Making waves: Surfer is first Afghan at the world games

HE TOOK joint 129th place in a 168-strong field, but for Afridun Amu, being the first competitor to represent Afghanistan at the World Surfing Games was a victory in itself.

“I’m an Afghan, living in Germany, from a country where you can’t surf. I’m competing with people who started surfing when they were five years old, living on the beach, and many of them professionals. So what do you expect?” he said.

Mr Amu said that he was battling both waves and clichés at this week’s championship in Biarritz, France.

When people think of Afghanistan, “they think of terrorism, war, and just negative things,” he said. “I can show that Afghanistan is so much more. That we Afghans have the same interests, the same joy as everybody else in the world,” he told the AFP.

Mr Amu, 29, whose family moved from Kabul to Germany as political refugees when he was five, climbed onto a surfboard for the first time just 10 years ago on a beach near Biarritz.

He now hopes that surfing could one day become a competitive sport in his landlocked home country, pointing out that cricket was relatively unknown to Afghans until just a decade ago.

“Now everybody is crazy about cricket in Afghanistan. So I think we can do the same with surfing,” he said, pointing out that the Panjshir province in the north-east of the country had a “very strong river”.