Welcome to the 27th Edition of The Bodyboard Report! 🤙

In just over three weeks, the men's world tour heads back to the place where it all gets decided. A volcanic slab on the north coast of Gran Canaria.

A wave the locals call La Bestia, The Beast.

I went down a slightly different rabbit hole this week because I wanted to know where the name El Frontón actually came from.

You'd think the answer would be pretty obvious, when in fact, it isn't. Once I started digging, I ended up somewhere I really wasn't expecting.

A 500 year old land document. An ancient royal capital. And a bodyboarding contest where the winner gets handed 70 kilos of bananas, a puppy and a playing card.

Yip… Grab a beer, a bong, or a cup…

This one gets weird. 👇

Ask someone why it's called El Frontón and the obvious answer is that it looks like a frontón, the big wall used in Basque pelota, a fast paced traditional ball game where players hit a hard ball against a main wall called a frontis using their bare hands, wooden bats, or curved wicker baskets.

Makes sense, except the name was already there in 1534.

A land grant from the early Spanish period refers to caves beside a rock formation described as “Risco que dizen El Fronton,” meaning the cliff they call El Frontón.

Some Spanish land clerk was wandering around Gran Canaria in the 1500s, looking at rocks and caves, and wrote down El Frontón.

Bodyboarding wouldn't exist for another 450 years. There was no Morey Boogie, or the likes of the IBC. No PLC, Jeff, Amaury or Tristan. Not even a dude standing on the beach saying, “Mate, that thing looks absolutely mental.”

In the traditional Canary Islands toponymy, frontón is used for the face or front of a large, steep rock formation or cliff. Which suddenly makes a lot more sense when you look at El Frontón itself.

Arguably the ultimate bodyboard wave, this beast didn't get its name from our sport. The coastline already had the name.

Bodyboarders just “dropped in” later and made it famous for something different.

El Frontón sits below Gáldar on the northwest coast of Gran Canaria, near the little fishing community of Caleta de Arriba. Getting there isn't exactly a case of parking the car and wandering down with your board under your arm.

There are banana plantations, rocky terrain and a steep descent before you eventually arrive at one of the most notorious pieces of volcanic real estate in bodyboarding.

And then you see it! A sight to behold, a sight for sore, frothing eyes. The wave detonates over shallow volcanic reef and, when everything lines up, produces the sort of thick, square barrels that make perfectly sensible people voluntarily paddle toward the insane.

It's an A-frame, throwing hard both left and right. The Canary Islands tourism people describe it as one of Europe's most powerful waves, while professional bodyboarders have ranked it among the world's best, and so do I. It's on my bucket list.

The local bodyboarders tend to have a slightly more direct vocabulary.

La Bestia, The Beast. Heavy water on volcanic rock with very little room for error.

A monstrous, cavernous barrel that seems to have been designed specifically to make somebody question their life choices…

Or wish they had an event ticket! 😭

Sitting above El Frontón is Gáldar. And Gáldar wasn't always just the town above one of Europe's heaviest bodyboarding waves.

Long before the Spanish conquest of Gran Canaria, Gáldar was Agáldar, the political center of one of the island's two indigenous kingdoms and the seat of the Guanartemes, the island's rulers.

The last ruler was Tenesor Semidán, later baptized Fernando Guanarteme. The Spanish conquest of Gran Canaria was completed in 1483. So when you stand at El Frontón today and watch somebody getting barrelled underneath a cliff, you're looking up toward a place that was already a center of power more than 500 years ago.

Then there's Cueva Pintada, The Painted Cave. It's one of the most important archaeological sites in the Canary Islands, containing the remains of an indigenous settlement and the famous geometric paintings inside the cave.

It was first stumbled upon in 1862 during agricultural work, but not properly identified until 1873, when a local farmer broke through into the chamber and found the paintings inside. So this little patch of Gran Canaria has layers upon layers of history sitting on top of one another.

Indigenous kings, Spanish conquest, banana farms, fishing villages, and eventually...

Lots and lots of bodyboarders!🤘

The first Frontón King was held in 2013, and right from the beginning, the organizers apparently decided that a normal trophy was far too sensible.

The winner gets a giant bunch of Canary bananas. Not a symbolic bunch, but the whole damn thing. We're talking 50 to 70 kg of bananas.

The winner has to lift it over his head and hold it there for ten seconds while the crowd counts. Alongside the banana bunch comes a Canary mastiff puppy and a King of Clubs playing card.

Apparently one symbol of kingship wasn't enough. Three would do nicely. The bananas represent the agricultural heritage of Gáldar and the farmers who have worked the surrounding land for generations.

The dog and playing card complete the local symbolism. It's wonderfully bizarre. And somehow, once you know the history of Gáldar, it also makes perfect sense.

This is a place that used to have actual kings, and now it has bodyboard kings.

The Frontón King grew quickly. By 2016 it had become an important stop on the international bodyboarding calendar, and the event started attracting the very best riders in the world.

For you new guys, there is an important distinction here. Winning Frontón King and winning the world title are not necessarily the same thing.

Amaury Lavernhe won the Frontón King event in 2016 while Pierre Louis Costes won the world title that year.

By 2018, Frontón King was offering a $36,000 prize purse, at the time a record for bodyboarding. This was no longer just some crazy contest happening at a crazy local wave. It was becoming one of the biggest stages in the sport, overshadowing Pipeline…

Tristan has now won 2 x IBC world titles, and El Frontón has played a pretty significant part in both chapters.

In 2019, Tristan won the Frontón King event and secured his first world title there.

In 2022, he secured his 2nd world championship at the Frontón King event, but the fun bit of trivia is that he didn't win the 2022 contest. High flying Jeff Hubbard did.

Tristan finished 2nd and still became world champion. So when people say Tristan has won 2 world titles at Frontón, the story is slightly more interesting.

As things stand, Tristan is the IBC men's world No. 1, sitting on 14,300 points.

He opened the season by winning in Morocco, where he went through every heat in first place and then beat Moroccan finalist Chajri Badr Eddine in the final. He followed that with another 5,000 point result in Antofagasta. And after the major Prime events, he's still sitting at the top of the rankings heading into Frontón.

Pierre Louis Costes is 2nd. Amaury Lavernhe is 3rd. It is going to be a battle for the world title runner up spot and the Frontón King bananas.

Tristan needs to surf his first heat and he’s our 2026 IBC World Champ. By now I am sure he’s well rested, hungry for competition, and if the elements align, he’s gonna go bananas to get the double dip.

Praying for big surf! 🌊

Because of the event format, the big names don’t even hit the water until the Main Event, which usually gets underway around the 3rd or 4th day, once the early rounds have worked their way through the 80 rider field and cut it down to the final 32.

So while the rest of the field is battling it out, the world title drama will be hanging over Gáldar, waiting for Tristan to paddle out. And there’s no shortage of serious competition behind him.

Pierre Louis Costes, Amaury Lavernhe and Canary Islands local hero Armide Soliveres are all still in the mix, with Armide being the only Canarian sitting inside the current global Top 16.

Then there’s another battle happening further down the rankings, because finishing inside that coveted Top 16 means automatic qualification for the 2027 Main Event. In other words, there’s plenty to fight for, even if Tristan has already done most of the hard work.

There's another interesting “green peace” piece to the Frontón story. The event has been pushing sustainability pretty hard, with its technical and sporting operation moving toward solar power.

Last year the event became the first sporting event in the Canary Islands to run its technical sporting infrastructure entirely from solar power, and they’ve continued that approach into 2026.

Not “we put a couple of solar panels on the roof and called it sustainable”. The actual technical operation is being run from an autonomous photovoltaic system. The judges’ tower, LED screen, scoring system, lighting, communications and the international live broadcast are all being powered by the solar setup.

The organizers put the technical consumption at around 20 kWh per competition day. So over the 6 actual competition days, you’re looking at roughly 120 kWh powering the machinery behind an international world tour event.

That doesn’t sound like much until you think about what those 20 kWh are actually doing.

Judges are scoring heats. Cameras are filming them. The footage is being processed and sent around the world. There’s a live stream, LED screens, communications and all the other technical gear required to turn a chunk of volcanic reef in northern Gran Canaria into a global sporting broadcast. All from sunlight.

The organizers say the system avoids around 4.4 kg of CO₂ emissions for every competition day, compared with producing that electricity from thermal generation. So, over 6 competition days, that’s about 26 kg of CO₂ avoided from the technical operation alone. It’s not going to save the planet by itself. Nobody is pretending it will.

But there is something wonderfully appropriate about it. One of the most powerful waves in bodyboarding is being used as the stage for an event that has figured out how to run its technical side without firing up a diesel generator every time the world wants to watch someone get spat out of a barrel.

Last week I dug into core density and complaints that concerns our heavier, more muscular riders. If thats you, like me, pushing 100kg / 220lbs and beyond, then kick the hornets nest below and check out some solutions. 👇🔥

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