The Story Behind the Most Incredible Photo of the Olympics

PARIS — The Olympic Games used to award gold medals for painting, art and even urban planning. And Jerome Brouillet’s stunning photograph of Tahiti deserves a place on the podium.

Floating above the surf, his arm reaching toward the sky and his surfboard in perfect symmetry at his side, Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina was the inspiration for a photographic masterpiece.

Brouillet’s photo joins Tony Duffy’s signature photo of Bob Beamon’s historic long jump at Mexico 1968 as one of the greatest photos of the Games of all time.

The Agence France-Presse photographer wins awards, but Medina is content with gold.

The three-time world champion is the big favourite for this summer’s Olympic Games, where the competitions will take place 16,000 kilometres from Paris, on Tahiti’s legendary Teahupo’o reef.

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This beautiful reef, nicknamed “Chopes”, has been brought to life by the low pressure that rolls off Antarctica. You can hear it from miles away.

It rises and falls so quickly that your heart plummets from your mouth to the pit of your stomach in fractions of a second.

Brouillet’s work, which went viral on social media, was the talk of the Games, but it’s worth looking at the moments leading up to it. Medina rode the wave and earned a near-perfect score of 10, beating Japan’s Kanoa Igarashi, who denied him a medal in Tokyo three years ago.

“I felt like it was a 10. I’ve done a few 10s before and I thought, ‘This is definitely a 10.’ The wave was so perfect,” he said.

“It’s really a dream come true to compete on waves like this for the Olympics. It feels great to be here in Tahiti, it’s my favorite wave in a place I love.

“I always feel very connected to nature here and that’s when I perform best. I feel close to God on this wave.”

The distance between Paris and Tahiti is the longest between a host city and an Olympic venue, beating Stockholm, which hosted the equestrian event in 1958 when Melbourne hosted everything else, by 160 kilometres.

But from a sporting point of view it makes perfect sense.

The best alternatives in France, such as La Graviere, Lacanau or Estagnots, do not compare to the consistent conditions we can expect in Tahiti.

And surfing – with every moment of the competition live on discovery+ – will have to be spectacular to secure a spot at the Games.

When the sport was first practiced in Tokyo, the waves at Tsurigasaki Beach were described by one athlete as “small and funky,” which is not a compliment in the vernacular of the sport.

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Teahupo’o has 1,455 inhabitants and its name means ‘place of skulls’. That’s quite something.

Like Tokyo champion Italo Ferreira, who learned to surf on the Styrofoam boxes his father sold fish from, Medina has overcome adversity on his journey.

He talks candidly about the fact that many of his friends from Maresias, a four-hour drive south of Sao Paulo, are now in prison, while he himself is a well-paid sports jetsetter with a string of major sponsorship deals.

“I didn’t have much to offer growing up, but my family and my surfing experience, they gave me everything,” he said.

“When I was little, I was probably six or seven, I used to park cars to help my mom with extra money for food and things like that.

“Where I come from, it can be hard, but it makes me appreciate life more. There are friends from school who haven’t had it so good, who are in prison and things like that.

“Surfing changed my life, football was my first love, but my stepfather was a surfer and he gave him my first board, which I shared with my best friend. I think that’s when everything changed.

“The last ten years have taught me how to deal with things better, I just focus on the water, that’s the place I love. If I focus on myself and not on the other surfers, then everything is fine.”

Watch every moment of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games live, only on discovery+, the streaming website of the Olympic Games.