LIMA, Peru: Some experts say surfing originated in Peru - the South American country has what many surfers say is the world's longest wave and the first world champion was Peruvian.

But for years the professional sport has struggled here. Until now. The new world women's champion, 21-year-old Peruvian Sofia Mulanovich, has turned the surfing spotlight back on Peru and sparked a can-do attitude for those aspiring to join her.

"We're seeing a resurgence. Definitely Sofia's world title has put Peru's surfing back on the map," said Jake Howard, associate editor of Surfer Magazine, the sport's bible.

"I think Peru is on its way to the big league," he said. "Sofia will help push it to the next level."

With Mulanovich's November victory in the 2004 World Championship Tour - surfing's premier league - still fresh, Peru in February hosted a competition of the junior league, the World Qualifying Series.

"It's unreal. There are really good, really playful waves," said world No 3 Chelsea Georgeson of Australia at the event.

"Peru will get huge," enthused compatriot Claire Bevilacqua, ranked 15th.

From a distance, the Pacific waves lapping Lima look as if they are full of sharks. But the black "fins" protruding from the waters are the wetsuit-clad torsos of surfers.

Undeterred by pollution, they range from learners as young as 4 in mini wetsuits to bankers taking a lunchtime dip.

And women and girls - hoping to emulate Mulanovich or the glossy stars of the 2002 surf chick movie "Blue Crush" - are taking to the waves in droves.

"That's definitely the Sofia phenomenon," said Hector Velarde, winner of an unofficial 1962 world championship.

Enthusiasm not enough

The Beach Boys praised Cerro Azul, a popular beach south of Lima, in their 1962 anthem, "Surfin' Safari" celebrating the spread of surf "from Hawaii to the shores of Peru."

Blessed by year-round waves, with plenty of variety, Peru is a surfer's godsend. There is Chicama in northern Peru, considered home to the world's longest wave because when conditions are good the ride can be a half mile. And at Pico Alto (High Peak) south of Lima waves reach up to 10 metres.

"The waves here are awesome, so I stayed," said Santiago Boveda, 26, a board maker from Argentina.

But enthusiasm is not enough if Peru - where ceramics from a culture over 1,500 years old show fishermen "surfing" on reed boats with upturned tips - is to turn out more champions.

"Peru has a long and big tradition in the sport of surfing," said Roberto Perdigao, South American head of the Association of Surfing Professionals.

"The problem is it's a third-world country. There's no surfing industry, no sponsors to support surfers," he said.

That is good for amateurs - Peru's surf beaches are full of bronzed Peruvian youths with sun-bleached hair and boards under their arms who see this as an adventurous, uncharted getaway.

But it makes it hard for surfing really to take root as a national pastime, like in neighbouring Brazil. And without big sponsorship deals, talented surfers struggle to get to Hawaii, Australia, Brazil, Fiji and Tahiti and other circuit stops.

"When I went to a world championship in California in 1984, I ended up paying my fare," said Rocio Larranaga, the pioneer of women's surfing in Peru.

Surf's new world

If Hawaii, Australia, California are the established empires of surf, Peru belongs to the brave New World.

Ironically, Peru helped invent and popularize surfing and establish the sport's rules 40 years ago.

Though British explorer Captain James Cook and his crew stumbled across surfing in Hawaii in the 1770s, some experts believe the pastime originated in Peru, not Polynesia.

Hawaii is where the craze took off. Waikiki beach boy Duke Kahanamoku helped revive Hawaii's traditional sport of kings that had been banned by European missionaries as "immoral" and introduced surfing to California and Australia.

Peruvian playboy Carlos Dogny spread it to South America and Europe. He learned in Hawaii and took a hulking solid-wood board back to Lima, where he founded the chic Waikiki Club for surfers in 1942 and one in Biarritz, France, in 1959.

Eduardo Arena, a Peruvian who was the first president of the International Surfing Federation, noted that Peru had the first official world champion in Felipe Pomar in 1965 and helped write the rules of the sport that still apply today.

Mulanovich, who has been honoured by the government and feted on billboards, had to be escorted by burly minders through crowds of screaming fans at February's tournament. "I open doors for a lot of people," she acknowledged. "But that is cool. I'm just living my dream," she said. "I was born to surf."

(China Daily 03/12/2005 page10)