In early July, a 23-year-old Australian named Tom Robinson set off from the coast of Peru in a 24-foot rowboat he built with his own hands. Robinson plans to paddle his boat for nine months, covering roughly 8,000 nautical miles of the Pacific Ocean, to reach his hometown of Brisbane in March, 2023.

No, Robinson is not crazy, or desperate, or being coerced; rowing across a daunting swath of open ocean is a dream he’s had since he was a boy. Robinson sees his upcoming row as the best opportunity to discover and explore his own limitations.

“I used to spend all my spare time rowing up and down the river by my home,” Robinson told me before setting off. “So, I guess it’s a combination of testing oneself, pushing yourself to the limits, and that love of the ocean—ocean rowing seems like the best way to combine those two.”

Robinson is not alone. In recent years, the tiny sport of ocean rowing has steadily expanded, pushed along by a handful of dedicated athletes, and by a growing collection of organized events, like the Atlantic Challenge, a 3,000-mile race between La Gomera, Canary Islands, and Antigua, and the GB Row Challenge, a 2000-mile circumnavigation of Great Britain. In both races, rowers can compete solo or in teams.Ìę Ìę

The sport has generated headlines for the amazing feats of its stars, and, in the case of solo adventurers, for the untimely deaths of others. In 2020, American rower and Paralympic gold medalist Angela Madsen died while attempting to cross the Pacific under her own power. And earlier this year, French 75-year-old adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin died while rowing across the Atlantic.

Both tragedies highlighted the dangers that are inherent in the sport. But the stories of both rowers have connected with a new generation of adventurers who, like Robinson, see purpose in the grueling, monotonous ordeal of crossing oceans with nothing more than the push of currents and a wellspring of grit.

“Being in a boat powered by oars in the middle of the ocean,” Robinson says, “is the truest sense of being able to get yourself out of a situation.”

The earliest-recorded attempt to row across the Atlantic occurred in 1896, when Norwegian-Americans George Harbo and Frank Samuelson paddled for 55 days between Manhattan and England. According to the website Ocean Rowing Stats, there have been 984 attempts to row an ocean since Harbo and Samuelson’s voyage, 694 of which have been successful.

Most of the latter have occurred in the last two decades, thanks in large part to races like the Atlantic Challenge. With its safety net, it’s no surprise that the event is absorbing the bulk of ocean rowing’s surging popularity. The 2022 race will be the largest ever, with 44 crews for a total of 137 rowers.

In 2023 the event is set to be even bigger, with 50 crews.

“It’s growing massively,” says Ian Couch, the race’s head safety officer. Atlantic Campaigns, the company that runs the event, has also just announced for 2023 the inaugural California to Hawaii Pacific Challenge—20 crews have already signed up.

Couch and other rowers point to various reasons for the sport’s swift uptick in participation. For one, social media allows rowers to broadcast their journeys in real time. But in the case of the Atlantic Challenge, it’s the race’s reputation for rigorous training and education prior to launch day that’s attracting so many first timers.

“Last year, our success rate was 100 percent, which was the first time in the sport that every boat, every rower, got across,” Couch says. “The rate is so high because we make it harder for people to start; it’s all about preparation.”

Today’s high-tech rowboats are also making a big difference. The boats are purpose built to withstand the abuse dished out by the ocean, even capable of self-righting when they are tumbled completely upside down by waves. Both their bows and sterns resemble the noses of a commercial jet, which improves aerodynamics. Though the coffin-sized cabins offer little space for creature comforts, they are watertight—even during a dreaded capsize.

Safer boats, social media and proper preparation may be the main reasons for the sport’s growth—but there’s also the age-old need for individuals to test themselves against the elements. Roz Savage, 54, was in her mid-30s when she quit her job as a management consultant to participate in the Atlantic Rowing Race as a solo competitor. Today, she sounds a lot like young Tom Robinson.

“I wanted to find out what I was capable of,” says Savage, who eventually became the first woman to row across three different oceans. “It’s not a rational thing to do, it’s something that comes from the heart rather than the head.”

Other rowers point to still another source of inspiration: the pandemic. The belief is that the coronavirus, in its total upending of the human perspective on health and mobility emphasized the importance of the outdoors as a place of healing and, ultimately, freedom. For many, the natural space that embodied those sentiments more than any other was the open ocean.

That was the case for chef and restauranteur Ben Towill, who plans to compete in the 2022 Atlantic Challenge.

“Professionally and personally, the last few years have been a real challenge to find hope and joy and to work through some really big things that have happened, says Towill, who is rowing alongside partner Charlie Layton. “And I think training alongside that experience, challenges come up at sea, mentally, you’re just conscious all the time that you’re working towards this goal.”

These west-to-east routes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, during the months when the races occur, offer favorable currents that help push crews toward their destinations. Atlantic Campaigns, Couch says, is also very selective about who they select to participate in the races. If a solo rower or crew is accepted, they are required to undergo extensive training that’s overseen by Couch and his crew. And once at sea, rapid-response vessels are on hand and never too far away from the fleet. Not surprisingly, since its inception in 1997, the Atlantic Challenge has been responsible for about 30 percent of all successful ocean rows. But, as Couch says, “the ocean doesn’t get any easier—once you are there on a boat, you are the same small person in the same small boat with the same challenge.”

Couch himself has rowed the Atlantic three times and the Indian once, as part of crews of various sizes. He has climbed mountains, trekked deserts, and speed-crossed the Greenland ice sheet. And yet, he says, “there is something particularly relentless about the ocean.”

Rosalind West, who completed the 2018 Atlantic Challenge as part of a crew of four, has for the past two years been studying the physiological impact of ocean rowing on the body. She has compared her findings from 27 Challenge competitors with those from research on Tour de France and Race Across America cyclists, ultra-runners, and explorers who have crossed the Antarctic ice cap. On average an ocean rower burns about 5,000 calories a day, which, West says, is less than the amount burned by a Tour de France competitor and similar to someone working their way across the Antarctic. The big difference with ocean rowing is how “it challenges every single system of the body at the same time,” West says.

“Because you’re not standing up, your calf muscles go completely, but then your core and arm muscles stay the same or get bigger,” West says. “Then, you’re rowing for a minimum of 12, maximum of 18-20 hours, a day. A Tour de France cyclist rides heavily for five hours and then they sleep and eat so their body can recover. In the Antarctic, you still get seven, eight hours of sleep at night. In ocean rowing, you don’t get that kind of recovery. You can’t stop, you can’t get away from it, so there’s this mental battle as well.”

While the Atlantic Challenge—and soon-to-be Pacific Challenge—are clearly brutal, the level of danger they present is nothing compared to what solo rowers like Angela Madsen and Jean-Jacques Savin were attempting. The Ocean Rowing Society, considered the governing body of “all human-power open-water exploration,” lists 13 rowers who have been lost at sea. Underscoring the danger of the sport’s rising popularity, four of those losses have occurred just in the past six years, the latest being Madsen and Savin.

The extreme risk doesn’t faze Robinson, who readily admits that his open ocean rowing experience is “surprisingly little.” He is not alone. In March, Victoria Evans, a 35-year-old lawyer with no rowing experience whatsoever, completed a 40-day, 2,559 nautical mile journey from the Canary Islands to Barbados. The next day, a 28-year-old British soldier named Jack Jarvis, who was an accomplished freshwater rower but who had never rowed in the ocean, landed in South Florida after rowing from Portugal—a trip that covered 4,500 nautical miles and took 111 days.

Robinson understands that the process of crossing the Pacific will be daunting and dangerous and he is aware of the cautionary tales, that is all eclipsed by the fact that what he is about to do is in service of the dream he’s had since he was a kid. “I find that when I row, something to do with the rhythm and the strokes and the solitude, time can pass at an interesting rate—it can go really fast and really slow. It’s humbling, but it’s powerful, and not something that we get to experience anywhere else.”

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On a rainy fall morning in 2005, Donald Lawson got a phone call from his sailing hero, Bruce Schwab, asking if he would be willing to drop everything and join him on a trip down the East Coast.

Lawson, then 23, had been honing his sailing skills for more than a decade, first at Baltimore’s Police Athletic League and then on the Chesapeake Bay in prestigious regattas like the Governor’s Cup. In these races, up to 20 boats are pitted against one another on courses that can reach 100 nautical miles in length. Lawson and his teammates had broken several speed records—and each time, Lawson was one of the only Black sailors.

In those days, there was no bigger figure in American sailing than Schwab, who in the previous three years had been the only American to compete in and finish two of the sport’s most hallowed planet-circling solo sailing races: the Around Alone and the VendĂ©e Globe. Lawson had been bombarding Schwab with Myspace messages for months, asking for tips on how to race better and faster. Schwab had been helpful, but this was the first time he offered an invite to sail on his 60-foot yacht, Ocean Planet, the boat he had used on his circumnavigations.

Lawson’s dreams had already stretched beyond those Chesapeake regattas—he wanted to ring the globe, too, and he wanted to do it faster than anyone ever had. But he needed practice. Immediately, he hopped on a bus from Baltimore to Portland, Maine, where Schwab awaited. “It was an opportunity that I knew I had one chance to do,” says Lawson. “That’s part of the mentality you have to have, not coming from a wealthy family and being a Black guy in sailing—sometimes you only get one chance.”

The first night Schwab and Lawson were on the water, a snowstorm hit as they steered into a freezing headwind. Most skippers wouldn’t have left port in those conditions, but Schwab wanted to take advantage of the storm’s winds, which could slingshot them south. Schwab loved speed, and it was clear that his new apprentice did, too. “The boat could sail perfectly fine under autopilot,” Schwab says. “But Donald was so thrilled to be there that he refused to come below, preferring to sit outside and drive the boat for hours, upwind, in the snow.”

Now 40, Lawson is an accomplished sailor on the precipice of realizing his dream of sailing around the world. In the fall, he’ll begin , including an attempt to become the fastest person, and the first Black sailor, to complete a solo, nonstop circumnavigation of the globe. That goal follows in the wake of both Teddy Seymour and Bill Pinkney, the only other Black Americans to sail alone around the world (they stopped along the way). Meanwhile, Lawson was selected to lead the , the sport’s governing body. He also established the , a foundation that aims to bring people of color into the sport.

Lawson was raised in Woodlawn, a predominately Black, middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore County. His father was a Baptist preacher and an employee in NASA’s Office of Inspector General, and his mother was a computer technician and community counselor. In a family that prided itself on regimented goals—his younger brother and sister both joined the military—Lawson was an outlier with an itch for adventure. In 1990, when he was nine, his mother enrolled him in the Police Athletic League and drove him to his first field trip, on the Lady Maryland, a replica of a 19th-century schooner that hosts educational outings on Chesapeake Bay. As the ship got underway, Baltimore’s skyline dissolved off the stern. Ahead lay the wide mouth of the Patapsco River, and beyond that the Chesapeake. Lawson found the captain and asked him how far he could take this boat. Around the world if you wanted, he said.

Would it be that easy to escape? “When someone tells you there are people going around the world, and you can be one of them, that opens your mind to possibilities you never thought of before,” Lawson says. But with all the white faces on the boats in the harbor that day, it was easy to think sailing had no place for a Black kid from Baltimore. At the time, he didn’t know anything about Seymour, who’d in honor of Black History Month, departing from Frederiksted, Saint Croix, where an uprising in 1848 had led to the abolition of slavery in the then Danish territory. It would be another 17 years before he’d learn of Pinkney, to complete an around-the-world trip by way of the southern capes. Sailing, Pinkney wrote, was “about escape—escape from the bonds of conformity, racism, and lack of respect because of one’s background.” The sea, he continued, “has afforded me the chance to prove my potential when placed on a level playing field.”

In 1999, after graduating from high school, Lawson began working for the Downtown Sailing Center, where he became its first Black instructor. Teaching sailing to novices on various types of boats in the busy waters of the Inner Harbor allowed Lawson to get good fast. Soon he was being invited to join crews for races up and down the East Coast and in the Caribbean. It was at this point that he discovered the sport’s racist undercurrents. “You start experiencing people who aren’t familiar with you, and they’re not totally comfortable with you,” he says.

After the trip with Schwab in 2005, Lawson began thinking about breaking speed records on his own terms, and doing so beyond the confines of a race schedule. To pay the bills, he got his captain’s license at the Annapolis School of Seamanship, which allowed him to deliver ships for boat owners to different locations. That job provided him access to a multitude of boats and an opportunity on each delivery to break personal speed records.

In 2009, Lawson set out to find sponsorship that would allow him to acquire his own boat. This year it finally happened, in the form of a 60-foot trimaran, one of the world’s fastest sailing vessels. Starting in September, weather permitting, he’ll kick off a campaign to break 35 solo world records over ten years, beginning with a record attempt of the California-to-Hawaii transpacific route; in January 2024, he’ll attempt the solo nonstop circumnavigation. For the sailing class that Lawson’s journey will fit into, the current world record is 74 days. Lawson will attempt to do it in 70.

“Sailing teaches certain things—good planning and prioritization skills, problem-solving, self-reliance, resilience, high-level understanding of physics, math, and hydro- and aerodynamics,” says Rich Jepsen, vice president of U.S. Sailing. “With tens of thousands of ocean miles under his belt, Donald has all that in abundance.”

In the meantime, Lawson is helping break barriers onshore. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, U.S. Sailing formed a task force to educate community sailing groups around the country about the importance of cultivating sailors of all racial and economic backgrounds. Lawson was one of the first people Jepsen thought of for the initiative, along with Debora Abrams-Wright, Quemuel Arroyo, Lou Sandoval, and Karen Harris. “I wish I could tell you that U.S. Sailing, out of wisdom or generosity, started the task force on its own,” says Jepsen. But it was volunteer leaders in community sailing organizations who pushed the national governing body to act.

Lawson hopes that any Black kid who sets foot on a sailboat will have role models they recognize to show them the way. “I’m happy to say that, probably in the next five or ten years, you will be seeing more of me out there,” he says. “And who knows? Maybe they’ll be inspired to come along and break my records.”

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For a sport with roots that run centuries deep, surfing has been comically misunderstood by mainstream pop culture. It could be the fault of surfers themselves, who, when asked to describe the basic pursuit of riding waves, will often devolve into the babble of a religious zealot. Or it could be the simple fact that, while surfing is well-known around the world today, it’s still only available to a lucky few. Surf films are often no less inaccessible—they tend to be made by surfers, leading to work that is more navel-gazing than probing.

So when the World Surf League, pro surfing’s governing body, that it had created a content division called WSL Studios “to connect with established and up-and-coming filmmakers, award-winning and innovative new producers, as well as experienced production companies,” there was cautious hope that a new generation of surf filmography was on the horizon. However, there were doubts, because the WSL has long long been averse toÌęsupporting filmmakers and other outside media that might depict the league in any tint but rose.

WSL Studios’ first mainstream effort was , a competition-based reality show that debuted in 2021 and sought the kind of back-biting narrative made essential by Survivor. Instead, it ended up with a generally amiable cast of young pros, many of whom had been pals since their amateur days and were unwilling to appease producers’ appetite for drama. The series was a flop. Not long after, the curtains quietly closed on WSL Studios.

It appears, however, that the WSL has achieved some redemption with its recent involvement in , a seven-part docuseries released in AprilÌęthat recounts the competitive and personal triumphs and travails of a group of women and men competing on the 2021 WSL Championship Tour. It features big names like world champions Kelly Slater and Stephanie Gilmore, as well as pro surfers who most casual fans have probably never heard of, like Morgan Cibilic and Leonardo Fioravanti.

While the project was done in partnership with the WSL, a “WSL Studios” logo is nowhere to be found, and this distance is a blessing. In the independent hands of Box to Box Films, a London-based production company led by Oscar-winning producer James Gay-Rees and BAFTA-nominated producer Paul Martin, Make or Break paints a refreshingly messy picture of professional surfing life.

Gay-Rees and Martin’s hit Netflix docuseries was the model for Make or Break. In both, the key to success has been making an obscure sport relatable to a wider, nonexpert audience. How to do that? In the case of Make or Break, it meant bucking one of the cardinal rules of old-school surf journalism: pulling the lens away from the water. “It is not even about riding waves, exactly,” writes Matt Warshaw, a surfing historian and author of the newsletter. “Make or BreakÌęis a reality show set within the grind and turmoil of the [World Tour], and as a viewer, to my eyes anyway, that grind and turmoil is bliss compared to the smileyÌębrain-dead presentation we get from the WSLÌęitself.”

For example, we learn that South African Tour rookie Matt McGillivray sometimes sleeps in his truck in order to have enough money to afford his dream job—the big paychecks only go to the Tour’s few top surfers. That American Sage Erickson, heretofore marketed by sponsors and the WSL as a delicate, unruffled soul, is capable of unleashing cutting verbal lashings on competitors who have pulled less than sportsmanlike maneuvers in a heat. (“I’m just playing the game,” a defiant Tatiana Weston-Webb later responds to the camera.) That Brazilian Filipe Toledo, who for the past few years has been overshadowed by two of his own countrymen and friends, has been battling depression. (And also that he is quite possibly pro surfing’s best dad.)

But the truest sign that Make or Break is something different, something better, comes when Yasmin Brunet, wife of three-time world champion and Brazilian icon Gabriel Medina, says how incredible it is that Medina was able to win a third world title after the year that he and Brunet had just endured. Instead of letting Brunet glaze over such a loaded statement, as would very well be the case in a WSL-led production, the interviewer stops Brunet and asks her to explain. No doubt it took Gay-Rees and Martin a few tries to crack the couple, but ultimately they did. (The revelations, about recently discovered secrets in Medina’s family, as well as growing tension between Medina and Brunet, also nicely tee up a second season, which has already been cleared for production.)

Luckily, Make or Break isn’t the only surf filmmaking out there that’s finally exhibiting some journalistic rigor. Released last year, provides a detailed—albeit at points snoozy—historical accounting of the life and legacy of Native Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, the five-time Olympic medalist who is considered the father of modern-day surfing. (In May it enjoyed a wider release, as part of its American Masters series.)

Both as an Olympic swimmer and later a Hollywood actor, the Duke, as he was known, has long been celebrated by the surfing community as the “ambassador of aloha.” It’s true that Kahanamoku became a beloved promotor of Hawaiian culture, surfing, and swimming around the globe. But it’s an incomplete description of his experience as a non-white athlete and entertainer in the early 20th century. While Waterman remains focused on Kahanamoku’s athletic talents and ability to spread the joy of water sports to countless cultures, it doesn’t hesitate to remind viewers that the Duke’s acceptance among white, Western cultures around the world didn’t come without episodes of prejudice.

In 1911, after word of a gifted Hawaiian swimmer reached mainland America, the Amateur Athletic Union arranged for a race to determine if Kahanamoku was as good as rumor had it. At Honolulu Harbor, Kahanamoku swam a 100-yard sprint in just a touch over 55 seconds, smashing the world record at the time. Despite his incredible performance, the AAU refused to accept the result and insisted he travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of all places, for another race. It was on this trip that Kahanamoku first witnessed racial segregation, “the antithesis of aloha,” as the film’s narrator, actor Jason Mamoa, says. “As a man of color, whatever unease he felt, Duke likely kept it in his heart,” he continues, referring to the Hawaiian phrase Mahape a ale walaua—“Don’t talk, keep it in your heart.”

Facing cold water and competing in an indoor pool for the first time, Kahanamoku’s first swim ended in failure, but he soon rebounded, traveling in 1912 to Stockholm to compete in the Summer Olympics alongside Native American Olympian Jim Thorpe. Both men set records and proudly won gold for the country that had taken so much from their people.

Aside from telling the underappreciated story of the father of modern surfing, Waterman is also an invitation to future surf filmmakers to be unafraid of tackling the thornier cultural stories that abound in the globally popular sport. That’s exactly what Los Angeles–based filmmaker Corey McLean has accomplished in his new filmÌę, now streaming online on and . It’s about a group of Cuban surfers fighting to get their government to sanction surfing as an official sport.

In the wake of the Cuban refugee crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, the nation’s government essentially banned water activities as a way to dissuade people from fleeing. Apparently, police viewed surfboards as watercraft sufficient enough for escape. Over the course of many years, McLean follows a Cuban surfer named Frank, who, despite living in a country not known for having good waves (an unfairÌęcriticism, as McLean discovers), is a skilled athlete with dreams of representing Cuba in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, where surfing made its debut. While Frank chases his competitive hopes—including a risky trip to a contest in Peru—his friend Yaya works to build support for surfing in communities around Havana, in an effort to convince the Cuban government to sanction surfing.

It’s jarring to watch Make or Break and Havana Libre back-to-back. Hardly bankrolled like Formula One drivers, the WSL’s top competitors are nevertheless showered with free plane tickets, clothing, and enough new surfboards to smash one or two in anger after a bad contest result. Meanwhile, in Cuba, surfers like Frank and Yaya are scouring the beaches for foam pieces from the rafts of unsuccessful migrants to use for homemade surfboards. It’s heart-wrenching to see them obsessing over American surf magazines that folded years ago and to realize that they must devote huge amounts of their lives to scraping together the necessary materials to build a board that is destroyed without thought by another surfer, just because of a stroke of cultural fate.

But there is also beauty in this gulf, a kind of validation of surfing itself, proof that it’s a sport that reaches and transforms lives across the spectrum of human experience. (Despite his competitive ambitions, Frank, in fact, is leery of calling surfing a sport, preferring instead to think of it as an art.) So it’s nice to learn in the credits that Havana Libre was made with support from WSL Studios. While it produced some duds, clearly the initiative was able to help discover and support surf filmmakers creating stories with complexity and worth. Who will step in to keep this positive trend alive?

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On February 11, 2020, fans of big-wave surfing watched Portuguese pro Alex Botelho nearly drown on the of the inaugural NazarĂ© Tow Surfing Challenge, a contest on the World Surf League’s Big Wave World Tour. Two years later, Botelho has filed a lawsuit against the WSL, accusing the organization of a series of decisions that he says have resulted in lifelong physical, psychological, and financial damages.

The 29-page complaint was filed on February 9 in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, and it alleges that the WSL ignored concerns that some competitors voiced about the event’s safety plan and then lied to the surfers about multiple critical elements of the plan. “As a result of these misrepresentations and failures of due care,” the complaint reads, “[Botelho] was left in the water unconscious for up to six minutes before he was pulled from the sea not breathing.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű was unable to reach Botelho for comment, but his lawyers Neil Fraser and James C. Carr agreed to speak. “We’re not blaming the city of NazarĂ©, and we’re not blaming the rescue personnel who were there and did as good of a job as they could,” Fraser said. “It’s just that WSL was the one that dropped the ball.”

The accident came in the sixth hour of competition, during a heat that wasn’t initially planned. The original schedule had called for four hour-long heats, but because the conditions were uncharacteristically favorable—giant waves with little wind shear—the Big Wave World Tour’s general manager Bill Sharp, other WSL staff, and the 19 competitors agreed to hold two additional heats. With about 30 minutes left in the final heat, the contest’s safety manager, Scott Eggers, went on the live broadcast to take a victory lap. “This is proof of concept for the WSL,” Eggers said. “So far, so good.”

A few minutes later, Botelho dropped into a wave. He wasn’t able to make it around the collapsing lip and was swallowed by the whitewater. The wave wasn’t a particularly large one, at least not for Botelho, who had been a veteran standout at Nazaré’s famed Praia do Norte break, which over the past decade has produced several of the biggest waves ever ridden. Botelho surfaced and was safely scooped up onto a jet ski by his teammate Hugo Vau.

That’s when the trouble began. Unlike the rest of the world’s premiere big-wave venues, NazarĂ© doesn’t have an adjacent deep-water channel for a jet-ski driver to access and safely get back out beyond the breaking waves. Not only does NazarĂ© lack a channel, but it also has an area where two separate wave sections violently converge. This was precisely the phenomenon Vau faced as he was trying to drive Botelho, who was holding onto the ski’s rescue sled, out of the impact zone. After Vau was caught between two colliding waves, he, Botelho, and their ski were launched about 20 feet in the air. According to the complaint, Botelho landed on the sled, hitting his head and perforating a lung.

“I remember landing and still holding on onto the ski and just thinking, ‘Uhhh, I’m going out,’ and that’s the last thing I remember,” Botelho told Stab magazine . Unconscious, he immediately went underwater and was pummeled by more waves for about six minutes.

Vau and another jet-ski driver, Edilson Luis da Assunção, who had been hired by the WSL to patrol the impact zone throughout the event, frantically tried but failed to reach Botelho. The waves and current eventually pushed Botelho close enough to shore for lifeguards to grab and drag him onto the beach. He was not breathing and didn’t have a pulse. Botelho told Stab thatÌęfour minutes passed before lifeguards were able to revive him.

That night, at a local hospital, he stopped breathing again and had to be intubated. According to the complaint, Botelho spent the next week in intensive care, his lungs infected from being inundated by so much seawater.

Botelho underwent months of physical therapy to recover from injuries that “left him weakened and unable to conduct a normal life,” according to the complaint. The document states that Botelho has also “suffered psychological injury as a result of the NazarĂ© incident and has suffered nightmares of drowning since February 2020, sleep and mood disturbance, and a gradually dissipating fear of entering ocean water again”—trauma that Botelho received treatment for after being discharged from the hospital.

At the heart of Botelho’s allegations is that Sharp, Eggers, and other unnamed defendants—the complaint includes the potential for up to 100 additional “does”—ignored concerns from Botelho and other competitors about the adequacy of the event’s three-layer safety plan.

The WSL’s safety plan was communicated to competitors by Sharp and Eggers in the months leading up to the event. The plan called for each surfer to have a dedicated ski and driver, a secondary ski and driver to shadow the primary crew, and emergency-response lifeguards on the beach.

According to Botelho, that was unsatisfactory to him and others in the competition. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű reached out to multiple competitors who declined to comment for this story. Prior to the event, Sharp emailed the surfers that a rescue swimmer would also be available as part of the emergency team onshore.

Botelho and the surfers responded that they wanted the rescue swimmer positioned on an additional ski in the water. Sharp and Eggers then allegedly informed the surfers that the WSL would hire Kalani Lattanzi, an experienced swimmer who bodysurfs at NazarĂ©. Lattanzi, the complaint reads, “is widely accepted as likely the only person in the world capable of operating within the NazarĂ© impact zone as a rescue swimmer, and certainly the best.”

Botelho’s lawyers said they have a copy of the event’s information kit from October 2019 that lists Lattanzi as the official safety swimmer. But on the day of the event Lattanzi was not there. “Having spoken to Kalani, he said he was never even contacted to be the rescue swimmer for that competition,” Fraser said. “It came as a shock to him when Alex spoke to him and asked him, ‘What happened? Why weren’t you there?’ And Kalani said, ‘I was never even contacted by the WSL.’”

Several surfers did not initially sign the WSL’s waiver of liability because they were concerned that the safety plan was inadequate. But by the eve of the event, Botelho signed despite his misgivings. According to Fraser, Botelho felt “caught between a rock and a hard place” because of his obligations to sponsors. He signed the waiver, in part, on the “understanding still that Kalani was going to be there as a rescue swimmer and the safety measures would be in place,” Fraser said.

Not only was Lattanzi not there, but shadow skis for each team were also missing, Fraser said. “There were rescue skis on the water,” he clarified. “But they weren’t assigned to any particular team.” The complaint also claims that the WSL failed to give each team three radios with dedicated channels, as was promised. Instead, “each team was given two radios with no dedicated channels,” Fraser said. “So there was crosstalk going on the whole time.”

The debate over the event’s safety measures took center stage in the recent HBO seriesÌę100 Foot Wave,Ìęand filmmakers captured Garrett McNamara, one of the pioneers of the NazarĂ© break, voicing his concerns over the safety plan. “It sounds really scary to me what you guys have in place,” McNamara tells Sharp in a call captured by cameras. McNamara was invited to attend a pre-race meeting with the event’s safety team, but HBO’s camera crew was not allowed inside.

“What happens in there is that he expressed very forcefully his concerns about safety,” Fraser said.

Sharp didn’t respond to an emailed request for an interview, but a WSL spokesperson provided the following statement: “The health and safety of the athletes, and everyone associated with our events around the world, are our top priority. We can’t comment regarding on-going litigation, but as a general matter, we are incredibly proud of our safety record in what is an inherently dangerous sport and will vigorously defend the league and the athletes we serve.”

Ultimately, the complaint accuses Sharp, Eggers, and the WSL of “material misrepresentations, intentional concealment, and gross negligence.” As a result, Botelho is seeking yet to be determined restitution for damages that include “past, present, and future medical and related expenses, loss of earnings and loss of earning capacity.” Botelho did note in his interview with Stab, however, that “everything that happened in the hospital was covered by the WSL insurance.”

Court filings show that the WSL was served the complaint on February 17, meaning it has 30 days to answer, at which point the WSL could admit or deny Botelho’s allegations or initiate various procedural challenges. While the case could go to trial, “often the courts will look to try and force the parties into some kind of mediation to discuss whether or not it can be resolved without a trial,” Carr said. “If that doesn’t happen, it just steamrolls on towards a trial.”

When he was asked by Stab if he’d ever go back in the water again, Botelho suggested he would. Despite Vau and da Assunção’s valiant attempts to reach him, in the end it was the waves that pushed his body close enough to shore for the lifeguards to grab it. “The ocean could’ve dragged me out to sea,” Botelho said, “but it didn’t
and that gives me a good feeling about going out there again.”

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In early November, the unthinkable happened. Images of the 20-foot self-righting rowboatÌęRow of Life, once skippered by the American Paralympian Angela Madsen, surfaced in a wire story from Ìę(AFP). Madsen’s boat, the article said, had washed ashore on a remote section of Mili Atoll, a thin ring of coral islets in the Marshall Islands.

The Row of Life had been adrift for more than a year, and it had held video footage of the last days of Madsen’s life.

Madsen was 60 days into an attempt to become the first paraplegic and oldest woman to row solo from California to Hawaii when she drowned on June 22, 2020. The 60-year-old had been attempting to repair the Row of Life’s bow shackle in preparation for a tropical cyclone that was bearing down on her position in the remote Pacific.

A German cargo ship en route to Tahiti was able to recover Madsen’s body a day later, still tethered to the Row of Life by her lifeline. Due to the approaching storm, however, the ship’s crew had to leave the boat behind, along with dozens of hours of GoPro footage that Madsen had captured for a documentary that was being produced by 25-year-old .

Immediately following Madsen’s death, Simi and Madsen’s wife, Deb Madsen, decided on a two-pronged recovery approach: Deb would focus on getting Madsen’s body back home to Long Beach, California, and Simi would work on finding a vessel and crew in Hawaii that could locate and retrieve the Row of Life. But the boat’s GPS signal soon went dark, and, in late July, a hurricane passed over the search area in the central Pacific, complicating the effort. Deb Madsen went on to launch her own search effort, but that, too, came up empty.

The photos of the Row of Life, propped up on rocks on a coconut palm–lined beach and surrounded by onlookers, were taken by Benjamin Chutaro, a Marshall Islander who snapped them while on a visit to Mili, where he has family.

For being lost at sea for over a year and drifting nearly 4,000 miles, the Row of Life appeared to be in remarkably good shape, save for some damaged solar panels, rust stains on the forward cabin, and a crack on the starboard hull, which Chutaro told me likely happened when the boat hit the reef just before washing ashore.

In the AFP article, Chutaro said he thought the boat had only recently reached Mili. But after returning to the atoll in December to investigate further, he now believes it showed up several months earlier.

“In September we have king tides,” Chutaro said. “It makes sense that the boat would have come ashore then; otherwise it would have just gotten slammed into the reef and probably sunk—and no one would have ever known the boat was there.”

By the time Chutaro learned of the boat, its life jackets, lines, and rigging had been taken. Madsen’s GoPro cameras and the treasure trove of video footage they held were also nowhere to be found. “Material wealth in the outer islands is zero,” Chutaro told me. “It makes total sense [that these items are gone].”

“When something floats in on these remote islands, it’s fair game,” Giff Johnson, editor of the and source of the AFP wire article, told me.

Chutaro removed the Row of Life’s EPIRB and, when he returned to the capital city of Majuro, took it to the U.S. Embassy, which used the device’s information to track down Deb Madsen. It was after Deb contacted Chutaro directly that he decided to return to Mili in late November to try and recover the cameras’ microSD memory cards.

On his second trip, Chutaro was still unable to track down the equipment. He believes that whoever took the electronics may be willing to hand them over. “There’s a group of us now that are trying to make sure we can get the SD cards,” he said. “But the cautionary part of this is that if people have opened up [the cards], they may have destroyed them inadvertently.”

Chutaro has since returned home to Majuro. But a U.S. Army official, who left for Mili for a previously scheduled patrol in December, has promised him that he will continue the search for the SD cards while he’s there, Chutaro said.

“It’s remarkable the boat washed up at all,” said Simi, the filmmaker. “But now that it has, it’s agonizing to learn that the footage is still missing but hopefully still salvageable.”

Simi guessed there were five or six GoPros onboard, along with a night-vision camcorder, a waterproof hard drive, up to ten batteries, around 20 microSD cards, and other accessories like cords and adaptors.

When Chutaro first told Johnson of the Row of Life’s discovery in early November, the editor reached out to U.S. ambassador to the Marshall Islands Roxanne Cabral, as well as Marshall Islands Police Department deputy commissioner Eric Jorbon. Neither Cabral nor Jorbon had up to that point heard of the rowboat’s discovery, but they said they would look into it. Since then, Cabral’s office, Jorbon, and Chutaro have all been in contact with Deb Madsen, keeping her updated with any news from Mili. At present the SD cards remain missing.

According to Johnson, abandoned vessels and castaways regularly wash up on the shores of the Marshall Islands, due to the prevailing westerly current in that region of the Pacific. “If you look at the Marshalls, we’re two vertical, essentially north-south chains of islands,” he said. “So anything that’s blowing in from Hawaii or the U.S., chances are you’re going to run into one of these islands.”

Deb Madsen declined to comment for this article, but Simi told me that both she and Madsen agree that the film should be completed if, by some miracle, the dozens of hours of footage that Angela captured at sea can be salvaged.

“Angela’s story deserves to be told and her legacy celebrated,” Simi said. “It would mean everything to finish what we started.”

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It was 1996. Shannon Miller and Kerri Strug had just led the Magnificent Seven to gymnastics gold at the Atlanta Games. Lenny Wilkens coached Scottie Pippen, Charles Barkley, and the rest of Dream Team III to victory for the second Olympics in a row.

Later that year, Fernando Aguerre, president of the International Surfing Association, the sport’s governing body, oversaw the largest ISA World Surfing Games in history—teams from 36 countries converged on Huntington Beach, California, for the 11-day event. The stakes were high: for the first time ever, International Olympic Committee officials were on-site to determine whether surfing should be included in the Summer Games. Team USA, led by pros Taylor Knox and Shane Beschen, would go on to take gold.

“The teams were stocked with stars,” Aguerre Surfer magazine in 2016. “I thought, If we could do this here, why not do it at the Olympics?”

From that point forward, Aguerre’s life was dedicated toÌęgetting surfing into the Olympics.

Twenty-five years after Huntington Beach, Aguerre’s dream is finally on the precipice of fruition. Beginning July 25 at 7 A.M.ÌęJapan Standard Time, 40 surfers (20 men and 20 women) representing 17 nations will hit the water at Tsurigasaki Surfing Beach to compete for the sport’s first Olympic medals.

Which Surfers Make Up USA’s Dream Team?

Carissa Moore: A four-time world champion from Oahu, Hawaii, Moore is known for her power surfing. While she is a heavy favorite to win gold, it can’t be ignored that she’s more comfortable in larger, punchier surf. The typically small conditions at Tsurigasaki could present a challenge.

Caroline Marks: Few surfers have had such a meteoric rise as this 19-year-old from Melbourne Beach, Florida. In 2018, at age 16, Marks became the youngest-ever surfer to qualify for the World Surf League Women’s World Tour. She’s already won three World Tour events and will no doubt win a world title very soon. Unlike Moore, the waves of Tsurigasaki are similar to those that Marks cut her teeth on in Melbourne Beach—a distinct advantage if the battle for gold comes down to the two American women.

Kolohe Andino: A trip to the Olympics for Andino, 27, wafts of destiny. Born in San Clemente, California, to a former pro surfer father who had his son out in the waves not long after he’d exited the womb, Andino has long been described as the World Tour’s all-American kid and a world-title threat. His home wave, T-Street, is also a beach break similar to Tsurigasaki.

John John Florence: Another element of destiny at play on Team USA is the fact that the two men’s slots ended up going to Andino and 28-year-old Florence. Highly touted as world-title hopefuls when they were both barely out of diapers, Andino and Florence have long been rivals. So far, only Florence has made good on the world-title hype—he’s already got two under his belt. Though he was born with Oahu’s infamous Pipeline in his backyard, Florence possesses the exceedingly rare ability to blend a smooth style with a competitive prowess that transcends wave types and sizes.

What Country Is Team USA’s Main Competition?

Look no further than the current WSL rankings for a tip on that answer. Of the top five men right now, three are Brazilian, including reigning world champion Italo Ferreira and two-time world champion Gabriel Medina.

Currently at number three in the women’s rankings is Brazilian Tatiana Weston-Webb, who is coming off a victory and a runner-up result in the recent Australian leg of the World Tour. At Weston-Webb’s side is her compatriot, veteran competitor Silvana Lima, who is renowned for her tenacity in competition and an ability to upset even the biggest stars when the stakes are highest.

Is There an Individual Wild Card to Watch Out For?

There is little doubt that the crowd’s energy at Tsurigasaki will be focused on 23-year-old Kanoa Igarashi, the best competitive surfer to come out of Japan. Shortly before Igarashi was born, his parents moved the family from Japan to Huntington Beach, California, explicitly so that their son might become a pro surfer. Even as his star rose quickly as a junior surfer, Igarashi never imagined that, one day, he would have the chance to represent his parents’ home country in the Olympics. He can thank Aguerre for that one. All eyes will be on Igarashi when competition kicks off on July 25. No pressure.

Which Other Surfers Should I Be Following?

Never rule out the Aussies. Especially seven-time world champion Stephanie Gilmore. One of the best surfers to grace the sport, Gilmore, like Florence, is blessed with an uncanny ability to surf with the same level of power and finesse, no matter how big or small the waves.

Gilmore’s teammates Sally Fitzgibbons, Owen Wright, and Julian Wilson are all decorated World Tour surfers, hungry to not only win but to represent the surf- and sport-mad Australian people in Tokyo.

What Is the Complete List of Nations Competing in the Event?

Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Peru, Portugal, andÌęRussia.

Read about each athlete representing their nationÌę.

How Will the Event Be Judged?

Five judges will assess surfers on the following :

• Commitment and difficulty
• Innovation and progression
• Variety
• Combination
• Speed, power, and flow

Each wave ridden is awarded a score that falls on a zero-to-ten-point scale, ten being a perfect score that exemplifies all aspects of the judging criteria. Only a surfer’s top two waves are counted toward their final score, meaning the best possible score a surfer can receive in one heat is a 20. It’s the same format that the World Surf League has implemented for years.

Women’s and men’s competition will be broken into three rounds, followed byÌęquarterfinals, semifinals, a bronze match, and a gold match. The medal heats run 45 minutes each.

Weren’t There Rumors that the Event Was Going to Be Held in a Wave Pool?

Indeed, there were. In 2015, following the IOC’s that it had selected surfing for inclusion in the Tokyo Games, much of the discussions around logistics centered on utilizing a wave pool as a way to avoid the ocean going flat during competition. The problem was, no such wave pool—at least one that produced a wave of any quality—existed.

Kelly Slater busted that paradigm. In December of 2015, the 11-time world champion dropped a video on social media that showed him riding an artificial wave so perfect it bordered on hallucination. The space race was officially on.

Slater’s Surf Ranch, located in Lemoore, California, proved good enough for the World Surf League to not only host an annual World Tour event there, but outright purchase the technology to be reproduced at locations around the globe. Representatives from the WSL promptly began scouting pool locations around Tokyo. According to gossip, by the time the Games rolled around, there would be a Surf Ranch 2.0 not far from the city’s center. But the pool was never built. In 2018, the IOC confirmed that the surfing competition would be held in the fun but fickle sand-bottom waves of Chiba prefecture, already host to many of Japan’s surf contests.

In a bit of irony, in June, another wave-pool company, American Wave Machines, that it had completed PerfectSwell Shizunami, a high-quality wave pool located four hours away from Tsurigasaki. Since then a steady stream of clips from visiting pros have been making the rounds on social media, revealing yet another incredibly fun chlorinated wave.

What Happens if There Are No Waves?

Go to the pool! Just kidding. But this question does play into why itÌęhas taken a quarter century for Aguerre’s dream to come true.ÌęUnlike all other Olympic sporting events, surfing’s playing field, if you will, is fluid. It may rain on the running track, making the rubber slicker, but its size, shape, and lanes remain static. The ocean, on the other hand, is ever changing—no two waves are the same.

There’s just no getting around the very real possibility that the surfers might get skunked. So, as the WSL does for its events, the IOC has padded the Olympic Surfing Festival, as the event is officially dubbed, with four extra days to maximize wave potential. With these built-in “lay days,” the for the event is July 25 through August 1.

But wait! The surfing gods must be watching over Aguerre. Not only do early forecast models show a typhoon passing offshore during the first days of competition, which will produce pumping surf and ideal wind conditions, but long-range projections show a run of great waves through most of the rest of the event period.

“ISA KARMA: Swells are arriving just in time for Olympics surfing!” Aguerre , then added in another post: “27 years paddling and I finally got here.”

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For Angela Madsen, it was a fortuitous time to row into the isolation of the Pacific Ocean.ÌęIt was April 23, 2020, a Thursday, and was gripped by the coronavirus pandemic. Over 17,000 cases and climbing. Eight hundred dead. That morning, had surpassed heart disease as the county’s leading cause of death. People were coming dangerously closeÌęto abandoning lockdown, especially now that had descended. In Long Beach’s EastsideÌęneighborhood, anÌęAmerican flag hanging from the front porch of the pink, 1940s-era bungalow thatÌęMadsen shared with her partner, Deb, barely moved in the fevered breeze.

In less than three weeks, Madsen would turn 60. Birthdays weren’t a big deal to her, but since it would fall while she wasÌęout in the ocean alone, in the midst of an attempt to become the oldest woman—and first paraplegic—to row theÌę2,500Ìęmiles between California and Hawaii solo, she figured, Why not celebrate?ÌęSo sheÌęhad stashed a mini bottle of Koloa Rum, a MoonPie, and a single candle inside one of the Ziplocs that held her neatly organized food supply of MREs, chicken-curry bars, freeze-dried rice, protein shakes, instant coffee, and chocolate. “Gotta have some chocolate,” she joked when we talked over the phone that morning.Ìę

Like everything on the Row of Life, Madsen’s 20-foot, self-righting rowboat, the food was stored in watertight hatches built around her seat, where for the next three months she planned to spend 12 hours a day rowing west. Her clothes and raingear and Wilson volleyball (complete with a Cast Away handprint) were in the closet-sizeÌęaft cabin, where she would also sleep for short stretches. Its low ceiling was peppered with stickers—“Well behavedÌęwomen rarely make history,” read one. Her parachute anchor, crucial for keeping the bow pointed into swell when she wasn’t rowing, was tucked in the smaller forward cabin.

It was hardly noon, and everything was done. The Row of Life sat trailered and ready in the driveway, its freshly painted navy and red hull glistening in the white-hot sun. Madsen was not nervous about the expedition, but she was nervous about the raging pandemic. “I’m already feeling a sense of relief,” she told me. “I’m going to be safer out there.”

An email came through from a meteorologist friend who would be updating her throughout the journey. For the firstÌęfew days, the wind looked like it would hold offshore. The hope was that the easterlies tumbling seaward from the dry lungs of California’sÌęSan Bernardino Valley would slingshot her past Catalina Island and to 125 degreesÌęwest longitude, where the currents would shift in her favor. It was, Madsen said, “a little window of opportunity, but not the best.” After thatÌęit would be a slog—the prevailing northwesterlies would return to try andÌępush her back. Either way, conditions would be calmer at night, so Madsen, who normally slept little because of the constant pain in her back, had been training to sleep during the day. That afternoon, while L.A. broiled, she drifted in and out of a fitful slumber.Ìę

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For several minutes on the live broadcast of Tuesday’s Ìęin Portugal, commentators Pete Mel and Ben Mondy thought they were watching the event’s water-safety team attempting to retrieve a piece of jet ski that had broken off following a horrific mishap in the 40-foot-plusÌęsurf. When the cameras finally got a clear shot, however, it suddenly became apparent that it wasn’t plastic the swimmers and drivers were frantically trying to grab but Portuguese big-wave surfer Alex Botelho. “It’s a body,” saidÌęMel, a veteran big-wave surfer himself,Ìębefore falling silent as the dramatic, minutes-long rescue unfolded in real time.Ìę

It was around 3 P.M. local time, and the inaugural World Surf League tow-surfing contest at Portugal’s world-record-breaking wave at Praia do Norte (North Beach), NazarĂ©, was supposed to be finished. But because conditions remained pristine and huge, the event’s directors had extended the contest by two additional one–hour heats. (The original schedule was for four hourlongÌęheats.) By this point in the day, every one of the event’s 19 competitors—17 men and two women—had ridden some of the biggest waves ever seen in a WSL competition, and there was little interest from the competitors, commentators, or fans in ending such a historic contest. ButÌęas the final heat began, there was plenty of chatter on the broadcast about the fatigue of surfing in such extreme conditions for six straight hours.Ìę

With about 30 minutes left in the competition, the frequency of the swell began to slow down, giving the commentating team time to reflect onÌęthe impressive work byÌęthe water-safety teamÌęthroughout the day. Despite some close calls, itÌęexpressed relief that everyone in the water had remained safe. “This [event] is a proof of concept for the WSL,” said Scott Eggers, the WSL’s Big Wave Tour safety manager, in an on-air interview. “So far, so good.” Eggers went on to describe the difficultiesÌęof holding a surf contest at NazarĂ©. “Every wave has their challenges,” he said, but at NazarĂ©, “there’s so much chaos out here that it’s very unpredictable.”Ìę

Ten minutes later, the first live footage appeared of the capsized and abandoned jet ski manned by Botelho and NazarĂ© pioneer Hugo Vau, hisÌęTeam Portugal tow partner.ÌęMel, understanding the urgency of a ski without its driver and surfer, immediately began questioning where they were at and if they were safe. His worst fears were soon realized, as members of the water-safety teamÌętried to pull Botelho’s seemingly lifelessÌębody from the ripping currentÌęjust off the beach.Ìę

For those who know NazarĂ© intimately, especially Tuesday’s competitors, the accident was a worst-case scenario. Botelho and Vau were attempting to make it back out to the lineup, but when they tried to punch through Nazaré’s notoriously difficult-to-navigate inside section, they met head-on a mountain of whitewater that launched the ski vertically, catapulting both men into the air. Ask any surfer who’s been caught in this area of NazarĂ© on a big day, and they’ll tell you there’s no more violent or powerful place to find oneself. Vau, the driver, appeared to fall directly, and hard, on top of the jet ski, while Botelho, who had been hanging on to itsÌęrescue sled, was sucked up and pitched over the lip of the wave, before vanishing beneath the water.Ìę

When it became apparent that the situation with Botelho and Vau was potentially life-threatening, competition was suspended and live images of the rescue were eventually cut off, as is protocol in most extreme-sports broadcasts. But people privy to radio communications from the rescue crew on the beach told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęthat Botelho remained unconscious and without a pulse for about a minute after he was finally pulled from the water. (Those sources wished to remain anonymous.) Once he was revived and transported to an ambulance, Botelho was conscious and coherent. He was rushed to the hospital and placed in intensive care. On Wednesday, the WSL issued a statement saying:Ìę“We’re happy to report that Alex remains stable.” That same day, a Ìęarticle quoted NazarĂ© mayor Walter Chicharro, who said he’d talked to Botelho’s doctors and that “there’s good news, even though [Alex] requires extra care and control.ÌęAlex is now breathing without any artificial aid, and he is perfectly conscious. Doctors confirmed that there’s still water in his lungs.”ÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű reached out to Vau, but because “Alex is still in a critical situation,” he declinedÌęto comment further.ÌęAs for Vau’s condition, which was initially described by some as a spine injury, he is “doing fine,” according to one of the event’s surfers. (The same Surfer TodayÌęarticle noted that Vau was to be released from the hospital on Wednesday.)

Inevitably, some in the surfing communityÌęquestioned the WSL’s decision to hold live events in such dangerous conditions. “People are always going to push limits individually, and that is their prerogative,” UK surf magazine Carve Ìęon Tuesday. “Still the bigger questions is [sic] how far are the WSL, as a commercial operation, willing to go as big wave surfing comps enter a new, untested realm which is right on the limits of human endurance.” Hawaiian big-wave surfer Albee Layer was more succinct: “Our lives are clickbait,” he wrote on Instagram. Layer sustained a head injury from a wipeout at the World Surf League Jaws Big Wave Championships inÌęDecember. But others—most notably some of Tuesday’s competitors—have pointed out that riding big waves is their passion, contest or no contest. Hawaiian big-wave surfing phenom Kai Lenny, who, along with his Young BullsÌęteammate Lucas “Chumbo” Chianca, won the event as well as the individual Men’s Wave of the DayÌęaward, : “We surf big waves because we love it, if the contest wasn’t running we all would still be out there.ÌęI can’t wait to have another session with these legends!”

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As the earth warms, our mountains, rivers, glaciers, and oceans will change, some inÌęunpredictable ways. So we pored overÌęthe research and called a few experts. Here’s a little of what we have to look forward to.

Backcountry Skiing Becomes Bony

In the past 50 years, average snowpack in the western U.S. has declined as much as 30 percent. One projection for the next century has the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada dropping another 60 percent from today’s levels. Resorts are investing in snowmaking technology to help offset the decline, but backcountry skiers will have fewer and fewer options.

Surfers Have More Giants to Ride

Climate change is contributing to larger, more intense storms, particularly in the tropics. The same systems likely to devastate coastal communities will also create enormous swells for big-wave surfers—­including, perhaps, the fabled 100-foot wave.

Rivers Change Course

The Fourth National Climate Assessment, a Ìęproduced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, reported that heavy rains have increased in intensity and frequency since 1901, though not evenly across the world or the U.S. In the arid Southwest, precipitation is expected to decrease, spelling the end of paddling on some sections of the Salt River and the Rio Grande. In the Northeast, rains may increase, opening up new whitewater in places like the Adirondack watershed.

The Route to the South Pole Shrinks

Antarctica’s Ross Island is home to Ernest Shackleton’s hut, the historic launch point for expeditions to the South Pole. Soon, though, explorers starting out here might need a boat. A section of the California-sizeÌęRoss Ice Shelf, a frozen mass over the sea that adventurers ski or sled across to reach the Antarctic continent, is losing nearly six feet of ice each year—a number that’s only expected to increase.

The Northwest Passage Gets Busy

It took centuries to find a navigable route through the sea ice of the Northwest Passage, and hundreds of adventurers lost their lives along the way. But as the Arctic has warmed, the ice has receded. Now cargo vessels and even cruise ships make regular trips through the widening waterway. Next year, adventurer Karl Kruger will become the first to attempt to paddleboard the passage.

Deserts Are Deserted

Scientists project that entire swaths of the Middle East and northern Africa will soon be nearly uninhabitable for humans, due to drought and heat waves that will spike temperatures to upward of 122 degrees. Areas like Oman’s Wadi Bani Awf region, long known for its canyoneering adventures, could become too hot to visit, while Morocco’s multi-day 156-mile Marathon des Sables, already touted as the world’s toughest footrace, might become impossible.

More Avalanches on Mount Everest

In 2018, scientists at the University of Geneva found that over the past 150 years, the number of slides in the Himalayas has increased dramatically. As researchers Ìęin Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, recent warming is “the most plausible explanation.” As snowfall remains consistent and temperatures rise, the destabilized snowpack may lead to more frequent releases. In the past five years, 32 people have died in avalanches on Everest.

RIP Great Barrier ReefÌę

In 2016, high water temperatures caused a massive bleaching event in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef that killed nearly 30 percent of its 134,634 square miles of coral. A new Ìęfrom the Climate Council, an Australian think tank, projected that by 2034, similar bleaching events could occur every two years, “effectively destroying the Great Barrier Reef.”

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The disastrous effects of hot-boxing the atmosphere were once problems for the future. Welcome to the future. And yet many people in the U.S., including its most powerful man, continue to deny that there’s a problem. How can we get the frightening reality across? Have we run out of options?Ìę

Acclaimed Russian director Victor Kossakovsky’s film , which hits select theaters on August 16, is a bold, thoroughly weird, high-def attempt to reimagine the climate-change message. Set to a jarring mixture of gut-crunching cello-metal tracks and the sounds of water in various stages of infuriated flux, Aquarela (“watercolor” in Portuguese) is meant to be uncomfortable. There’s no scripted dialogue. Instead, the only human conversation comes in the beginning, when we are placed at the center of a terrifying scene on southern Siberia’s Lake Baikal, where unsuspecting people keep driving their vehicles, one after another, through prematurely thawed sections of ice.Ìę

From there, Kossakovsky’s water world melts. The humans start to disappear. We travel west to Greenland, where the booms of calving glaciers echo like thunder across the landscape; to , on the brink of collapse during the epic floods of February 2017; to an empty, cobalt-washed Miami in the howling throes of Hurricane Irma. The subtext is clear: earth’s water is immense, and it is angry.Ìę

Aquarela provides a visual clarion call amid a flurry of prestige projects coming out this year, from Leonardo DiCaprio’s hopeful to Netflix’s , an eight-episode documentary that spans the globe, highlighting species and ecosystems imperiled by our warming world. Kossakovsky elects to gradually delete humans from his shots, twisting the traditional narrative that humans will destroy nature. Aquarela instead suggests that while we may be ravaging nature now, the earth will ultimately live on—not us. Without a narrator or narrative, this film is abstract art at its best, a void for unobstructed contemplation of the world in which we live.Ìę

But is a feature-length film composed of only imagery, heavy metal, and raging ambient sound an effective way to raise awareness? Big-budget pictures like Our Planet have at least reached people who might still need convincing that climate change is a present danger. ŽĄ±çłÜČč°ù±đ±ôČč’s beauty and novelty succeed in bringing to life the visceral effects of global warming. The question is whether enough of us will watch for it to have an impact.Ìę

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