As the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games events concluded on Sunday, February 22, a now-familiar mechanic emerges with unrelenting clarity. The world is industrializing. The world is standardizing. The world is optimizing. And sport, far from escaping it, becomes one of the most readable metaphors. Board sports in particular are the perfect illustration of this: “white surfing” on Alpine slopes, “blue surfing” on ocean waves.
“White surfing” occupied a central place in the program of the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games, through biathlon, snowboarding, freestyle skiing and snowparks. Highly appreciated by the world media, it was also a sporting success for the French delegation, which won almost a medal per day. But competition changes everything. It is no longer free, uncertain, exposed gliding, where we accept the ultimate risk, sometimes unconsciously also risking the lives of the rescuers.
It is now the reign of measured performance, choreographed spectacle, calibrated timetables, marked courses, omnipresent sponsors, standardized adventure playgrounds, standardized modules, on snow more and more often produced by humans. Nature does not disappear: it recedes. It becomes the distant setting of a spectacle which no longer has much to do with “white surfing” in its original purity.
Like “white surfing” before it, “blue surfing” will have to comply with the rules of Olympism: readable formats, controlled narration, imposed balance between nature and spectacle.
“Blue surfing”, entered the Olympic universe at the Tokyo Games in 2020 (contested in 2021), then dedicated to Teahupo’o (Tahiti) in 2024 with a first French gold medal, seems for the moment to better resist this artificialization. We slide on a raw, mythical, indomitable wave.
It is, in appearance, the ultimate Olympic discipline still almost free of any artifact. An image from the Paris 2024 Games crystallized this illusion: propelled by the force of the tube, suspended above the Teahupo’o wave, the Brazilian Gabriel Medina, captured by Morgan Maassen’s lens, seemed to defy any human attempt to artificialize reality.
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And yet, soon, everything will change. Like “white surfing” before it, “blue surfing” will have to comply with the rules of Olympism: readable formats, controlled narration, imposed balance between nature and spectacle. The Olympism will demand what surf culture has always refused: perfect equality of conditions, controlled programming, broadcast without rough edges.
While the performance is perfected by becoming artificial, reality brutally recalls its law. Global warming contributes to the increase in mountain avalanches, killing careless skiers. And the ocean is not left out. Just a few days ago, storm Nils hit the South-West of France with rare violence: gusts of up to 180 km/h, a driver killed by a tree falling on his truck.
It is in this gap that the fundamental tension of skiing plays out today. On the one hand, an Olympic mechanism which seeks to frame, measure and artificialize everything. On the other, a nature which does not negotiate, which cannot be noted or classified and which continues to impose its tempo. Sliding thus becomes the best illustration of the contemporary illusion of mastery: believing that we can domesticate the world by artificializing it and transforming it into a spectacle.
Long a refuge for a raw relationship with the living, will skiing be able to resist this great rationalization of the world?
For “blue surfing”, the real question is no longer whether it has its place in the Games. It is to know how long it can stay there without losing what gave birth to it – and which so many other sports have sacrificed by becoming Olympic.
In all other areas, the world seems to be following the same trajectory. Environments are becoming industrialized. Practices are becoming standardized. Human relationships themselves are becoming more and more transactional, even artificial.
Long a refuge for a raw relationship with the living, will skiing be able to resist this great rationalization of the world? Will she, too, have to give in to a world where everything becomes a spectacle and where the spectacle ends up replacing reality? Or will it remain, at least in its blue version, one of the last spaces where human beings dialogue harmoniously with nature without brutalizing it?
