Cover photo: Slater at the Surf Ranch by WSL/PNN

The greatest surfer in history, Kelly Slater, has come out in favour of surfing in Los Angeles 2028 being held in a wave pool. “People ask me if we should do it in Lowers, Huntington, Malibu… And I say: Let’s do it in a wave pool,” the 11-time world champion told Barton Lynch on the Stoked Bloke Show.

Slater insisted that they should build a pool that can support the format that he believes should exist at the Olympic Games. “They should bring together the right people in our sport and come up with what everyone believes is the most exciting and fair format. Create the format also with the idea of ​​what wave we can have.”

For Salter, the format of Olympic surfing should be different from that of the world tour and basically what he proposes is similar to gymnastics: "It should be a combination of singular maneuvers, compulsive if you like, that is, you have to do these aerials or these cuts and you can score these individually and then have a full right and a full left.

“If everyone has the same canvas, the same wave to deal with, it makes sense in a way,” he said.

He said that with his partner in the construction of the Surf Ranch, the controversial Jeff Bizzack (who was imprisoned for bribing his son to get into a certain university) He told him to think of the pool as a mantra, like making it an Olympic pool, and from then on he thought about an Olympic format.

“What’s the fairest way to showcase everybody’s surfing? Maybe they don’t ride the best waves but they do the best moves and you still win. Maybe you’re fifth in one aspect and first in another and tenth in another, you put them all together and… I think that’s probably the best way to showcase surfing because then you put it in a smaller package which makes it more understandable to people who ‘paddled out a little bit faster but I had surfed the last wave and there’s an issue with priority,’” Slater explained.

Barton Lynch agreed about the pool, saying a tournament at Malibu, Huntington or Lowers is something that has been seen before, so it makes sense especially since Kelly's pool is nearby in Lemoore.

Last week, both Filipe Toledo , the Gabriel Medina spoke along the same lines as Slater, saying that for them the fairest thing is that the Games are held in swimming pools.

Medina was affected because he waited more than 15 minutes for a wave and it did not come, in his semi-final series against Jack Robinson.