Athletics, just like surfing, can still be a contest against no one else except yourself, especially post-Beijing, writes Ian O'Riordan

AFTER WEEKS of calm and unseasonably mellow surf, the big winter swells finally hit Rincon last Sunday, changing the entire mood of the small seaside town known as the Maui of the Caribbean. At Playa Maria's, where throughout the Christmas and New Year holiday the visiting surfers caught waves for fun and rolled about in the soft white water, the feeling now was one of fear and respect for what The Big Kahuna actually means.

This is when surfing turns serious, and the serious turn pro. Just over 30 years ago, Rincon couldn't be found on most maps of Puerto Rico, but it was recognised as one of the original and best surfing locations in the world. So good, in fact, one of the first World Surfing Championships were staged here, in 1968, and while the popularity of the place has grown steadily ever since, it maintains the thoroughly chilled-out feel of the era it was borne out of.

When the big winter swells hit, however, Rincon is no place for the faint-hearted. Instead, it turns into a sort of natural amphitheatre for what must be one of the most athletic, skilful and spectacular of all sports. On Sunday, only a handful of the best local surfers dared to paddle out into the crushing 18-foot waves, and the most amazing thing wasn't the incredible feats they performed when out there, but rather they made it back in alive.

"The biggest waves I've ever rode in my life," said Joe Valdez, a surfing instructor who moved here from Los Angeles three months ago and already considers it home. "I almost died out there. At one point I was so far underwater I had to crawl up the leash of my board to get back up. Right the're, the hunt for Red October."

Surfing is a dangerous game at this level but they know what they're doing. One of their favourite exercises is to swim a quarter-mile out to sea, at which point they dive to the bottom, find a rock to pick up, and then walk with it along the ocean floor for up to a minute. This develops vast reserves of underwater strength and resilience.

What a few weeks in Rincon also teaches you is that surfing is no ordinary sport, at least not in the competitive sense. Surfing is more of a lifestyle - and to be the best in this game you don't have to prove anything to anyone except yourself. It may be as heavily marketed and branded as any other sport but the truth is no one likes to sell surfing as a competition, and least of all those that have mastered it.

In that sense it's more like mountain climbing, only on water - about conquering your fears and physical limits. But what ultimately separates surfing from most other sports is the clear division between those who believe in staged competition and those that don't - and there is no middle ground.

This, for example, is peak surfing season in the Caribbean and yet there's not a single competition going on, nor any planned. Surfing continues to stage a World Championship Tour but this essentially promotes the sport, and certainly doesn't define it. Those that shun the contests typically point to the random luck of the waves in a surfing contest, but more than that, they don't want their sport defined by time, distance or score.

Take Laird Hamilton - one of Hawaii's biggest surfing stars, and, to quote Surfing Magazine, "the all-time best of the best". Hamilton not only rejects competitive surfing, but despises it. "Contests are less about the one big wave than about your performances," he once said. "Surfing is about your body of work. It's about art. I would snap if I was letting someone other than the audience determine my fate. How does a musician judge his thing? By how many people love his music?"

All this, of course, is a world away from competitive athletics, which for better or for worse, has become increasingly defined by the major competitions. Never has this been more evident than with last year's Beijing Olympics - which became the sole focus for practically all of Ireland's leading athletes to the point of absolute absurdity. Truth is no Irish athlete travelled to Beijing last August as a genuine medal hope. Still, Beijing was billed as the defining point of not just their entire athletic careers but also their lives - and of course a lot of this was self-inflicted.

Perhaps on reflection, the senselessness of all this has become a little more apparent.

Throughout 2008 it was all about "the Olympics, the Olympics, the Olympics", and that can only have taken the fun out of the sport, the reason why most athletes get involved in the first place. "I've always wanted to compete in the Olympics" is the standard saying for those that do but chances are they knew little about the Olympics when they first started competing.

In the end, most of the 16 Irish athletes that did get to compete in Beijing fell into this trap. Paul Hession, Robert Heffernan and Olive Loughnane are the main exceptions, and deservedly came away from the Olympics with no real regrets. (No coincidence, then, they're the only Irish athletes to make the distinguished Track and Field News magazine top 10 - Hession ranked eighth over 200 metres; Heffernan also eighth in the 20km walk; and Loughnane ranked sixth in the women's 20km walk.

For the rest, the lesson is there to be learned, and if it is can only make for a better 2009. David Gillick put so much pressure on himself going to Beijing that he probably ended up cursing himself too. Derval O'Rourke fell victim to another Olympic curse of peaking a couple of years too soon, and Joanne Cuddihy and Eileen O'Keeffe - who both enjoyed an excellent World Championships a year previous - were victims of the worst Olympic curse of all; injury.

Then, Alistair Cragg and Roisín McGettigan endured the further Olympic curse of performing well in the heats but not in the final. Given the reaction to this, you'd wonder if they were better off not competing at all, surfing style.

But there is still so much good in competitive athletics, which unlike surfing, will always define the sport. The main event for 2009 is the World Championships in Berlin next August, but the best thing the leading Irish athletes can do is let that be the another date on their calendar year rather than the purpose of it.

This, the post-Olympic year, is the chance to explore the other side of the sport, the way surfers do - to forget about times and distance and score, and let it become fun all over again. There's a European Indoor Championships in Turin the first weekend in March and no Irish athlete should by-pass this for any reason other than injury.

Gillick is the two-time defending 400 metres champion and would be crazy not to try for the hat-trick. O'Rourke too if she regains any of her 2006 form is a definite medal contender in the 60-metre hurdles. The pressure is off and so too should the expectations, because athletics, just like surfing, can still be a contest against no one else except yourself.