The New Yorker Radio Hour - Kelly Slater’s Perfect Wave Brings Surfing to a Crossroads

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

In December of 2015, a video appeared on the Internet that stunned surfers worldwide. Titled “Kelly’s Wave,” it showed Kelly Slater—arguably the best pro surfer in history—unveiling a secret project he had been working on for more than a decade. With the help of engineers and designers, Slater had perfected the first artificial wave, created by machine in a pool, that could rival the best waves found in the ocean. “One could spend years and years surfing in the ocean,” the staff writer William Finnegan, himself a lifelong surfer, notes, “and never get a wave as good as what some people are getting here today. Ever.”    Finnegan went to visit the Kelly Slater Wave Company’s Surf Ranch—a facility in California’s Central Valley, far from the Coast—to observe a competition and test the wave for himself. (He wrote about the experience in The New Yorker.) Up until now, surfing was defined by its lack of predictability: chasing waves around the world and dealing with disappointment when they do not appear has been integral to the life of a surfer. But, with a mechanically produced, infinitely repeatable, world-class wave, surfing can become like any other sport. The professional World Surf League, which has bought a controlling interest in Slater’s company, sees a bright future.   But Finnegan wonders what it means to take surfing out of nature. Will kids master riding artificial waves without even learning to swim in the ocean? Finnegan spoke with Kelly Slater, Stephanie Gilmore (the Australian seven-time world champion), and Matt Warshaw (the closest thing surfing has to an official historian). Warshaw, like Finnegan, is skeptical about the advent of mechanical waves. Yet he admits that, when he had the chance to ride it, he didn’t ever want to stop. “It reminded me of 1986,” Warshaw recalls. “The drugs have run out, you already hate yourself—how do we get more?”   This story originally aired December 14, 2018. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm driving through farmland outside Lamour, California. It's pretty morning, low sun, some of the fields are green, a lot of the fields are brown, some have gone to weeds, lines of eucalyptus. William Finnegan is one of the very best reporters I've ever seen in action, and without a doubt, he's the greatest surfer I've ever met. He wrote a terrific memoir about his lifelong passions for the sport. It's called Barbarian Days, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. And that might explain why Bill in 2018 found himself driving

through the Central Valley farm country of California. Now passing what looks like a jogging surfer out the middle of nowhere. We're getting near the Surf Ranch Pro, this pro surfing competition going on this weekend. A few years ago, in December of 2015, something happened that sent an incredible shockwave through the world of surfing.

Kelly Slater, who's the consensus best surfer in history, dropped a video on the internet called Kelly's Wave. This is our little secret spot, about 110 miles from the coast. You see this misty pond daybreak. And then we pan to this wave that's peeling along down this long pond. It's an artificial wave. It's not in the ocean. It's incredibly precise machine tool.

It's really glassy. We don't know how big it is, but then Slater paddles out and takes off on a wave, and it's six feet. I mean, it's just the most incredible wave you've ever seen. Seeing that, I'm 100% positive. Our team built the best wave than anyone's ever made. It's a freak of technology. His business partners claimed there were like 2 million views in the next two days or something on YouTube.

Everybody had to see this thing. I mean, there have been wave pools for a long time, including wave pools built for serving. But there's never been anything exciting about them. They produced these short, messy, weak waves. But Slater had this idea that it should be possible to build a great artificial wave, a powerful wave. And here it was. Like everybody else who surfs, I grew up chasing waves, trying to find good waves, to predict where they're going to be and to be there. So when I get to the surf ranch in the Central Valley and far far from the coast, I mean, it's just completely,

weird. We're, you know, showing up at a facility. It looks like a, you know, a fairground or a country club. So many great farmers now at the gradstands watching crow surfing. Who would have thought? 100 miles off the coast. Amazing people here hosting the world. So there's a big event at Kelly Slater's Surf Ranch, World Championship Tour. Men and women have come to hold a big contest normally held on the coast in California. It's the California Lake of the Tour. And this is a great big place. The pool's 700 yards. long, maybe 100 yards across. It's a big noisy scene, and there are all these pro surfers around,

some of the best surfers in the world, including Kelly Slater. That's 1.1, that's 2.0. So we find him back in what they call the boardroom. It's got an awful lot of surfboards along one wall. He's gobbling kale chips out of a bag, and he starts showing us some of the photos of the wave here at different stages of development. That was first stage. These are all chronological.

First time we ran the left of August. of August of last year, the day after the solar eclipse. So they've done a lot of different versions of this wave. I mean, first, countless simulations in the lab and on computers, and then out here in the pool. And the goal was really for competitive purposes to make a level playing field, you know, unlike what you have in the ocean,

to make every single wave exactly the same. There's a place called Padang Padang in Bali that if you're looking for the right wave, they all are pretty much the same. I think if you went out in those spots said each guy got three waves that looked exactly like the other guy's three waves, he would say that was fair, the better guy won. And so often in the ocean, a person wins because they got the right waves,

not because they were necessarily the better surfer. And so I think with this, the idea is to try and do as best as possible to create a format to allow the best surfer to win. Now, I'm not a professional surfer, so the idea of a level playing field doesn't mean very much to me. and yet some of the pros really respond to it. Well done. I just had some lunch, some food on your face. And you surf really well, but I missed it.

Thank you. Oh, that's all right. You got a 9-2-3. Stephanie Gilmore, for instance, great Australian surfers. She just won her 7th World Championship. She has such a silky, beautiful style, and she just figured out this wave immediately.

Well, if you surf snapper rocks every day from the age of 12 till 27, then you'll probably be able to figure it out too. What's like any basic differences, though, between this wave and an ocean wave? Anything you notice? When you take off on the wave, you can't. I mean, the feeling of having the most perfect wave come towards you

and the potential of just like falling on the takeoff, all these things that you never even consider surfing when you're in the ocean is just second nature. each other, paddle in, jump to your feet. It's too easy. But all these things that you've never even thought about before, you're like sitting there going, is my leg rope on the right leg? Did I, my fins in? Did I wax properly?

Oh, did I forget how to paddle? What about getting to my feet? All these crazy little things that you shouldn't even think about. Do you remember where you first heard that we're putting this Sir French on tour and you're going to have to do a contest here? The very first time I came here, I mean, I didn't even have to ask anyone. I knew that this would be a destination for a contest. The beauty of wave pools, and they're such a supplement to competitive surfing,

to be out of time and to be able to broadcast it live on television. There's so many things in the ocean that hold us back from having that primetime viewership. All the times and all of the events that couldn't really. run or no we could never have an event in that city or I mean the amount of times I've imagined going and watching a professional surfing event at Madison Square Garden so yeah it was it's cool I got really excited about it. Surf Ranch Pro presented by Hurley this is stop eight on the championship tour for the world surf league the title race is intensifying we've got surfing is at a crossroads you know the world

surf league which is the governing body of pro surfing has really really been on a growth push the last few years. And wave pool technology is central to this push. That is, in 2016, the WSL bought the Kelly Slater Wave Company, when they saw that this thing is as good as it is. The idea that you could hold competitions in an artificial setting like this, in a wave pool, suddenly makes it possible to sell broadcast rights. You can suddenly schedule an event for a Sunday afternoon,

and hold it on that Sunday afternoon. You know, they want the WSL to be up there with the NFL and the NBA, whether that's realistic or not. They should be disappointed with that first effort on run number one. About halfway down the length of the pool is a control tower. That's where they launched the wave from. We walked down there with a guy named Gerald Kubiak, who's showing this round.

Before he took a job at the surf ranch as the senior control, controls engineer. He worked designing roller coasters at Universal Studios and Disney parks. You know, the technologies that we're using here for the control system standpoint is very similar to what we had at Universal. Yeah, let's go ahead. We spent a lot of time up here. Hey guys. Hello, guys. So here we have camera views.

This is the North Winch House. Blinking lights and we can, you know, trained eyes can look at this and say, okay, something's not right. There's a blinking light here. We can zoom in on things and we can really have a good, you know, close look from this point, right? A bunch of cameras trained on different parts of the pool, the system, the machinery, being watched in real time by somebody who can come. catch any discrepancies. Adam Finchum, who's a scientist who specializes in fluid dynamics at USC, he's been the lead

engineer on this thing from the beginning. It was really him and Slater. So do you watch this thing with a proprietor's eye? I'm watching every wave. Uh-huh. Every wave, and we're looking for any small discrepancies in the waves. Happening more frequently? The lake responds differently in the way the water moves, depending on. on how many waves he run per hour, how often you take a break.

So Finchum is the brains behind the piece of machinery that makes the wave. It's this big blue vehicle that runs on raised tracks along the length of the pool, dragging this 100-ton iron blade through the water. Really massive thing, I mean, it's the size of a small house or, you know, maybe three train cars. We're not a theme park. Uh-huh. We're not a ride. Right. I would say in a lot of ways, well, more akin to a mining industry.

Mining industry? And the connection there is... Heavy machinery. Heavy machinery. Not sluicing, not... Powerful, heavy machinery. Machinery that has to run, you know, if your gold mine, whatever dredge or whatever it is, goes down for a day, that's a lot of money. And their reliability and, you know, they're dealing with big, powerful machines that have to work. Yeah. Have to work. Yeah.

And we want to be that company that provides that. So the foil is down there. And now he's going to be pushing that button. Did you push it already? Yeah. So he pushes that blue button, which is the launch confirm button. And so we change the profile to cater to a person's skill or open up the barrel, close up the barrel. Wow.

Wow. You can see them up here. It's like being in God's control room. I'm going to open up the barrel. Make it go faster. Make it smaller, bigger. Thank you, guys. From up here in the tower, this is actually the best view of the wave I've had yet.

It's hard to see from the ground because it's so long. and it's always sort of running away from you. But up here you can really see the whole thing. This guy just sitting in a pond in the middle of nowhere. Oh, look, there's a left coming at us. Wow. Oh, that somebody's taking off. Wow.

A little bit of onshore wind on this left. Guy making the most of the crumble. This wave. Oh, my God. This inside section. Oh, man, look at that. Wave. Oh.

Oh, oh, so clean. I have all the kind of natural feelings of, God, I wish I'd got that wave, and hope he doesn't blow it, and look how long that wave's going, and this is all, you know, this is program. This wave reminds me of a place I used to surf in Australia called Kura. I lived there for a few months,

got some of the best waves of my life, and that place doesn't exist anymore. The sandbar moved, and the waves not. there anymore. But it was a long, hollow, incredibly fast barrel, just like the middle section of this surf ranch wave. And it's strange because, you know, I keep watching these waves reel through and I feel like I'm falling in love with this wave. And of course, it's like falling in love with a robot. I don't know. I think it's just, it's progression. It's going to happen whether we like it or not. Now I'm back with Steph Gilmore, our talk with earlier.

it's sort of like we could sit here and, you know, be sad about it, or we could just accept it and move with it and almost be proud that we grew up in an era where we did get to experience learning to surf, you know, getting pushed backwards in the whitewater, trying to get out all the time, not having to pay for parking at the beach, all those sorts of things. You know, because they are still the most, yeah, the most magical moments

from surfing. I don't know if they're going to get a wave pool ready in Tokyo for the Olympics, but it would make sense, right? Totally. I mean, the Olympics is, I dreamed of going to the Olympics as a young girl for running or discus, javelin, just anything. And I never thought I'd get the chance of a surfer, but now to have that chance to know that we could, every surfer from any part of the world gets the same opportunity to ride a wave

makes sense to me. I'm, I just think that we'd keep it consistent. because if we start the Olympics in the ocean and then the next Olympics is in a wave pool and the next one's in an ocean again, it sort of, I don't know, it could change the credit of each medal that was won at each Olympics, you know?

But once every four years, for it to come down to sitting in a flat, no swell at a beach in who knows where, and you don't even get away, to surf, that would be really heartbreaking. Would you like to see it in the wayfield? As a, I don't know, purist or something, would you be disappointed to see it? Not be, you know, an authentic representation of what surfing is. I don't know, it's not, that doesn't worry me.

Are you worried that it'll make it too crowded? I'm, yeah, worried about surfing getting more and more and more popular. And, you know, going along like this, somebody, could learn to surf incredibly inland somewhere and be like world champion material and and be unable to paddle out doesn't know how to duck dive yes they can win in a wave pool but they're probably going to drown at pipeline yeah I should say that the hope that a slater pool will be used in the Tokyo Olympics has since faded the world surf league tells me that they don't think it's going to happen. The Olympic surfing is going to be held in this mediocre beach break,

a couple hours from Tokyo. In the meantime, the Slater Wave Company, though, is going full speed ahead. I mean, they're building the pool in Tokyo. They've got a construction permit in Palm Beach, Florida for a wave pool, and they tell me they're going to be building them all over the world. The contest is over for the day and a bunch of sort of friends of the surf ranch or Facebook people, as these seem to be, partners with the World Surf League, are out in the water, not expert surfers by any stretch, and they're running quite a different wave, and it looks like a different world than what we saw earlier.

The lights are going on. The party's just starting, apparently, the Facebook party. Very strange how they've exported this ocean sport to the... the San Joaquin Valley that kind of isolated the very specific joy of it. I mean, one can spend years and years surfing in the ocean

and never get away of as good as what some people are getting here today, ever. So... Yeah. How are you, man? I'm good, you? I'm good. Let me see. Hold on a second. After I get back from Surf Ranch, I call an old friend to debrief.

Matt Warsh He's the closest thing we have to an official historian of surfing. He's written a couple of big authoritative books, and he maintains something called the Encyclopedia of Surfing Online. So, Matt. Hey, Bill. I mean, can you really bear to talk any more about Kelly's Wave? You know, I'm never that far from thinking about it in a weird way.

It's a genuine existential problem for someone like me or probably you who's been surfing and thinking about surfing for as long as we have. Yeah. Did you go? Yeah, I did. I went for the Surf Ranch Pro, and after the comp, I got to surf it. So how did your waves go?

You were given two waves? Yeah. First, I was sort of scrambled and, you know, I messed up to and thought, oh, no. And they said, no, no, no, come back and get on the right board. And, I mean, my reaction, really, after two waves, and I ate it in the end section on both of them, was, you know, give me another one.

Give me another one. Give me a hundred more. Totally. I got this. I know what I did wrong. I'll get it right next time. No, they turned the machine off and I was just, you know, I would have thrown all three of my credit cards up to somebody to say, just take these and let me have as many as I can, until they, until they break. You know, I would have, I mean, it, it was like, you know, it reminded me of 1986 and the drugs have run out.

You already hate yourself. And how do we get more? It's like, I just wanted more and more. more and more. And I've ridden a lot of great waves and a lot of waves that I thought were perfect. And the truth of the matter is, I've never, what is it, Bill, 300 yards long or 200 yards long? It's 700 yards to pool. 700 yards long, okay. Well, you know, a 700 yard long wave that doesn't have a section and in tubes for most of the way. No, I've never, I've never surfed a wave like that before. So it seemed to somehow make small,

you know, my whole lifelong pursuit of good surf. What Matt and I are struggling with here is just sort of the meaning or the value of, you know, how we've spent our surfing lives, this huge amount of time looking for waves and sort of developing the ability to find them and then to surf them. And it can be frustrating, it can be scary, it can be boring. And you're out there having to really think. Not only apply all the sort of physical skills you acquire over the years of surfing, but, you know, the tide's changing.

What does it mean? The wind's shifting. What does it mean? So while's coming up, where should I be? What's going to work? What's too dangerous? Now that's going to come into play in a pool. The reason the sport is interesting is because of the ocean.

The only reason we're interesting is surfers. is because of all those decisions we had to make and have to make to get surf. That's the only, otherwise we're, you know, otherwise we're just doing parkour, right? Yeah. Gymnast or something. Gymnist, right. So we've solved a problem that I don't think even needed solving. But we all thought it did.

Yeah. I think that if I did have the time and the money, I think that I'll still choose to roll the dice and go back to Indonesia. Okay. Well, I'll see you there. Great talking to you, Bill. You too, Matt. Call any time, and let's keep in touch. All right.

You can read William Finnegan's article about Kelly Slater's artificial wave at New Yorker.com, along with a lot of other terrific work that Bill's written over the years. I'm David Remnick, and thank you for listening. We'll have a lot going on in January, including an interview with Terry Gross, who will join us next week. See you then. The Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Karen Frulman, Callalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Morgan Flannery, Alison McAdam, Monk Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.