Award-winning TV documentary looks at the history of surfing

Waveriders will be shown on BBC1 Northern Ireland on Monday, May 10th at 10.35pm.

The award-winning documentary will tell the fascinating story of how a man, George Freeth, believed to have had Irish ancestry, and who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery, is credited with making the sport of surfing the success it is today.

Waveriders will also follow some of the world’s top surfers back to George Freeth’s ancestral home providing viewers

with stunning footage of them tackling 60ft monster waves off the west coast of Ireland - the biggest waves ever surfed there.

It’s a widely held view that George Freeth, whose father left Ireland in the late 1870s, played a pivotal role in popularising surfing. Freeth is credited with re-introducing the ancient Polynesian art of wave riding in Hawaii at the start of the 20th century.

Filmed in Hawaii; California; Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Waveriders features the stunning scenery where some of the world’s top surfers come to catch a wave.

The distinguished cast includes top professional surfers Alastair Mennie, Richard Fitzgerald, Gabriel Davies, nine-time

world champion Kelly Slater, Irish and UK surf champion, Easkey Britton and famed surf writer Kevin Naughton.

The one-hour documentary hears from surfing historians who look back at how Freeth helped transform something that was a little-known ancient art into a sport with its own culture and which captured the psyche of North America in the early 1900s.

It reveals that Freeth is regarded as the first true life guard – his methods shaping the profession into how we see it today - and how his heroics in helping save the lives of Japanese fishermen off the Californian coast earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor.