By David Chazan at TheTimes.com (28/1/2025)
Many British surfers prefer to take a budget flight to the milder climate of southwest France rather than take a chance on the weather in Cornwall, Britain’s prime destination for riding the ocean waves.
The European Surfing Federation is now planning to follow suit by moving its headquarters from Penzance to Lacanau, on a stretch of France’s Atlantic coast regarded as a surfers’ paradise, to be closer to European Union institutions post-Brexit.
“The federation is looking for funding to develop its activities and it makes sense to be headquartered within the European Union,” Jean-Luc Arassus, its president, said.
“But that’s not the only argument; Lacanau is very committed to promoting surfing and it is giving us an office in the town hall. We will inaugurate the new headquarters on Saturday by holding our annual general meeting there.”
The relocation is unlikely to create as much of a stir as other agency departures from Britain after the vote to withdraw from the EU, including the European Banking Authority and the European Medicines Agency.
The surfing federation remained in its Penzance base after Brexit, but its role in promoting Europe-wide regulations for the sport and organising the European Surfing Championships made an eventual move to an EU member state inevitable, Arassus said.
Lacanau is the home of France’s oldest professional surfing contest, first held in 1979. It is 100 miles north of the resort of Biarritz, credited by some residents as being the birthplace of surfing, although most historians believe the sport originated outside Europe.
Professor John Wrightson is believed to have become the first British surfer in 1890 under the tutelage of two Hawaiian princes, David Kahalepouli Kawananakoa Piikoi and Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole Piikoi, who were his students at Downton Agricultural College in Wiltshire. He practised surfing at Bridlington in Yorkshire.
Surfing was already a central part of Polynesian culture when HMS Endeavour arrived in Tahiti in 1769 during the first voyage of Captain James Cook.
In 1835, Captain James Edward Alexander discovered surfing in west Africa, where it is believed to have developed independently. “They waited for a surf and then came rolling in like a cloud on top of it,” he wrote in his diary.
