf League tournament was held at some of those breaks up until a few years ago.
According to Olympics organisers, the decision to choose Teahupo’o was driven by an “ambition to spread the Games across France.”
They went on to say “it offers an opportunity to engage French overseas territories and their communities in the Olympic Games … while showcasing France’s rich and diverse heritage.”
That statement came not long after the decision was originally made back in 2020, but is especially prescient after recent anti-government riots in the French territory of New Caledonia (also a small island in the Pacific, although it’s actually almost 5,000 kilometres away).
Did locals want the Olympics in Tahiti?
Whether many of the 280,000 people who live in French Polynesia actually feel engaged with the Olympics is unclear.
For starters, it’s very difficult for anyone to get near the event venue.
There are police checkpoints more than 10km away from where the surfing will actually take place - if you live beyond that radius, and don’t have an official residency permit or IOC accreditation, then it’s virtually impossible to watch the event live.
Even those who do have a pass to watch the action aren’t able to take their boat out onto the water as is tradition when the World Surfing League comes to town. Instead they have to watch from the river mouth, about a kilometre from where the competitors are.
As one journalist on the ground put it, “If you came here to watch the Olympic surfing live, you’ve blown it. Stay in the hotel and watch it on TV.”
Then there’s the infrastructure that comes with the Olympics. The requirements for surfing are fairly minimal compared to many other Olympic sports, but the construction of a temporary three-story tower for the official judges was met with stern local resistance, primarily over concerns of the impact on the reef that it would be drilled into.
There were no such concerns over the athletes village, which instead of being built on the island was instead simply put on a cruise ship that is anchored offshore for the next few days (some athletes and officials are renting houses on land instead).
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How do the athletes feel about it?
It seems the surfers are, on the whole, pretty happy about the choice of location.
“There’s a lot of excitement about the surfing venue for the 2024 Olympics being here in Tahiti," USA’s Carissa Moore told the official Olympics website.
It’s hard to find any blowback from the competitors but in the surfing community more broadly, there was some criticism. The biggest concern isn’t necessarily the distance from the Olympic hub in Paris, but the conditions the famous break at Teahupo’o might dish up.
Those giant, perfect barrels you see on highlights reels don’t necessarily appear every day, and making competitors and spectators wait around for days on end for the right conditions doesn’t seem very, to use a completely made up term, Olympicsy.
Where exactly is French Polynesia?
“Middle of nowhere” is not a bad way of describing it. It’s about halfway between Australia and South America, sitting just on the other side of the international dateline to most major Polynesian nations like Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. It’s nearest neighbour is the Cook Islands.
Lovers of fancy holidays, or fancy holiday photos on Instagram, can use Bora Bora as their point of reference - it is one of the islands that forms part of French Polynesia.
Is French Polynesia actually part of France?
Technically yes, although pro-independence groups there might beg to differ.
Tahiti, the biggest island in the five archipelagos that make up French Polynesia, became a French protectorate in 1842 after Catholic missionaries had earlier been expelled from the island.
Less than 40 years later Tahiti officially became a French colony, and in the late 1880s so did the surrounding islands that form most of what is now French Polynesia.
That changed after World War II, when, as anti-colonial movements swept France out of colonies across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, French Polynesia became a friendlier-sounding “overseas territory”.
The name “French Polynesia” wasn’t officially adopted until 1957, when two-thirds of voters chose to remain part of France.
Has an Olympic event ever been held outside of the host country?
Yes, it has! The equestrian events for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 were held in Sweden due to Australia’s strict quarantine laws.
At 15,600 kilometres, that seemed destined to forever be the record for furthest Olympic event from the host city. But the 2024 Games now hold the record, with Teahupo’o nearly 15,800 kilometres from Paris.
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