Italo Ferreira has won the Olympic premiere of surfing with superiority. In the final, the 27-year-old Brazilian defeated the Japanese local hero Kanoa Igarashi with 15.14: 6.60 points. Bronze went to the Australian Owen Wright. While Igarashi, who was born in Huntington Beach, California, was unable to cope with the pressure and expectations of his compatriots in the final, Wright defeated the favorite superstar of the scene, the Brazilian Gabriel Medina, with 11.97: 11.77 in the battle for third place Points and celebrated his medal on the beach with a party. Six years after he was hit by a wave and seriously injured and had to fight for his life and future, bronze glistened like gold to him. A great victory for him too.

Italo Ferreira, World Champion 2019, is the son of a fishmonger from Baia Formosa in northern Brazil. He learned to surf on a foam box his father had used to sell fish. There wasn't enough money for more. He has been one of the big three on the international surfing scene for years. Medina and the American John John Florence are the other two. Two charismatic superstars who were always a wavelength ahead of him in terms of popularity. This is about to change.

Olympic gold, as demonstrated by the premiere in Japan, is also a hard currency in surfing.

And the way Ferreira won it left no doubt about its exceptional class.

In the quarterfinals he defeated the Japanese Hiroto Ohhara with 16.30: 11.90 points just as easily as Igarashi in the final.

Against Ohhara he achieved the highest score of the entire competition: 9.73 points, just below the maximum score of 10. The two best waves of a round are counted and added up.

With technology and a fine feeling

Owen Wright.

His story as a surfer, his ordeal, found a happy ending on Tsurigasaki Beach, a hundred kilometers east of Tokyo.

The waves there, their height and strength, were not what Wright's ideas, his dreams and nightmares, come close to.

Too small.

The Australian is a man for the big breakers.

There he is in his element.

But with all his strength he can also make it a few sizes smaller if need be.

With technology and a fine feeling.

At 31 he is a veteran of the scene, someone who has seen everything in his sport.

Triumphs and tragedies.

The medal he has now won is so valuable because he has had a time when he couldn't even think about surfing.

It was all about surviving and getting reasonably well again.

It happened in 2015 when he was run over by a five-meter wave in training in the fight for the world title of the elite WSL Tour. This wasn't the first time, but this time he was pushed underwater for long, too long. When rescuers took him ashore and to the hospital, the shocking diagnosis was: traumatic brain injury. Wright had to start all over again. Surfing was out of the question, he first had to learn to walk again.

Wright later said his heart was broken at the time, not because of the accident, but because of the prospect of never being able to surf again.

You have to know that surfing is not just a sport - and that is not just a phrase in this discipline, even for the best of the best - but that it is also a comprehensive way of life, deeply shaped by the beach and the sea, freedom and adventure .

Wright had lost all of that.

Everything that had made up his life until then.

His boards were in the corner and he was struggling to take a few steps again.

Anyone who suffers such a severe brain injury needs a drive to work day in and day out to get back to where they were.

For Wright it was the world of surfing, the prospect of arriving back in it at some point.

He made his comeback in 2017. In his own way. He won the start of the Championship Tour. He was back. And how. In the current season things went less well for him, a ninth place on the tour was his best result. He had put his focus on the Olympics and trained increasingly in small waves in the United States. For the 1.90-meter man that's more bathtub than sea, but that was the prospect for the games in Tokyo: small waves. Wright's plan worked and his theory: Great things can be achieved even in small waves.