Hugues Oyarzabal, one of Europe’s most accomplished surfers and among the first to record spectacular feats from inside the curl of a wave using digital cameras, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Biarritz, France. He was 39.
His parents, Charles and Lucette Oyarzabal, said he had taken his own life. Friends told The New York Times that Oyarzabal had lived with bipolar disorder from childhood.
“His physical and psychological suffering took its toll,” his parents told The Times through a translator. “He has chosen to leave us, to rediscover the peace and serenity he has been unable to find over the last few years.”
Oyarzabal surfed some of the most challenging waves in the world, from the Basque coasts of northern Spain and southwestern France to Southern Africa and beyond. In his later years, he found what he called “a second home” in Indonesia, spending part of every year there and seeking out spots that had rarely, if ever, been surfed, notably at Desert Point, on Lombok island, east of Bali, and at Uluwatu, on the Bukit Peninsula.
He also made acclaimed surfing documentaries, including “Peace and Left,” a multipart series, its title referring to a “left-hand wave,” one that breaks to the left from a surfer’s perspective.
Oyarzabal began videotaping his surfing exploits in 2001, as a teenager, using a Mini-DV camcorder in a waterproof box attached to his board. He captured images of himself riding through “tubes” or “barrels” — the tunnels of air created inside cresting waves, which the greatest surfers can ride in for hundreds of yards.
He is believed to have been the first to film himself inside a barrel, and to photograph and videotape himself looking backward through one. He later moved on to more sophisticated GoPro digital cameras as they came on the market.
In December 2012, when he was 26, he was invited to Hawaii to be honored at the first-ever GoPro Awards ceremony. The American surfer Kelly Slater, an 11-time world champion, presented him with an award for his photography and video work. One “selfie” image captured him inside the tube of a wave in Skeleton Bay, Namibia.
Nowadays, extreme sports athletes, from big wave surfers to mountain climbers, commonly use GoPro or other point-of-view cameras, placing them all over their bodies or on their equipment. Oyarzabal is thought to be the first surfer to create a device that clamped a camera to his teeth, affording the most direct point of view of a surfer.
His surfing friends variously described him as idiosyncratic, unpredictable, manic, lovable and loyal.
Hugues Oyarzabal (roughly pronounced OO-geh oy-ar-ZAH-bahl) was born on March 7, 1985, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a fishing port in the Basque region of southwestern France. He grew up in the village of Biriatou, on the French side of the river Bidassoa. Like many Basques, he had a French given name and a Spanish surname. When he began surfing in Indonesia, he added another first name, Waian (Balinese for “firstborn son”). It led to his logo, WHO (for Waian Hugues Oyarzabal), which he used on his website and in photographs.
At elementary school in Biriatou, Hugues excelled at tennis and paleta, a court sport similar to pelota, in which a leather bat or glove is used to smack a ball against a wall. But at age 11 he fell in love with surfing, starting in the Bay of Biscay on the Basque coast. During high school in Hendaye, near his home, he surfed some of the most formidable waves off Basque beaches.
One beach, Belharra, on the French Basque coast, was the scene of rare but violent waves that were considered unsurfable, known to have swallowed up many a fishing boat. But Oyarzabal took on the challenge and succeeded. (The surf was later calmed by a breakwater.)
His passion for surfing became so consuming that he left school at 16 and, financed by his understanding parents, moved to the Sunshine Coast of Australia to enroll in a sports and education program under a private coach, who improved his surfing and his English. For the rest of his life, Oyarzabal considered himself a so-called freesurfer, unbound by the need to compete and instead content to be at one with the waves, performing unique feats that became famous among the global surfing community.
“I’m always looking to try different things,” he told the Britain-based Surf Europe magazine in 2006. “I hate the idea of having a surf routine.”
In Australia, he met Jana Kondo, who returned with him to France, where they were married in 2006. They traveled to surfing beaches around the world. In 2011, they had a daughter, Kailani, meaning “sea and sky” in Hawaiian, and Oyarzabal later taught her to surf. She is now an accomplished surfer in her own right.
The marriage ended in divorce in 2013. Oyarzabal’s daughter and parents are his only immediate survivors.
After his death, about 100 surfers gave Oyarzabal a Hawaiian-style farewell by paddling out from Hendaye, close to his home, to scatter flowers on the water. Half a world away, fellow surfers in Indonesia did the same.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
