It’s hypnotic to sit down in front of the television around midnight and watch the surfing events in the antipodes of the host city. The Olympic sub-venue of Teahupo’o is more than 15,000 kilometres from Paris. Hypnotic and fascinating.
Everything is slow. The rolling of the waves, time in suspense, the monotonous sun on the lazy island, as Baudelaire would say. Then, the wave comes. And everything goes fast.
This is Tahiti, in French Polynesia. And although we have seen fencing at the Grand Palais, beach volleyball in front of the Eiffel Tower and acrobatics on the Concorde, it is doubtful that there is another aesthetically comparable event. Aesthetically and geopolitically. Because behind this idyllic setting lies colonial history, and France’s agonising efforts to remain a world power.
“I thought I had been transported to the Gardens of Eden,” wrote the French navigator Bougainville when he landed in Tahiti in 1768. “Everywhere there reigned hospitality, repose, sweet joy and all the appearances of happiness.”
More than a century and a half later, in the midst of the Civil War, the Catalan poet Josep María de Sagarra travelled to the same island and understood that beauty could hide the terrible: “In the sea of Tahiti,” he wrote in The Blue Route, “in addition to the discomforts and dangers of the coral, there is the risk of eels, which bite like dogs and coil around your legs, and there is the risk, very occasional if you like, but evident, of a visit from a voracious shark.”
Something similar happens with Olympic surfing. The pedestrian contemplates paradise from the sofa. But the pedestrian has on his table reports, articles, books about the 193 nuclear tests that France carried out in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996.
—Right now I’m on the Atlantic coast and I’m surfing.
On the phone, journalist Tomas Statius, co-author with scientist Sébastien Philippe of Toxica journalistic and scientific investigation into the trials. He sees the Games from a double perspective: that of a surfer and that of a researcher.
With Philippe, he analysed 2,000 pages of declassified files and concluded that the health consequences had been greater than recognised by the authorities. Some 110,000 people may have received radiation doses above the threshold for compensation. According to Philippe’s estimates, there were around 10,000 cases of cancer during this period.
We asked Statius about the impact on Teahupo’o, the home of surfing, and he replies: “The peninsula where Teahupo’o is located was one of the places hardest hit in July 1974 by a test called Centaur. Either dust fell from the atmosphere, travelling with the cloud as it moved on the wind, or rain washed the cloud of its radioactivity and fell to the ground, contaminating water and food.”
That every paradise has its edges, Sagarra understood it, and so did the filmmaker Albert Serra, who filmed in Tahiti, in the midst of the pandemic, Pacificationanother hypnotic and disturbing picture of a Polynesia where rumours are rife that France will resume nuclear testing.
“I imagine there are higher interests,” the French High Commissioner tells a local activist opposed to the tests in the film. “I think of Russia, of China, of your American friend.”
The Olympics have always been a way for the host country to flex its muscles. With surfing, in the middle of a Pacific Ocean that is the theatre of disputes between 21st century powers, France explains something about itself. This is a country, still, where the sun never sets.
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