Insiders believe that the development of surfing in China is not yet mature and needs to “break the waves.
Xinhua News Agency, Haikou, January 8th issue: improving surfing technology and popularizing surfing culture-China’s surfing movement needs to “break the waves”
Xinhua News Agency reporter Liu Bo
on the 8th, WSL (world surfing Alliance) the third match day of the world men’s and women’s short board surfing Challenger Series (Mannings station) ended. Chinese player Qiu Zhuo stopped the second round. So far, 32 Chinese contestants all ended the surfing competition. Insiders believe that the development of surfing in China is not yet mature and needs to “break the waves.
This competition is points race of the qualification of the short board surfing project of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, with nearly 200 top surfing players from 30 countries and regions participating in the competition. As the host, China has 32 foreign card entries, which is a big training for China’s national surfing team.
The competition system adopts the four-in-two system, that is, there are four players in each group. The first two are promoted to the next round, and entering the second round is equivalent to the players who have defeated half. Chinese players Qiu Zhuo, Winnie and Yang Siqi entered the second round of the competition, which was a great progress for Chinese surfers.
But judging from the competition results, there is still a big gap between Chinese players and top foreign players, among which the French player Joao Di Lu, who ranks 28th in the world in WSL points, is in the same group with Qiu Zhuo, qiu Zhuo’s best score in a wave was 3.2 points, which was less than half of that of French players.
South Dongbin, the referee of surfing technology, said that the gap between Chinese players and foreign players is mainly power. How to release power to produce big water flowers requires mature surfing technology. Reading competition ability is also very important. How to catch a good wave is coming, which tests the ability of athletes to “read waves.
Surfing has become the Olympic sports programme in Tokyo in 202020. now most professional surfers come from Australia, Brazil and the United States. Surfing, as a competitive sport, is not yet mature in China. In order to make surfers perform better in the debut of the Olympic Games, China has established a national surfing team in 2017.
Ma Fulai, the leader of the national surfing team, said frankly that compared with the surfing level of international high-level athletes, there are still many “things” worse for the members of the national surfing team, but after more than two years of efforts, the national surfing team members scored 4-6 points from the first 1-2 points.
For the development of surfing in China, Ma Fulai said that the current national team members are basically under 18 years old, and the surfing time is 10-15 years, at the speed of the current team members’ level improvement, I believe there will be a world champion in China in the near future.
Another gap is surfing culture. China’s national surfing team has just begun to develop for more than 2 years, and other advanced countries have developed for decades in this project. Japan has developed surfing for more than 40 years and has formed its own surfing culture.
Steve George Robertson, general manager of the Asian region of the World Surfing Federation, believes that the promotion of surfing is not limited by geographical conditions in many cases, but cultural differences. Surfing culture does not exist in the genes of Chinese traditional culture, and surfing “entering the Olympics” will make more young people understand surfing.
If China wants to make a breakthrough in surfing, it needs more international events to train the national team members, and it also needs to develop a good surfing culture so that more people can go to the beach and fall in love with surfing.