Surfing has long felt like the reserve of cool Californians or tropical island dwellers. But since appearing in the Tokyo Games in 2021, the Olympic effect has seen more and more Brits get involved in the sport.
No doubt in part to the rising number of retreats — offering travellers the chance to travel abroad to try riding waves as part of a group, coastal towns have seen a boom in visitors with surfing among the activities in their sights (5 million people visit Cornwall a year, according to stats from the University of Exeter). There is also The Wave, an inland surf simulator in Bristol which opened in 2019 to allow landlocked Brits to get involved. “We currently welcome around 70,000 individual surfers a year, but I expect to see an increased appetite for people wanting to learn to surf on the back of the Games this year,” says The Wave founder and Surf England director Nick Hounsfield.
