From planning a casual Tahiti trip to getting an Olympic ticket to compete there: Germany’s Tim Elter on upgrading his travel itinerary
Tim Elter was busy planning a fun surf trip to the Teahupo’o wave in Tahiti when an unexpected qualification to the Olympic Games forced him to modify his travel plans.
“I was actually talking with my friends like, ‘Hey, maybe we should go to Chopes just for a surf trip’, and then Didier [Piter, Germany's head surf coach] was like, ‘Yeah, why don’t you just qualify?’” Elter told Olympics.com. “It was more like a joke back then, but now it’s not anymore.”
Elter’s trip to Tahiti is more than a whimsical plan now that he has secured a provisional quota for the upcoming Olympics* through the 2024 ISA World Surfing Games. The Olympic surfing competition will be held at the famous Teahupo’o wave, which Elter is now set to tackle, along with 23 of the world’s best male surfers.
It is a dizzying take-off into the elite of surfing, and perhaps no one is as surprised as the 20-year-old German himself.
“I wasn’t sure even that I was going to come,” said Elter, on making his World Surfing Games debut in Puerto Rico. “I was unsure until the last training camp, and I happened to make it to the team and now I’m in the Olympics and it’s insane. It’s absolutely insane.”
*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.
Tim Elter: From team alternate to Olympic ticket holder
Elter was born and raised on the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa, to German parents, and started surfing when he was six years old. His first surf competition came two years later.
“Surfing for me, that is my life,” he said. “I can't imagine not living by the sea. It gives me so much adrenaline, so much joy. There are so many moments that I associate with surfing. Good and bad, but moments where I grew as a person. I owe a lot to the sea and what I have learned from the sea.”
While the young surfer continued to progress over the following years, the thought of representing national colours on the Olympic stage did not seem a possibility to him.
At least not until fellow German surfer Leon Glatzer qualified for Tokyo 2020 through the 2021 ISA World Surfing Games.
“Leon Glatzer was a very big inspiration to me. As soon as Leon qualified in 2021, I was really looking up to him. I was like, OK, it’s actually possible for a German to do it. It’s not out of reach and he inspired me a lot during the last years. Him and I have been pushing a lot in the last training camps. He was the prime example for me that it’s possible.”
Three years later, at the World Surfing Games in Puerto Rico, Elter himself was on the chase for the Olympic ticket.
He was promoted from first alternate to full team member in December when another surfer got injured, joining Glatzer and Dylan Groen on the men’s roster.
With Glatzer eliminated in the fourth repechage round and Groen in the seventh, it was up to the youngest team member to secure Germany one of the six individual male quotas that were on offer.
And it was not without some drama that he set about this mission.
Elter was almost eliminated in the sixth repechage round on Friday, 1 March when he trailed Brazil’s two-time world champion Filipe Toledo and Portugal’s Championship Tour surfer Frederico Morais with seconds left on the clock. It was a buzzer beater that ultimately saved him by a mere 0.13 points.
“My thinking was, 'I have nothing to lose because I’m the underdog, I’m the young gun and these are super experienced guys and for me to make that heat, it would cause big upsets, and so it did',” he said.
Over the next hours, however, Elter felt the safety of the underdog status start to slip away from him.
He advanced through the eighth repechage round and was heading into heats that would decide if he would become an Olympian or not.
“The nerves were there as soon I made my last heat yesterday. The last 24 hours were terrible. I could barely sleep. I could barely get my feelings and thoughts off from that ultimate goal, and I really suffered,” Elter said. “That [first heat], I almost puked when I went in the water. I felt absolutely terrible.”
“Even through nobody expected me to do it, as soon I got to a certain round, I felt confident in myself and I had expectations for myself," Tim Elter to Olympics.com
Despite feeling less than his best, Elter managed to advance through his first heat of the day in second place with the Olympic quota now within his reach. All he needed was to top the 7.50 score of the third-place finisher from the previous heat, Mexico’s Sebastian Williams.
He surpassed that mark by scoring 9.07 points in a heat with Tokyo 2020 Olympians Rio Waida of Indonesia and Ramzi Boukhiam of Morocco.
“It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life, especially because I knew that not only me, but also the other two boys in my heat had made it,” Elter said. “I went to them in the water and told them, ‘Hey, we're already qualified. No matter how this heat ends, we all have more than 7.5 points. We're all in it’. And then, as I came ashore, the whole team came running towards me and everyone hugged me. That was wonderful. It was very emotional.”
It was the second Olympic ticket for Germany in two days. Elter’s teammate Camilla Kemp secured a quota in the women’s competition a day earlier.
Date set for Tim Elter’s Tahiti surf trip
Since Elter grabbed an Olympic ticket before he carried out his plans to go on a first surf trip to Teahupo’o, the wave remains an unknown entity to him.
Despite this, Elter is not intimidated. He is planning to prepare by surfing waves in Europe that have similarities with the Tahitian behemoth and do a training camp at the Olympic site before the competition begins on 27 July.
“I think Teahupo’o will be a very interesting venue for me because I love charging. I’m not afraid of slabs and it’s just amazing,” said Elter who alternates most of his training between the Canary Islands and France. “I think I'm a match for the power of nature there, and I definitely think I can do some damage.”
And does he feel better to go to Teahupo’o on an Olympic ticket rather than ordinary airfare?
“For sure! It changes everything about it.”