Article source: "Paris 2024 : l’épreuve de surf maintenue à Teahupoo, avec un nouveau projet de tour des juges", Le Monde, 17/11/2023.
The Organising Committee for the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics announced this evening that a new judges’ tower will be built in Teahupo’o, Tahiti for the surfing competition next summer. The decision was announced jointly with the local Tahitian authorities. They said that the tower would be “less imposing and substantially reduced in size and weight”, compared to the original plans.
For the past few weeks, the future of the competition due to be held in the renowned surfing resort of Teahupo’o has been called into doubt following protests by inhabitants and environmental groups who think the construction of the judges’ tower would cause lasting damage to the coral reef. The surfers, on the other hand, feared that the seabed profile might change, which could have a negative impact on the surf. A petition against the construction of a new tower, published yesterday, gathered more than 162,000 signatures.
The new project will “reduce the depth of drilling for the foundations of the tower and allow the use of a barge with a shallower draught during the construction phase,” reads a Paris 2024 press release.
Reduced Environmental Impact
According to the Organising Committee, the new aluminium tower will have the same surface area (150 m2) and weight (9 tonnes) as the former wooden tower. It will be erected before the competition and dismantled afterwards. The foundations, whose drilling depth can be reduced due to the weight reductions in the new design, will be “installed in an area with few corals”, says the Committee.
“The foundations will be inserted into the gaps between the existing studs, so the tower will be located in exactly the same place as the old tower,” explains the press release. “In addition, the new studs will allow coral to settle and grow, as is already the case with the existing foundations, and a cuttings programme will be carried out to accelerate this process.”
Although he hopes the surfing competition will stay in Tahiti, Moetai Brotherson, President of French Polynesia, announced a week ago he was considering moving the competition away to a different site a few kilometres from Teahupo’o. Yesterday evening, he told local TV channel TNTV, “this option is obviously not going to please everyone,” but that a decision had to be taken, because otherwise, “the Olympics are simply going to go somewhere else”.
Translated by William Lefever and Pierre Hébert.
Editing by Sam Trainor.