Alo Slebir's impressive Christmas Eve ride near Half Moon Bay has sparked debate about a potential new world record. While the wave's height remains unconfirmed, its sheer size has captivated the surfing community. Determining the biggest wave ever ridden is a complex and subjective process.
As a friend on a jet ski towed Alo Slebir into a towering gray monster of a wave near Half Moon Bay on Christmas Eve, the Santa Cruz surfer had no idea he might be riding into the record books. But a jaw-dropping photo of Slebir’s relatively tiny form racing down a collapsing mountain of ice-cold Pacific Ocean water has gone viral, with knowledgeable big-wave surfers around the globe speculating that the wave was over 100 feet tall and that Slebir, at 23, has set a world record .
But did he? For all of their ferocity, big waves are among the most ephemeral phenomena in all of sports — they're almost impossible to precisely rank. “You can measure Mt. Everest every day of the week for 100 years, it never moves,” said Bill Sharp, who has spent decades orchestrating the world’s most rigorous big wave surfing awards. “But even the biggest wave lasts only for a few seconds, and then it’s gone forever.” So anointing a new world record holder isn't like handing someone a gold medal after winning an Olympic event, Sharp said. It's more like “naming a new pope.” Once a year, Sharp, a former editor of Surfing magazine, and a “conclave of wise men and women” get together in a closed room and study photos and videos submitted by surfers from around the world in an effort to determine who was lucky — or crazy — enough to ride the biggest wave captured on film. Submissions can come from anywhere, but the most common spots are Half Moon Bay, home to the mighty break known as Mavericks; the North Shore of Maui, home to a crushing wave known as Jaws; and, in recent years, an otherwise nondescript fishing village on the west coast of Portugal called Nazaré, where an underwater canyon funnels huge winter swells from the North Atlantic directly onto shore. The current world record was set in Nazaré in 2022 when a German named Sebastian Steudtner rode a wave later calculated to have been 86 feet hig
SURFING WORLD RECORD BIG WAVE Nazaré Half Moon Bay
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