By VICTORIA MILKO, Associated Press

TEAHUPO’O, Tahiti (AP) — The search for the perfect wave has been a part of surfing culture for decades, with surfers traveling from location to location in their quest for the best swells. But with the development of surf forecasting— the prediction of wave swell behavior and breaking— that search has gotten much easier.

This year, it also determines the four days that surfers competing in the Paris Olympics in Tahiti, French Polynesia, will paddle into the ocean in their pursuit for the gold medal.

Here’s a look at how surf forecasting is done, how it impacts the Paris Olympics surfing competition and how experts expect climate change to affect future wave forecasting.

What is surf forecasting and how is it done?

Surf forecasting is often considered a branch of meteorology and oceanography as it uses the same tools and methods adopted in weather forecasting and the study of the ocean.

Forecasters monitor wind and storms that blow over the ocean — sometimes thousands of miles out at sea — transferring their energy in the water and creating most waves. They then calculate how the storms will move over the water and how long they’ll take to reach shores.

Some old-school forecasters do their calculations by hand, but software has been developed to help semi-automate the data that creates forecasting models. Forecasts can be fairly accurate up to 10 days in advance, said Nathan Cool, a wave forecaster and creator of WaveCast. But he warns that it’s not an exact science.

That doesn’t stop surfers around the world from regularly checking forecasts shared on popular surfing websites to help decide if they want to surf that day.

Does climate change impact surf forecasting?

Yes, but the changes are likely to be gradual rather than a shock event, said Cool.

That’s because rising seas and changes in geographic features due coastal erosion or shifting shoal shapes will change the coasts, impacting how and where waves break.

“Features like these take long time to change, so local surfers may see less beach over time, local breaks may change, but nothing extreme in the short term,” Cool said. “But long term will see inevitable see changes.”

How does forecasting impact the Paris Olympics surfing competition?

The surf forecast is the biggest determinant of when the Paris Olympics surfing competition will take place, predicting when swells are expected to arrive, as well as the angle and size of the waves. Only four days of a ten-day window will be allotted for the competition, so it’s important to pick what forecasters think will be the best days.

The current forecast for the competition window — which spans from July 27 through August 5 — comes with good and bad news: An anticipated swell the first day in the window means the competition is anticipated to start on the first possible day. But the forecast also says there will be wind, negatively impacting surfing conditions and perhaps delaying competition days until later in the window.

“We’ll hope the best and plan for the worst,” International Surfing Association president Fernando Aguerre told The Associated Press.

By JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr., Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — The Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony got underway after a rough start to the Summer Games on Friday, with rainy skies over the Seine and suspected acts of sabotage targeting France’s flagship high-speed rail network.

ZIZOU’S FLAME

Former French footballer Zinedine Zidane is seen on a screen prior to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 on July 26, 2024 in Paris, France. (Photo by Alex Davidson/Getty Images)

French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane kicked off the opening ceremony with the Olympic flame in his hands. In a prerecorded video, he’s seen running and weaving through a Parisian traffic jam before he delivers the flame to a group of children on the metro who then make their way through the Catacombs and to a boat, at which point the broadcast switched to a real-time view of the Seine River.

LADY GAGA DAZZLES

Lady Gaga delivered a dazzling performance as the first musical act during the Paris Olympics 2024 opening ceremony — except it was all prerecorded. The Grammy- and Oscar-winning performer kicked off her performance on steps along the Seine River, singing Zizi Jeanmaire’s “Mon Truc en Plumes.” Gaga’s appearance was a surprise — she was not listed on a program provided to the media in advance — but was heavily rumored after the singer and actor was spotted in Paris.

By PAUL NEWBERRY, AP National Writer

NANTERRE, France (AP) — The main swimming pool for the Paris Olympics is set up inside a 30,000-seat rugby stadium on the city’s western edge.

Sound strange?

Not really. It’s the new norm.

The biggest swim meets are being held in massive venues, which could provide a boost to the sport’s popularity in non-Olympic years.

“I love the idea of more and more people watching swimming,” said Australian star Bronte Campbell, who will be competing in her fourth Summer Games. “The bigger the crowds, the better. Maybe they’ll make enough noise that we can finally hear them underwater.”

The U.S. Olympic trials were held this year at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, a 63,000-seat venue that is normally the home of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts.

The event broke numerous attendance records, drawing 285,202 fans over nine days — including 22,209 for one session.

“I think it was great,” American Nic Fink said. “It was a big swing from USA Swimming to try to host an even like that in Lucas Oil. From my standpoint, it seemed like it was a success in that viewership was up, tickets were good.”

Just as important, it was a meet that appeared to grow the sport beyond its hard-core fan base.

“It seemed like it was a great environment for not only the swimmers and swim fans, who want to go see the best swimming, but also for the casual fans who are like, ‘Oh, the Olympic trials are here, let’s go see what that’s about,’” Fink said.

“I was going into it kind of anticipating it being like a circus, and it was in that regard. But it seemed like a lot of fun. too,” he added. “I think that’s a good introduction and stepping stone to maybe the future of swimming.”

Paris built a new 6,000-seat aquatics center for these Games, but it will be used only for diving, artistic swimming and water polo preliminary games.

The swimming will be held in a temporary pool at La Défense Arena, an indoor stadium that is home of the storied Racing 92 rugby team and has been the venue for major concert tours such as The Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney.

The pool is set up at one end of the arena, with a warm-up pool located behind a curtain dividing the facility in half and leaving the capacity for the games at just over 15,000.

“The idea of being able to drop in and have a bigger fan base for the sport is really exciting,” said Australia’s Zac Stubblety-Cook, the reigning Olympic champion in the men’s 200-meter breaststroke. “Going into this arena, even the pool deck space, is really, really incredible. Being able to walk around and having space is actually a small detail but something that everyone has noticed.”

The next Summer Games, at Los Angeles in 2028, will look to make an even bigger splash.

After initially planning to construct a temporary aquatics stadium on the baseball field at the University of Southern California, LA organizers recently announced a series of venue changes that included moving the swimming competition to a portable pool at 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, the dazzling home to a pair of NFL teams, the Rams and Chargers.

The planned setup will have a capacity of 38,000 seats — by far the largest swimming venue in Olympic history.

“Hopefully, we can carry that momentum of viewership, of getting people involved, casual swimmers, memberships, stuff like that, into a home Olympic games, which will probably be an even bigger circus and more fun,” Fink said.

Portable pools have created far more flexibility in the selection of swimming venues for major meets.

Over the past two decades, several world championships were held in large, multipurpose arenas that were built for sports such as basketball and tennis.

The U.S. trials were held in a temporary facility for the first time in 2004, when an outdoor stadium was constructed in the parking lot outside Long Beach Arena. Then, three straight trials were held at a 17,000-seat arena in Omaha, Nebraska, allowing more fans to attend.

The Indy trials took the event to an even higher level.

The Australians, who are the leading rivals to the powerhouse American squad, took note of the enormous facility and large crowds for the U.S. trials. Head coach Rohan Taylor hopes that his country will some day be able to emulate that Down Under.

“To do it for a trials or a domestic competition, it would be about finding the right facility for a drop-in pool and in a city that would probably come out and support the sport,” he said. “That’s one thing we’ve got to be better at, growing the kind of broader support of it.”

Taylor said it’s also important to focus on bolstering the sport at the grassroots level. The big arenas are certainly eye-opening, but swimming also needs more permanent, year-round facilities, which he described as a goal leading up to the 2032 Summer Games in Brisbane.

But, for now, he’s relishing the big stage in Paris.

“Walking into this facility is incredible,” Taylor said. “Seeing it full will be incredible.”

___

AP Sports Writer Jay Cohen contributed to this report.

JD Vance’s Yale Law School pedigree came up at least a dozen times at the Republican National Convention. His degree from the institution gives the inexperienced Vance more legitimacy and validates his Horatio Alger story.

The use of elite educational credentials by populist critics of elite education isn’t new. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who went to Yale College and Harvard Law School, did a version of the same thing when he was running for president. Senator Josh Hawley, he of the raised fist on Jan. 6, graduated from Yale Law in 2006. Representative Elise Stefanik, who spent much of the past year grilling college presidents on Capitol Hill, graduated from Harvard College. And Trump himself likes to brag about his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (although at the time, over half of applicants were accepted).

But Vance’s degree is central to his narrative in a way that it’s not for those other politicians. Admission to Yale was his main accomplishment when he wrote his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” It cemented his rise to the elite. It framed Vance as an effective source to “explain” poor white politics (and poor white dysfunction) to the NPR-listening, tote-bag carrying, book-buying public. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without Yale Law School, there could be no phenomenon of JD Vance — at least, not by the tender age of 39.

Yale Law has also played a vital role in legal conservatism. At the Supreme Court, Justices Clarence Thomas (’74) and Samuel Alito (’75) have gone from being peripheral voices to becoming the authors of major new conservative opinions that seem likely to last at least a generation. One of the reasons they have such influence now is the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Yale Law ’90). The court currently has an unprecedented four Yale lawyers, including liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor (’79). Together they account for nearly half of the nine Yale law school graduates that have ever sat court.

What makes the prominence of these figures fascinating is that there are so few conservative graduates of Yale Law School. A generation ago, Bill and Hillary Clinton, also both graduates of Yale Law, brought an extended network of their liberal classmates and friends to Washington. Such liberal Yale Law graduates are not hard to find — and remain prominent in a wide range of legal jobs, especially as professors. (I went there myself.)

Yale’s conservatives are something else again. The law school is small to begin with, graduating only around 200 students a year, meaning there are about 600 law students at a time. And while there’s no official count, the number of those who identify as conservative is not likely to be much greater than 10% — and might be smaller. Consider: The photo on the homepage of the Yale Federalist Society chapter features just 20 students.

Their rarity is doubtless one reason Yale Law conservatives ascend so quickly. Consider judicial clerkships. More than half of federal judges are conservative and look for clerks who will support their world view. At the Supreme Court, the conservative-to-liberal ratio is 2 to 1. That gives conservative students a significant leg up, statistically speaking.

As important, however, is the experience of alienation shared by so many Yale Law conservatives, which seems to harden their political views and also becomes a central part of their narratives. Thomas and Alito have both spoken extensively of feeling like outsiders at Yale. Neither came from the upper or upper-middle class. (Kavanaugh, in contrast, who did grow up upper-middle class, used to speak warmly about his social experiences at Yale and remains a relatively moderate conservative.)

Vance, who grew up poor, also experienced a sense of alienation at Yale, one he emphasized in his book and has played up further in his political career. For him, as for Thomas and Alito, Yale Law became a double-edged component of his self-perception and self-presentation. On the one hand, having gone there proves one is now a member of the elite. On the other, being exposed to Yale elites confirms one’s belief that populist conservatism is the right way to see the world.

Vance benefited enormously from Yale, making the connections that helped him to find a top-tier literary agent and launch his career in Silicon Valley. And it’s in part in hopes of providing this kind of elevator for working class students that elite institutions like Yale believe in the value of admitting students from a wide range of backgrounds. I believe in it myself.

But one result is the inevitable emergence of people who use their elite experience to become proponents of anti-elitism. That’s their right.

I would venture to suggest, however, that elite institutions can and should do better in being aware of and trying to minimize the alienation associated with being any kind of an outsider there — whether based on social class, race, religion, or conservative politics. Some culture shock is inevitable so long as elite educational institutions draw so heavily on the children of economic and educational elites. Yet we can teach our students, from day one through graduation, to think harder about the experiences of others, and to take some of the moralizing out of their encounters with people who think differently. The real-world effects might give us more thoughtful graduates and fewer reactionaries.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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