Nadia Erostarbe Geiser (Zarautz, 23 years old) has made history for Spanish surfing in the World Cup that is being held these days in Puerto Rico. The young Basque woman has just become the first Spanish athlete in the discipline to qualify for the Olympic Games, and she will be next summer in Tahiti, an island located in French Polynesia (Oceania), exotic surfing headquarters for Paris 2024.
The Basque surfer, one of the most promising women on the national scene since she was a child and European youth champion in 2018, was left at the gates of Tokyo 2020 for a single place in the previous pre-Olympic. With her passage to the final rounds of the ISA World Surfing Games she has realized a dream that she has been pursuing since the inclusion of the discipline in the Olympic program was announced in 2016. The stage of the test, the feared and admired lethal wave in the Tehaupo’o reef, is also the recurring dream and one of the greatest fantasies of practitioners of this sport, with almost 50,000 federative licenses in the last official count of 2019 .
Erostarbe, the product of one of the strongest quarries in Spain on the beach of Zarautz and the daughter of a family where everyone is a surfer, is still competing in the current World Cup, where she aspires to medals after qualifying for the fifth round, the penultimate one. before the grand final. With her presence among the 12 best surfers in the world, the athlete has secured one of the eight places that were distributed in the current championship, since four of her rivals who are still in competition had already qualified for the Games in the midst of an intricate classification system.
“This generation is taking the level of surfing in Spain to another level. Let’s see if we inspire more people,” said Erostarbe from Recibo, a town located on the northern coast of the Central American country. The Spanish team still has six surfers in competition and with options to accompany their partner to the Olympic event. Lucía Machado and Janire González are in the repechage phase to enter the fifth round that leads to Tahiti, and in the men’s category Andy Criere, Kai Odriozola and Yago Domínguez also have options at this stage of the championship.
Each country opts for a maximum of two surfers classified by gender, plus an additional place if the team classification is won. In Puerto Rico, Spain leads the women’s and combined table, in addition to being third in the men’s table. A total of 48 surfers, 24 per gender, will compete at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
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