Getty Image / Diogo Baptista / SOPA Images / LightRocket
The tiny fishing village of Nazaré, Portugal that’s situated about halfway between Lisbon and Porto has become the top destination on earth for Big Wave Surfing and it’s been home to multiple world records set (and broken) for the largest wave ever surfed.
Over the weekend on February 24th, the conditions were perfect with a monster swell moving across the Atlantic Ocean and hitting the underground cavern at Nazaré where the ocean floor gets shallow in a fast and creates skyscraper-sized waves. And many in the surfing community believe a potential new surfing world record was set for the largest wave ever surfed.
I’ve ridden past Nazaré on a train but never been to the town itself, though I have written about the surfing impact on the town countless times over the years. And it’s hard to tell when there’s a new official surfing world record for the largest wave ever surfed because the rides are so massive at Nazaré people throw around ‘world record’ too casually. That said, there might be a new one from this session on 2/24/24.
In the YouTube caption, the Above Creators channel wrote “Did we witness history? A new world record perhaps? While that remains to be confirmed, one thing is clear: February 24th, 2024, will be etched in the annals of surfing history as a day of monumental bravery and sheer force of will.”
They added “the performances of Steudtner, Chumbo, Lattanzi, and Sampaio have left us all with our hearts in our hands, marveling at the human spirit’s capacity to confront and ride the fury of nature.” Last month, Brazilian surfer Lucas ‘Chumbo’ won the Nazare Big Wave Challenge which has quickly become the Super Bowl of Big Wave Surfing in recent years.
Funnily, they don’t call out which specific surfer might have set a new world record during the latest Nazaré surfing sesh.
Currently, German surfer Sebastian Steudtner holds the world record and he, of course, set that record at Nazaré. That was back in 2020 but here’s another record-setting wave he rode in 2018.
Measuring waves is difficult. It’s complicated to measure the wave face as waves are moving and ever-changing objects and those doing the measuring are typically doing it using video footage or from the shore. It is not as if someone can just pull out a measuring tape.
If someone from the 2/24/24 session believes they surfed a world record wave then there will certainly be a concerted effort made to measure the wave.
So while the surfing community argues in the comments on YouTube saying things like “The most crazy big wave session I have ever seen!” and “Not a record….Great sets but not a record” we will just have to wait for measurements to come out. All the while, Surfer magazine is calling it a ‘potential’ world record as well, so there’s that.