Israeli surfer Anat Lelior unlikely for Tokyo Olympics

Anat Lelior got his first experience of surfing at the age of 5.

Her father, Yochai, lay with her on the back of the board at their local beach in Tel Aviv and pushed the two of them into a breaking wave. But instead of riding the sand victorious, the board pounced on the nose. They fell and the board shot into the air like 8-foot, plastic and foam projectiles. On his return journey he hit Anat on the forehead, leaving it open.

As his daughter’s face was bleeding, Yochai recalled, “Everyone on the beach was looking at me like I was a murderer.”

However, Anat was unconcerned. After blood dripping on the sand and getting stitches in the hospital, he asked to go back to the beach. When Yochai took her back to the crime scene, the lifeguards there served her tea and she sat, sewed up, and watched the waves.

Despite her injury, this was the beginning of Anat’s love affair with the sport. He continued to surf, and eventually began entering regional competitions run by the Israeli Surfing Association, or ISA. Soon she was not only winning, but also catching the eye of the local surf industry. Artur Rashkovan, owner of Tel Aviv surf shop Clinica and a key figure in the Israeli city’s modern surf culture, remembers the first time he surfed.

“I was announcing a local children’s competition in Netanya, around 2007,” he said. “I looked at this girl like a 12 year old, and she was lying back” [a technical, snapping maneuver] and throwing water. I didn’t know his name and I panicked. I was like, ‘Who is this girl?!'”

According to Rashkovan, surfer Maya Dauber came up against the same problem in the 1980s. Known as Israel’s first female pro, Dauber ended up competing against boys due to the lack of female opponents. But by the time Anat began competing and building a surfing career, not only were fewer kids surfing, but national interest in the sport had died out. The barrier to entry had become even higher.

“We are slowly starting to see the level of European surfing avoiding us,” Rashkovan said. “European surfers start getting bigger sponsorships and the ASP circuit” [the global organizing body] will go to Europe. There was a geographic connection to them as well, and we were, you know, at the end of [Mediterranean], Left out.”

So the idea of ​​surfing becoming an Olympic sport – with very few Israelis competing in them – seemed more than a little far-fetched.

But in 2002, Rashkovan became the director of the Israeli Surfing Association. He dreamed of the day when Israel had a vibrant surf culture, similar to the one he saw on a trip to California. However, the road there will be long and steep. While the industry was thriving overall, competitive surfing in Israel was not.

Rashkovan went to work: He offered insurance and surf shop discounts as perks of membership. They held a huge re-launch party for the association, and brought in major brands and registered new members. He served to convince surfers that being part of the ISA had benefits for non-competitors as well. By the time she left the association in the mid-2000s, Rashkovan had reinvented competitive surfing, rebuilding her membership roster and creating the first events for girls.

In 2007, he and ISA handed over the reins to Yossi Zamir, an Israeli native who had recently returned after nearly two decades living in Australia. Zamir not only had close industry ties there, but also saw a highly organized, government-sponsored approach to surfing combined with competition, which created a kind of feeder system in the upper reaches of the sport.

At ISA, he set out to import what he had learned.

His first goal was to get more kids into surfing – helping the sport lose its punk, bad boy image – and to put some structure, rules, and standards into competitions. What followed was the bringing of high-profile, international qualifying competitions to the country. And with a top Australian coach, Zamir developed a coaching program and high performance clinics for ISA surfers.

Like Rashkovan, he too remembers seeing Anat Serf for the first time.

“At the first clinic, Anat arrived with her sister,” said Zamir. “She was really young and we really saw her potential at the time.”

This was around 2012, when Israel had only four or five female competitors across the country.

“It was very hard to reach a high level when you really didn’t have anyone to compete in Israel,” Zamir said. “Anat was working very hard; I respect him a lot for what he did. And she has a wonderful family supporting her. “

In fact, Anat’s father Yochai lobbied ISA to participate in the boys’ competition.

“In the beginning we said no,” recalled Zamir.

Eventually the union will bow down. Anat became involved in boys’ competition, then began to travel outside the country and compete against a large pool of female athletes. At the same time, the popularity of surfing in Israel continued to grow, and more girls began competing.

While Anat sometimes struggled to find competing resources in a system that was not yet ready for her, her family was flooded with support every step of the way. Not only did her parents supply her with equipment and sometimes plane tickets, as well as in-house training partners: her older brother, Ido, and her younger sister, Noah, who competed until then. until she got derailed by injury. Surfing with each other helped them up their game.

It was Noah who led Anat’s first voyage to the very big stage in surfing. Now 18, when Noah was 12, she asked if, in exchange for a party for her bat mitzvah, the family could go to a surf competition abroad. Yochai and the sisters packed up and headed for their first qualifying series (QS) and junior level competition in France – a major step up from local competitions.

“It was such a treat,” Yochai said. “Tent on the beach. How nice was the morning buffet and everything. We rented a van, but a van for flowers, so we slept in the back with sleeping bags. We didn’t have a big party for Noah. But We did a road trip. We did this contest and then we went to Pantene [Spain, which also hosts a QS contest]. The seed was sown. One incident can make a difference in the life of a person in his journey.”

The trip was the family’s first high-level, international event, but was far from their last. Anat continued to compete at home and abroad, and in 2019 he provisionally qualified as Israel’s entrant to the Olympics at the International Surfing Association’s World Surfing Games in El Salvador. A few weeks ago, the family came again to cheer on Anat as he secured his place in Tokyo.

Unlike many of his Olympic peers, Anat’s early years in the sport were largely one’s journey.

“It’s so hard to be so alone in a journey like this, so many obstacles to break through,” Yochai said. “You question yourself a lot of times. You’re not in a community of surfers. There’s no competition for you to be a female surfer, and to be able to grow from it. Going to the military, and going to school; that feeling That you always have to be in two places at the same time.”

Those who have seen Anat’s growth in and out of the water say that it is not just her talent, work ethic and uniquely supportive family that has propelled her here.

“Anat has a very strong internal energy,” Rashkovan said. “She’s something else, she’s a different kind of person. She’s very strong minded.” In other words, he needs that kind of rigor to make his way into a highly competitive, male-dominated sport. “

Yochai said that in this light, Anat’s access to the Olympics meant more than just reaching the pinnacle of his sport. He recalled the time in 2019 when he provisionally qualified for Tokyo. It was a long, challenging day in which he competed against some of the most elite surfers in the world.

“When we arrived at the hotel, suddenly I understood that he had [validation], Yochai said. “For a long time he could not believe that his success was his own handiwork and not by chance. And he worked very hard for it.