5 questions with surfer Sanoa Dempfle-Olin ahead of Canadian's Olympic debut

Sanoa Dempfle-Olin will be the first Canadian to compete in surfing in an Olympic Games starting Saturday.

The sport made its Olympic debut in Tokyo in 2021, but Canada didn't enter an athlete.

Dempfle-Olin is Canada's lone surfer competing in Tahiti's Teahupo'o (pronounced CHOH-poo), which is known as the "Wall of Skulls."

Tahiti is a French Polynesian Island in the South Pacific some 15,000 kilometres from the host city of Paris.

The 18-year-old Dempfle-Olin from Tofino, B.C., provisionally qualified for the Paris Games by capturing a silver medal at the 2023 Pan American Games, and officially stamped her ticket by finishing 13th in February's World Surf Games in Puerto, Rico.

Her older sister Mathea is also an accomplished surfer having won Pan Am Games bronze in Lima, Peru in 2019.

Sanoe Dempfle-Olin answered a few questions from The Canadian Press ahead of making national surfing history. The interview has been condensed and edited for space.

Will you feel a part of the Olympics competing at a venue far from the host city?

"You definitely will. It has a different energy around it. It is far away. I'm sure it will have its differences. Hopefully I get to go to Paris after the surfing part of the event and get to see the Olympic city."

What makes Teahupo'o so formidable and why is it called the Wall of Skulls?

"Teahupo'o is a really popular wave in surfing. It can be a very dreamy, perfect wave and it can also hold a lot of swell and get really big and really thick. It breaks over a really shallow reef. It is a very scary wave. It takes a lot to surf it."

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Are you afraid of sharks, and have you ever seen one?

"I'm not particularly afraid of