World Surfing Games champion Alan Cleland ready to showcase Mexico’s brand of fearlessness
There is only one rule in Alan Cleland’s household: Always go on the best wave you see.
It didn't matter that the waves at his home break, the rugged Pascuales on the west coast of Mexico, were usually bigger than the young surfer. Rules had to be obeyed.
“If you're going to go out there, you want to go out there and get hopefully the biggest barrel and gnarliest wave you've ever seen,” Cleland told Olympics.com. “If I didn't do that then I'll be breaking the rules and I'll be in trouble.”
After testing his courage on one of the heaviest waves in the world as a child, no situation is too intimidating for the now 21-year-old.
Cleland’s fearlessness streak is on display in everything he does, whether that is staying calm while held at gunpoint as a teenager or punching Mexico’s first ticket to an Olympic surfing competition* in a battle against stormy waves, thunder and lightning.
Olympics.com spoke to the surfer ahead of the 2024 ISA World Surfing Games in Puerto Rico to discover more about his upbringing in an isolated fisherman’s village, learning how to be cold-blooded on water and on land, and putting Mexican surfing into a global spotlight.
*As National Olympic Committees have the exclusive authority for the representation of their respective countries at the Olympic Games, athletes' participation at the Paris Games depends on their NOC selecting them to represent their delegation at Paris 2024.
Click here to see the official qualification system for each sport.
A childhood among fishermen and surfers for Alan Cleland
Alan Cleland was born in Boca de Pascuales, a remote fisherman’s village on the Pacific coast.
In his own words, there are only two things to do in his hometown: surfing and fishing. As a true local, Cleland did both.
His father, an avid free surfer, pushed Cleland into his first wave when the boy was two years old. Cleland does not remember that time, but he does remember going surfing with his father regularly after he turned four.
By six, he was surfing by himself or with his friends.
The daily routine was then as follows: Wake up, go look at the waves, and if the waves are good, go surf. After three to six hours of surfing, Cleland would come back to shore and do his school lessons.
“Growing up there was really just a ghost town. Pretty much the only people that lived there were either surfers or fishermen,” Cleland recalled.
“The simplest living that you can see, that's where I'm from and that's where I live. It's really unique. I feel like it's really special. It makes you a calmer person once you don't have much in front of you.”
A child in rough waters
There was another perk to living in Boca de Pascuales. It opens up to one of Mexico’s hidden surfing gems, Pascuales.
While Pascuales is somewhat off the beaten path, those who surf there are unlikely to forget it.
“It's a pretty gnarly wave,” Cleland said. “It was very scary, to be honest, growing up there.”
True to his family’s rulebook, Cleland did not let the scale of Pascuales intimidate him when going out in search of the best wave. No situation was rough enough to scare him off - not as a child, when he started surfing in rip tides and got sucked in several times, nor as a teenager when he progressed to bigger waves.
“I just haven't stopped,” Cleland said of his quest to ride the biggest waves. “That's where I have the most fun and that's where I feel the most comfortable.”
Pascuales, while not always kind to Cleland, also proved his best teacher.
“Having that wave and having everything about that coastline, I feel it made me a way better surfer and a way better waterman at reading the wave and reading the ocean,” he explained. “Going to every other wave and every other spot for me, it's not easier, but it's not as intimidating as it would be for a lot of people.”
“For me, the wave at home is the scariest thing. It gets huge, so any other place other than home, it's like, ‘All right, rad, perfect’,” – Alan Cleland to Olympics.com
Alan Cleland: Calm under pressure, and at gunpoint
As tranquil as life in Boca de Pascuales was, it was not uncommon for its residents to hear about incidents that happened nearby.
Mainland Mexico was not the safest place to grow up and while most things were heard rather than seen, Cleland has been in a handful of perilous situations himself.
“Any town in Mexico, I feel like for all of us, everybody that's from there, things just happen and things are how they are. And sometimes you could be on the wrong side of the road and things can happen,” the surfer said. “Some people get to grow up and there are nice rainbows and flowers, and other people get to grow up in something different. I feel like that's how life is.”
One night, while traveling in a car returning from the national championships, 12-year-old Cleland and his teammates were stopped by a group of men who held them at gunpoint.
Among the youngest on the team, Cleland was the only one who kept his cool in this time of danger. That too, he said, is a credit to his surfing mentality.
“All the other people were crying and scared, and I was the only one who was calm,” Cleland said. “The adults would just be bawling their eyes out.
“For me, at that moment, at that time, I was just all survival instincts,” he continued. “[There are] all your instincts that come into play with surfing big waves, pretty much staying fearless, just look for any little opportunity and just be in the present.”
After Cleland experienced tough situations like that, the stress of competition became easy to handle in comparison.
“That helped me a lot to really keep my calm and just be cold-blooded,” he said. “There have been really scary moments throughout my life living where I live, but I feel like it's also what makes you grow up and that's what makes you stronger throughout life."
The rough bits of his childhood were also not enough to keep Cleland away from Boca de Pascuales. To this day, his extended family lives there and it is the place he calls home.
“[I have] the luck of being able to travel around the world,” said Cleland who first went abroad at age 13 to compete at an international event. “Every time you go to any place, everything's so rad, but for me, it's going back home. It's my favourite trip.”
Alan Cleland getting Mexican surfing to the Olympic stage
One of the trips Cleland made out of Boca de Pascuales took him to Surf City El Salvador for the 2023 World Surfing Games.
It was a dazzling run for the young surfer there. He got three of the top 10 highest-scoring waves of the competition and won the final with the highest score among men or women, earning 9.73 on waters that were pummelled by a storm just a few hours before.
With that, Cleland became the second Mexican man to win the World Surfing Games, to follow on Jhony Corzo’s victory in 2017.
Two weeks later, back in Boca de Pascuales, Cleland got a call from the International Surfing Association (ISA) to join their Athlete Training Camp at Teahupo’o, the venue of the next Olympic competition.
Cleland seized on the opportunity to surf in Tahiti for the first time. A few weeks later, he was looking at the famous wave again, this time on television, as he followed the Tahiti Pro stop of the World Surf League’s (WSL) Championship Tour. It was more than an interest of watching the world’s best surfers – Cleland’s own Olympic fate was on the line based on the competition's results.
If Jordy Smith could advance through the heats and earn a quota based on the WSL ranking, the South African's quota as the top-ranked male surfer from Africa at the 2023 World Surfing Games would then pass to the competition’s champion Cleland.
As Smith celebrated advancing through his heat in Tahiti, more than 6,000 kilometres away Cleland and his family celebrated a milestone of their own.
With his provisional quota for Paris 2024, Cleland is set to become the first surfer to represent Mexico at an Olympic Games.
“For me, representing Mexico is just representing where I'm from,” he said. “My whole life is based off of where I've lived and if it wasn't for that place or my country or the people that I grew up with or surrounded myself with, I feel like I wouldn't be the same person. I don't think I'd be even a little bit of the person that I am today if it wasn't for the place, the wave, and my family and everything in general about where I grew up.”
And thanks to Cleland surfing Pascuales since his childhood, even Teahupo’o is now not big enough to frighten away the Mexican surfer.
However big the swell is during the Olympic Games, Cleland is sure his family’s rule will bolster his performance.
“That would work perfectly. Just see the best wave and go,” he said. “As simple as it sounds, it's probably the most hardest thing to do.”