Challenging Nazare

Challenging Nazare: Article by Heidi Hansen

Journalist and surf writer Heidi Hansen spent time with Freddy Olander in Nazare to document what it means to challenge the world’s most famous big wave break. The resulting article, titled Challenging Nazare, is one of the most detailed written accounts of Freddy’s approach to the Nazare Canyon and what drives him to return there season after season.

Heidi Hansen is known for her ability to go beneath the surface of extreme sport stories and find the human truth inside them. In Challenging Nazare, she captures not just the spectacle of the waves themselves, but the texture of daily life for a professional big wave surfer based in a small Portuguese fishing town that has become the world capital of the most dangerous form of surfing.

What It Means to Challenge Nazare

Challenging Nazare is not a metaphor. It is a literal description of what Freddy Olander and a small community of professional big wave surfers do every winter when the Atlantic generates the massive swells that travel thousands of kilometres before being amplified by the Nazare Canyon into the waves that have made this location world-famous.

To challenge Nazare requires years of preparation before a single big wave session is possible. Physical conditioning must be built over years, not months. Breath-hold capacity must be trained systematically until a three-minute hold under stress becomes possible. Ocean reading must be developed through thousands of hours in the water at progressively more demanding locations. Equipment must be selected and customised for the specific demands of the Nazare break.

And all of that preparation only gets a surfer to the starting line. The actual experience of paddling into a 15-metre wave at Praia do Norte, with the Nazare Canyon producing a double-up that makes the wave steeper and more powerful than almost anything else on earth, is something that cannot be fully prepared for. It must be faced.

Freddy Olander: Paddle-In at Nazare

The article focuses particularly on paddle-in surfing at Nazare, the discipline where the surfer uses arm power alone to catch waves without the assistance of a jet ski. Paddle-in surfing at Nazare is considered by many in the big wave community to be the purest and most demanding form of the discipline at this location.

Freddy is one of a small number of surfers who pursue paddle-in surfing at Nazare at the professional level. The combination of the wave’s size, speed and the specific characteristics of the Nazare Canyon make paddle-in surfing here extraordinarily demanding, requiring the surfer to generate enough speed through paddling alone to match a wave that is moving at enormous velocity.