The revolution of surfing thanks to wave pools

The temptation would be to define what was seen in mid-February in Abu Dhabi – during the WSL Championship Tour 2025 – as a new way of surfing. Specifically, the World Surf League, the federation that oversees the professional surfing championship, made a stop in the United Arab Emirates from February 14 to 16 for a competition held in the middle of the desert. How was this possible? A gigantic wave pool was used: a three-meter-deep basin that, thanks to a special structure on the bottom mimicking the shapes of a coral reef, is capable of generating waves, both right and left, which can reach three meters in height and travel for one hundred meters. A technological gem created by Kelly Slater Wave Co., the company founded by Kelly Slater, the most famous and successful surfer of all time. The competition itself did not receive the media coverage that such an event – a surfing competition in the heart of the desert – could have generated; in fact, most of the attention was directed toward the case involving Tyler Wright, an Australian surfer who risked arrest for being homosexual, due to the laws in force in the United Arab Emirates, and who only participated in the event after receiving official reassurances about her safety from the WSL.

Once the temptation to define surfing in a wave pool as a novelty is resisted, the next step is to grasp the core of the matter, which is that thanks to wave pools it is now possible to surf anywhere. Surfing is a sport that requires locations with very specific characteristics: the most obvious example is seen in the Paris Olympics, where all the surfing events took place in the stunning setting of Tahiti, 15,000 kilometers away from the French capital. In this constant search by sports to transcend borders in the quest for popularity, once again, money from the Middle East has come into play, with Arab countries gradually moving toward: Football, NBA, Formula 1, MotoGP. Surfing is just the latest name on this list, and it is not unlikely that what was seen in Abu Dhabi could be repeated elsewhere. The arrival of surfing in the United Arab Emirates was initially conceived for touristic and commercial purposes, and later on a sporting level. A new attraction for the elite population of those places and, at the same time, a solution to make those who come to Abu Dhabi for their holidays feel at home. A shared goal that led to the creation of Surf Abu Dhabi, the 75,000-square-meter location where the WSL stop took place, created in partnership between the aforementioned Kelly Slater Wave Co. and Modon, the real estate company tied to the UAE government.

Regardless of the classic division between romantic purists and avant-garde innovators, surfing in wave pools has long been a common practice among professionals. The images from the competition in Abu Dhabi are not an absolute novelty. In fact, it is an ideal and widely used solution by professionals for their training, and past WSL events have been held in wave pools. However, the majority, if not nearly all, of the World Surf League calendar still includes events in open waters, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Wave pools, however, open up new scenarios, such as the possibility of surfing in the city. The spread of surf parks could propel surfing into a new dimension, returning a new popularity to the sport. Of course, the possibly bitter consequence is that it might lose the wild magic that has always characterized surfing, that sense of challenging death, which is also celebrated in cult films like Point Break. There is a chance it may present a more elitist image, as opposed to the wild one we associate with surfing: long hair, bare feet on the sand, and boards loaded onto van roofs. The only certainty is that, even in a wave pool, surfing would still be cool.