After El Niño, what will be left of LA’s Olympic surf venue?

Recent storms have brought an epic run of big, surfable waves to Southern California. But they’ve also wreaked havoc on beaches, surfside homes and coastal infrastructure.

The prospect of El Niño bringing even more volatile weather raises a serious question about the chosen venue for surfing at the 2028 Olympics: Will there still be a beach at Lower Trestles when the Games roll around?

The World Surf League held its annual competition this month at Trestles, a beach south of San Clemente that straddles Orange and San Diego Counties. The competition took place a few days after Hurricane Marie’s remnants hit the Southern California coast.

High tides and big surf shut down coastal rail tracks just north of Trestles. Waves pummeled beachfront homes in nearby Dana Point, rendering at least 10 of them uninhabitable.

At Lower Trestles, the surf break where the competition took place, seawater flooded the narrow beach, washed out the access road and pooled around several of the temporary structures.

Compared with other parts of the coast, the damage was minimal. But as sea levels continue to rise, organizers of the 2028 Olympics will need to address some tough questions, especially with more hurricanes and what forecasters are calling a “Super El Niño” on the way: Where will ticket holders watch the event? How much infrastructure can the beach hold? And how will organizers get equipment there?

Getting to Trestles Beach generally requires a long walk or bike ride from the nearest parking lot. Its lack of development helps keep the area resilient to extreme weather.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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What makes Trestles a world-class surf beach

SoCal Olympic surfing hopefuls were stoked when LA28 organizers announced the surfing event would take place at Lower Trestles.

“It’s a dream,” said local pro Griffin Colapinto, who was surrounded by autograph-seeking kids as he exited the water during the Trestles competition earlier this month. Colapinto, who’s from San Clemente, competed for the U.S. at the 2024 Paris Games.

“Focus on getting there, and then go for gold,” he told LAist of his dreams for LA28.

The potential hometown advantage excites surfers like Colapinto. So does Trestles’ reputation for delivering consistently good waves. People familiar with surf competitions say that dependability is clutch for international sporting events that depend heavily on environmental conditions.

The relatively pristine San Mateo Creek watershed is the secret to Trestles' world-class waves.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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The spot’s consistency stems from its location at the mouth of San Mateo Creek, within San Onofre State Beach. When flowing creeks and rivers meet a slower-moving body of water — in this case, the ocean — they drop heavy materials like rocks and boulders, which eventually form a cobblestone reef.

This is a defining feature of prized surf spots along the California coast, said Chad Nelson, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal conservation group.

“That's true at Rincon, at Cardiff, at Malibu,” he said. “All these iconic places are these cobble river mouths.” That underwater topography makes for amazing waves, Nelson said.

Also key to the excellent waves at Trestles is the lack of development upstream along San Mateo Creek. Nelson called it “one of the last natural surf spots in urbanized Southern California.”

Its isolation — there is no paved public road leading to the beach, much less a beachfront parking lot — bodes well for the area’s resilience to extreme weather. At the same time, it presents some conundrums for staging a major international sporting event.

‘We’ve had way worse’

Matt Riggs has helped set up the beachside infrastructure for many surf competitions at Trestles. He said the damage from Hurricane Marie in 2020 was "way worse" than this year's hurricane of the same name.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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The beach at Lower Trestles is a narrow strip of sand, about 30 to 40 feet wide, backed by protected wetlands. The coastal railroad runs through the wetlands behind the beach.

On each of the four days before the World Surf League’s competition began earlier this month, the tide at south Orange County beaches was high enough to flood part of the beachside competition area.

On one of those mornings, Matt Riggs, a contractor for the event, was out at the beach early with a small tractor, hauling sand and dirt to rebuild the beachfront access road the surf had washed away.

“I'll probably have to do [it] again tomorrow morning since there's another high tide and another swell,” he told LAist. Riggs and other workers also had to resecure some of the elevated structures used for watching and judging the competition.

But he said the damage wasn’t bad compared to flooding at the competition a few years back. “We’ve had way worse,” he said.

“These stairs here,” Riggs said, pulling up a photo of a previous year's damage on his phone, “they fell into the ocean.” (edited)

Planning around unpredictable weather

Much is still unknown about the planning efforts for the Olympic surfing event in 2028. How many tickets will be sold? How will spectators get to the beach? What about the many journalists who will want to cover the event, and all of their equipment?

LA28 declined an interview request for this story. But spokesperson Jacie Prieto Lopez emailed a statement saying, in part, “We are actively monitoring developments. … With less than two years until the Games, we remain focused on our shared planning efforts to ensure the safe and successful delivery of the 2028 surfing competitions."

One of LA28’s closest planning partners is California State Parks, which leases the land that includes Trestles from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. Scott Kibbey, State Parks superintendent for the Orange Coast District, noted that surf competitions have taken place at the spot for decades. They’ve had to adjust, he said, as the coastal environment shifts.

“This is a dynamic area,” Kibbey said. “Right now we're looking at a beach that is much narrower than it has been in recent years, and we're letting nature kind of dictate how we plan for future events.”

The last few years have been busy for Kibbey and his staff, as storms and rising seas have posed increasingly thorny challenges. In June, heavy surf and high tides caused a lifeguard stand to collapse at Crystal Cove State Park. One of the park’s historic beachfront cabins was also damaged, and the public access trail flooded.

“Old Man’s,” a beloved surf spot at San Onofre State Beach south of Trestles, has suffered severe erosion in recent years, forcing officials to rethink public access to the beach.

At the same time, record-high temperatures, fueled in part by El Niño, sent visitors flocking to state beaches this summer, straining staff and infrastructure.

“Our state park resources, our staff have been hit incredibly hard,” Kibbey said.

High winds and rough surf didn't deter beachgoers in Malibu this summer.

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Courtesy Rhea Presiado

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Environmental concerns

Kibbey said sustainability is at the forefront of planning for the Olympic surfing event. Surfers and others who cherish the spot will be watching closely, given past environmental activism at Trestles, plus concerns that erupted over the previous Olympic surfing event at the Paris 2024 Games, which took place in Tahiti.

Two decades ago, surfers, conservationists and members of the Acjachemen Nation joined to fight a toll road that would have cut through San Mateo Creek, potentially destroying some of the tribe’s most sacred sites and ruining Trestles’ perfect waves. A few years into the project’s public approval process, several thousand people showed up to a California Coastal Commission hearing to voice opposition to the project.

“It was an epic fight,” said Nelson from Surfrider. Given that history, Nelson said his group met the news that Trestles would host Olympic surfing with a mix of excitement “and a little bit of trepidation.”

Nelson noted that surf competitions at the famed big wave spot Mavericks in northern California have brought problems in the past. In 2006, hundreds of spectators walked out onto the reef and scaled coastal bluffs to watch the contest, trampling the delicate ecosystem.

At a Mavericks' event in 2010, huge waves tore through contest infrastructure, knocking people off one of the watch towers and injuring 15 spectators.

Environmental concerns also tinged preparations for the Olympic surfing event at the 2024 Paris Games, especially over the drilling of a new judging tower into the delicate coral reef.

“That was definitely a cautionary tale,” Nelson said. Still, he added, “I'm pretty confident that we're going to be able to find a solution down here that's well managed and takes this special place into consideration.”

Erosion has also shut down train traffic through San Clemente State Beach numerous times in recent years.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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El Niño ‘not all bad’ for coastlines

After Hurricane Marie, the cities of Laguna Beach, San Clemente and Dana Point declared states of emergency to address coastal damage. Orange County and Gov. Gavin Newsom followed with their own emergency declarations, in part to prepare for potentially worse damage from even stronger El Niño effects in the coming months.

The Orange County Transportation Agency recently announced plans to place 690,000 cubic yards of sand on beaches just north of Trestles in hopes of protecting the coastal rail corridor.

Kibbey, the State Parks superintendent, said the expected heavy precipitation from El Niño could also bring some benefits. If San Mateo Creek flows strong enough to reach the ocean, he said, “it would bring a bunch of sand here naturally.”

Its beach may be narrowing, but Trestles has actually fared much better than its neighbors, thanks largely to its natural state, Nelson from Surfrider said.

“Usually the problem isn't coastal erosion,” he said. “It's when coastal erosion meets human infrastructure.”

No matter what Trestles looks like in 2028, Nelson thinks the Olympic spotlight will bring more benefits than drawbacks.

Surfing is one of the only Olympic sports “completely reliant on the health of the coastal ecosystem,” he said. “If a million people learn the lesson that we need to protect our coasts and protect our ocean, or millions, then I think that's probably ultimately to our advantage.”