Riding the Olympic wave: sportisation and authenticity in Chinese surfing

Yang Siqi’s ninth-place finish in women’s surfing at the Paris 2024 Olympics represents a compressed development trajectory: China progressed from virtually no competitive surfing infrastructure to Olympic representation within 7 years of its Olympic inclusion in 2016. This article examines how this rapid sportisation was institutionally achieved in China and how it reshaped authenticity politics in an emerging Olympic action sport: surfing. Through reflexive thematic analysis of policy documents and media coverage (2006–2025), the study shows that, in contrast to other surfing cultures, where authenticity is negotiated through bottom-up subcultural processes and commodified lifestyle – competition tensions, Chinese surfing followed a distinct trajectory of authenticity formation. Recreational surfers initially embraced sportisation with little subcultural resistance. However, once surfing became an Olympic priority, state authorities imposed an authenticity dialectic not through commercial exploitation, but by instituting competitive legitimacy criteria that excluded early recreational surfers lacking elite training credentials. The article argues that authenticity dialectics in Chinese action sports are being directed by institutional frameworks, governance structures and power relations driven by Olympic integration, rather than subcultural authenticity tensions and market segmentation more typical of places with more long-standing action sport cultures.