World’s best surfers riding Abu Dhabi’s perfect waves

ABU DHABI: The world’s best surfers have gathered this week not on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii, or the sandy beaches of Australia’s Gold Coast, but in the unlikely location of Abu Dhabi for the second stop of the sport’s elite global tour.

Unlikely because until recently, the UAE capital, despite being surrounded by the Arabian Gulf’s waters, did not have surfable waves to speak of.

Advances in artificial wave technology, however, aligned with deep investment in sport by countries including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, has led to the creation of a world-class surf destination.

The Surf Abu Dhabi Pro, which got underway on Friday, features 18 women and 36 men battling it out as a part of the World Surf League’s Championship Tour.

Other stops on the WSL’s 12-leg circuit include the ferocious Teahupoʻo in Tahiti, which featured in last year’s Olympics, the long, peeling point break of Jeffreys Bay in South Africa, and the fabled reef pass of Cloudbreak in Fiji.

Abu Dhabi’s journey to add its name to this illustrious list began a decade ago when the race to build wave-pool technology entered a new era.

Wave pools have been around in surfing since the 1960s but they had always been a poor imitation of the real thing.

In 2015, however, the greatest competitive surfer of all time, Kelly Slater, posted a video from a secret site in Lemoore, California, that featured a perfect peeling wave lasting 45 seconds — a long ride in surfing.

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The wave even included sections that allowed the rider to reach one of the sport’s sacred goals — getting “barreled” by disappearing behind the lip of the wave as it breaks onto the water in front.

It was a seismic moment for the surf