'A liquid tightrope': A look at the stunning and dangerous waves surfers will ride at Olympics

Building a relationship with the wave.

That's what Canadian Olympic surfer Sanoa Dempfle-Olin has been doing for the last few days in Teahupo'o, a village on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti that will host Olympic surfing events.

The island is almost 16,000 kilometres away from Paris and boasts some of the biggest, and most dangerous, waves in the world.

That requires competitors to spend lots of time getting familiar with the nuances of the conditions in Teahupo'o. The Canadians trained there in September, and 19-year-old Dempfle-Olin, the only Canadian to qualify for Olympic surfing, has been back another four times since then.

"A tightrope is basically what they're riding here, a liquid tightrope," Dom Domic, the executive director of Surf Canada, told CBC Sports as the waves crashed behind him.

"You want to be as deep as possible and still make it out."

The answer is simple: The conditions are better in Tahiti.

In Teahupo'o, where it's winter, the swell originates from wind blowing, from low-pressure systems spinning off Antarctica, according to Fernando Aguerre, president of the International Surfing Association.

"They are the same swells that make amazing waves this time of the year in Bali or in South Africa or in Australia or the West Coast of the Americas," he said, describing the surfing in Teahupo'o as the "Mount Everest" of the sport.

Teahupo'o also has "a super shallow live reef break" with really heavy water, Domic said.

That creates a big barrel, which is when the wave forms almost a tunnel around the surfer. That's what leads to the stunning visuals of surfers who look like they're being swallowed whole by monster waves.

"That's what's going to score the biggest points, and that puts you also in the