Overflowing creeks, Olympic peaks, surfing geeks, Kelly’s tweaks, and the Human Viagra. Here are seven cases when surfing set the internet on fire.
Gabe Medina at the Olympics
It was an image that would become one of the iconic frames of the 2024 Olympics and one of surfing’s most viral episodes.
French surf photographer Jerome Brouillet captured Gabriel Medina bolt upright, three feet above the water, an index finger raised in glory after a perfect 10 in the Olympics at Teahupoo. The BBC called it the photo of the Olympics, and it made TIME’s annual list of the top 100 photos for 2024. Afterward, Brouillet was flown to Paris to meet up with Gabriel and described it as a life-changing photo. “This is the beauty of photography: freezing time and capturing unique moments.”
Mick Fanning V Shark at J-Bay
The rewatching of Mick Fanning getting attacked by a great white shark in the Final of the 2015 J-Bay Open never fails to make the blood run cold.
Broadcast live, there is a sickening moment when viewers see the huge dorsal fin arc toward Mick before the set wave takes him out of the camera’s sight for a few horrible seconds. For most watching, it seemed inevitable that the 2X World Champion was about to meet a grisly end. Miraculously, he survives, and within minutes, he is on the boat recounting how he punched the shark to stay alive. Understandably, it went viral. If there has been a more dramatic piece of live sport, we haven’t seen it.
Raimana “The Human Viagra” Van Bastolaer
“I call him the Human Viagra because he always gets you up.”
That was Cindy Crawford describing Raimana Van Bastolaer, the resident surf coach at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch. That legendary Tahitian has hosted celebrities like Doja Cat, Matthew McConaughey, Lewis Hamilton, UFC fighter Israel Adesanya, and Prince Harry, to name just a few. Many of those clips went viral, but it was this one, showing his feather-light touch as he mentors a grom to full stoke, that was the most loved by the internet.
River Destroys Beach
A mix of basic coastal morphology, some ASMR, and the satisfaction of seeing a tiny trickle turn into a raging torrent of standing waves managed to titillate the World Wide Web.
Skimboarder Blair Conklin’s time-lapse of a river breaching after his mates had dug a tiny trench at Laguna Beach and the ensuing carnage proved to be one of surfing’s most watched clips with over 100 million views on YouTube.
Kelly Slater Drops The Surf Ranch, 2015
On December 5, 2015, Kelly Slater dropped the first clip of himself surfing the Surf Ranch.
“This is the best man-made wave ever built, without doubt,” he said, as surfers first, and then the rest of the world gawped at the pure perfection of the GOAT called a freak of technology.” A decade later, we have been desensitized to the millions of artificial waves that have been pumped out all over the world, but this first one really blew minds.
The “Wapah” guy, or “Get Pitted” Guy
In 2002, before YouTube, Micah Peasley gave a memorable interview on FOX 11 that went viral long before the term “going viral” was even a thing.
His report of surf conditions saw him get the name of the “Wapah” or “Get Pitted” guy, depending on your preferences. Whether it was real, fake, or somewhere in between is largely irrelevant, as it gave Peasley his place in surf history… and his business name. He now runs the Get Pitted Surf and Snow, which provides surf and snowboard lessons.
Dynamite Surfing
Very early on, Quiksilver saw the commercial value of the viral video.
Given that their dynamite video was created just two years after YouTube launched in 2005, it was remarkably ahead of its time. The key was that it was an expensive, professional shoot that gave the illusion of being homemade. High-grade cinematography software and hundreds of hours of post-production made it look realistic that a group of surfers paddling into a lake would ride a wave caused by someone throwing dynamite from a bridge. Non-surfers bought it (and even some surfers), and it quickly collected millions of views on this new thing called YouTube.
Hurricane Surfer
This was a 2002 TV advert that made a bit of a splash during its initial release but gained much more virality once it was cleared of all the branding and released on the internet as a real-life event.
Initially, it was a Powerade ad featuring Flea Virostko and Zach Wormhoudt at Mavericks. Later, someone tweaked it to look like news footage of a storm making landfall, with a reporter narrating the freak waves. To be fair, you’d have to be a relatively keen surfer to spot the skullduggery, and it usually does the rounds after any tsunami event, clocking up even more views.