Dr. Michael Serazio
Professor of Communication, Boston College. Author of three books: The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it ‘Real’ in Media, Culture, and Politics; The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture; and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing.
Email: serazio@bc.edu
Instagram/Threads: @mikeserazio
A landscape of media abundance tenders fertile soil for conspiracy theories to take root and blossom. The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools and the low-cost, highly convincing deepfakes they generate put chronically online populations ever on notice: Believe nothing that you see, they assure us.
Against that backdrop, Olympic surfer Gabriel Medina levitated and went viral: an image so social media-scroll-stopping and share-stimulating, it begets wonder not simply for the athletic feat itself but for the possibility that it was actually real. To celebrate the photo, then, was to celebrate a kind of guileless innocence that the internet had long since disabused us of – refuting ceaseless cynicism otherwise cultivated.
Indeed, allowing ourselves to be arrested by the experience and expression of online awe is, at this point, an epistemologically radical act.
It arrived during the fifth heat of the third round of the Games and the Brazilian, Medina, was some 10,000 miles from Paris, offshore from the Polynesian island of Tahiti, where the surfing competition was being held. By the time the television cameras caught Medina in frame, he was already a dim vector bolting through a hazy, cascading tunnel – “a beautiful, life-threatening wave,” the NBC announcer marveled – before emerging from the froth, carving upward, and kicking out.
The ride itself shattered records: 9.90, the highest single-wave score in Olympic history, which Medina would appeal to have rounded upward. “I’ve done a few 10s before and I was like, ‘For sure, that’s a 10,’” he enthused. “The wave was so perfect.”
Yet that accomplishment would’ve mattered comparatively little had cameras not captured and projected it: a truism that Daniel Boorstin and Guy DeBord and Jean Baudrillard theorized decades ago; a truism now amplified by smartphone-lived lives.
“Pics or it didn’t happen,” goes the meme – until the pics themselves now demand AI-era incredulity.
Jerome Brouillet, an Agence France-Presse photographer, was perched offshore on a media boat, ripping ten shots per second with his Nikon Z9. An AFP editor recognized that one had the potential to become as Time tabbed it, “the defining image of… the 2024 Summer Games,” and posted it to worldwide acclaim.
That shot begs disbelief: Medina floats, frozen with statuesque calm, many feet above the deep blue-green crest of Teahupo’o, a single finger skyward; his board also puzzlingly upright, shadowing surf-froth that signals the momentum. At first glance (and second, and third), the shot makes little sense: How can that be?
Indeed, it evokes, with uncanny suspicion, a TV-spot for Google Pixel 8 that’s run on repeat in recent months, advertising its AI-powered capacity to effortlessly reposition bodies with a quick pinch-and-drag across the smartphone screen.
Less cynically, it also evokes some of the most distinguished shots in the canon of sports photojournalism history: Bobby Orr, arms out-stretched, expression of ecstasy from having just potted the 1970 Stanley Cup-winning goal; Michael Jordan, hurtling from the free-throw line, toward a 1988 All-Star dunk contest victory.
Defiance of gravity has tantalized humankind for millennia; it is, equally, the impassable prison of physics that many an athletic act yearns to flee free.
Miraculous, even? Medina captioned the picture on Instagram – where it earned more than 5.7 million likes and 140,000 comments – by quoting Paul from Philippians 4:13: “I can do everything in Him who strengthens me.” Like the surfer’s Christian icon of worship, his own pose a visual echo of water, implausibly, walked upon.
That theological allusion is not too far a conceptual stretch here. Sport helps fill the vacuum of institutional religious decline: It articulates the language of belief, furnishes homilies of moral judgment, structures systems of meaning-making, and paves pathways to transcendence. It simulates the human experience long derived from faith, when many are formally divorced from it. Through sport, we think, feel, and act spiritually.
Moreover, it remains real – “authentically” so – amidst so much else mediated fakery. The greatest crimes against the spirit of sport – doping, gambling – violate that ideal and endanger the plausibility of the spectacle. Hundreds of billions of dollars that churn the global sports industry trace their market value to that authenticity.
Otherwise, it’s just pro wrestling: a show scripted in advance.
The manipulation of visual reality will likely get worse before it gets better – a foreboding prospect in a year when nearly half the world’s population heads to the polls. The outpouring of fervor for Medina’s feat was not just on behalf of a hitherto-little-known surfer in a lower-profile sport. It was a renewal of hope and faith in a bygone aphorism: You had to see it to believe it.
