Surfing legend and multiple world champion, American Kelly Slater, supported opponents of the judges’ tower at the Teahupo’o site in Tahiti for the 2024 Olympics surfing event.
The American responded on social networks to the video posted on Sunday by local surfer Matahi Drollet. The Tahitian denounces the compromise found by the authorities to install a lightweight tower in the middle of the lagoon to accommodate the judges, despite local protests, regretting that “financial issues take precedence over the environment”.
“It doesn’t make sense that we need such a giant tower for a two-day event,” Kelly Slater wrote in the comments below the video. “Give money to local city infrastructure for the damage caused by the changing river that caused flooding earlier this year,” he suggests.
The 51-year-old American, committed to saving coral reefs, also suggests using for the Olympics the wooden tower usually in place for international competitions on this site, “or else, build it on the existing foundations” .
This wooden tower “has not been up to standard for around ten years,” the organizing committee explained to AFP.
The initial project to create a new aluminum tower had raised strong local opposition, with several associations, environmentalists and residents of the village of Teahupo’o believing that the installation of this tower would degrade the coral and the seabed.
The president of French Polynesia Moetai Brotherson even considered moving the surfing event on November 8. But a week later, after a meeting in Tahiti, the Polynesian government, state representatives and organizers announced that they were redesigning the project, reducing the surface area and weight of the tower. , from 14 to 9 tons, and that the test remained at Teahupo’o.
“The solution we are proposing today, in the unanimous opinion of the committee of experts, is the best possible,” Moetai Brotherson assured AFP on November 20 on the sidelines of the mayors’ show in Paris.