SINGAPORE — Camille Spaccarotella’s first surfing competition ended without her catching a single wave. Six years later, she is preparing to make sporting history for a country where finding a proper ocean wave can be harder than finding an international opponent.
The 21-year-old will become Singapore’s first surfer at the Asian Games when she paddles out at Pacific Long Beach in Tahara, Japan, later this month.
She will also arrive with an ambitious target.
A medal.
“I do want to have a podium finish,” Spaccarotella told CNA, while acknowledging that simply reaching the Asian Games represents a major step in her career.
The goal is significant because Singapore enters the event with a disadvantage that has followed its surfers for years.
The island nation is surrounded by water.
But it has very little reliable natural surf.
So while competitors from countries such as Japan and Indonesia can develop inside established surfing environments, Spaccarotella has spent years leaving home simply to get enough time on proper waves.
That makes her Asian Games debut more than one athlete’s milestone.
It is also a test of how far Singapore surfing can go when much of its serious training has to happen somewhere else.
Her first competition almost convinced her to quit
Spaccarotella’s competitive story hardly began like that of a future Asian Games athlete.
She first tried surfing during a family holiday in Bali when she was about 10, gradually falling for a sport built around conditions nobody can completely control.
Then came her first competition, around 2020.
She became so nervous that she did not catch a wave during her heat.
Her immediate conclusion was that competitive surfing might not be for her.
That could easily have been the end of the story.
Instead, she tried again.
A few years later, she entered another event in Bali and finished third.
That podium changed the trajectory.
Competition was no longer something to avoid.
It became something she wanted to pursue.
Bali became the training ground Singapore could not provide
The central difficulty for a competitive surfer based in Singapore is simple: skills developed on a board need repeated exposure to real ocean waves.
Singapore cannot reliably provide that.
Spaccarotella therefore spends as much as four months a year in Bali, according to CNA, while competitions have taken her to countries including India, South Korea and the Philippines.
The travel has served two purposes.
First, it gives her actual wave time.
Second, it puts her around surfers who have grown up inside much deeper competitive systems.
That experience matters because surfing is not like running on a standardized track or swimming in a 50m pool.
The playing field constantly changes.
Every wave has a different shape.
Wind changes conditions.
Tides matter.
Positioning in the lineup matters.
And an athlete can execute well yet still need the right wave to arrive during the heat.
That unpredictability is one reason Spaccarotella has told The Straits Times that surfing taught her to accept what she cannot control and remain prepared for whatever the ocean produces.
In 2023, she entered Asia’s serious competitive field
Spaccarotella represented Singapore at the 2023 Asian Surfing Championships in the Maldives, her first major regional milestone.
Official Asian Surfing Federation results placed her joint ninth in the women’s event, earning 500 ranking points.
She followed that period with wins and podium finishes at smaller regional events.
Recent profiles credit her with victories at Malaysia’s Tioman Surf Festival and Desaru Kejora Surfing Cup in 2023, second-place finishes at Cherating in 2023 and 2024, and victory at a Hikkaduwa event in Sri Lanka in 2024.
She also reached the quarter-finals of the QS3000 Baler International Pro in the Philippines in 2024, giving her exposure to a higher level of regional competition.
Those results did not turn Singapore into an Asian surfing powerhouse overnight.
They did establish that a surfer from a country with almost no consistent home break could compete credibly outside it.
The 2024 Asian Championships opened the door to Japan
The decisive Asian Games qualification process came at the 2024 Asian Surfing Championships in Thulusdhoo, Maldives.
Under the Asian Surfing Federation’s qualification system, the 2024 championships awarded quota places to the leading National Olympic Committees through two routes: regional representation and the seven highest-ranked eligible NOCs not already qualified through the regional route.
Spaccarotella finished joint 19th in the women’s open ranking with 390 points, while Singapore placed 10th in the women’s country ranking.
That distinction is important.
Her Asian Games qualification should not be portrayed as though she won a medal at the 2024 Asian Championships.
She did not.
Instead, Singapore secured its place through the Asian federation’s NOC-based qualification pathway, and Spaccarotella became the athlete associated with that historic quota.
Surfing Association Singapore now lists her as Singapore’s representative in the Women’s Shortboard Open Division at Aichi-Nagoya.
Then came another encouraging result in China
Spaccarotella’s results continued to improve after qualifying.
Surfing Association Singapore records that she won silver in the women’s open shortboard at the Dongsha Surfing Open in China on October 18, 2025.
That result does not establish where she will finish at the Asian Games.
The field, conditions and competitive format will be different.
But it does show that she enters Japan with more regional experience than she had when she first secured the quota two years earlier.
She is no longer simply the athlete who qualified.
She has continued competing against international opposition while preparing for the biggest event of her career.
Surfing itself is making Asian Games history
Spaccarotella is not the only one making a debut.
Surfing will be contested at the Asian Games for the first time in Aichi-Nagoya.
The competition will take place at Pacific Long Beach in Tahara, with official training from September 22 to 24 and competition scheduled for September 25 to 28. September 29 has been reserved in case ocean conditions force organisers to shift the programme.
That reserve day highlights an unusual feature of surfing.
Organisers cannot manufacture the competition surface.
The ocean decides whether conditions are suitable.
According to the Games’ official guide, competitors typically ride multiple waves during each heat, with judges scoring their performances. The two highest-scoring rides are combined, with factors such as manoeuvre difficulty, creativity, speed, power and overall execution affecting the score.
The scheduled women’s programme begins with Round 1 on September 25.
Quarter-finals are planned for September 27.
The semi-finals, bronze-medal heat and gold-medal heat are scheduled for September 28, weather permitting.
That means Spaccarotella’s podium goal would require advancing through several rounds against a field drawn from across Asia.
Japan and Indonesia bring considerably deeper surfing pedigrees
CNA identifies Japan and Indonesia among the expected stronger nations in the women’s event.
The recent Asian Championships support that context.
At the 2024 Asian Surfing Championships, Japan’s Mirai Ikeda and Anri Matsuno finished first and second in the women’s open standings.
China’s Siqi Yang was third, followed by Indonesia’s Taina Angel Izquierdo.
Japan also has the advantage of competing at a home Asian Games.
Indonesia, meanwhile, has a longstanding surf culture and access to internationally renowned breaks across Bali and other islands.
None of that decides what will happen in Tahara.
Surfing is particularly sensitive to heat draws, wave selection and changing ocean conditions.
But it does explain why a Singapore medal would represent a significant result rather than an expected one.
Singapore’s surfing story actually began before Camille
Spaccarotella will be Singapore’s first Asian Games surfer, but she is not Singapore’s first international surfing representative.
The Republic assembled its first national surfing team for the 2019 SEA Games in the Philippines, when surfing also made its debut at that regional competition. Six Singapore athletes—four men and two women—were selected.
Even then, the central problem was the same.
Singapore surfers had to travel to places such as Desaru in Malaysia and Bali for useful ocean training.
Seven years later, Singapore surfing has progressed from putting together its first SEA Games squad to sending an athlete into the Asian Games.
Spaccarotella therefore represents a newer generation rather than a sport appearing from nowhere.
There is a small but growing local surf community
Surfing remains niche in Singapore, but participation has gradually expanded.
Earlier reporting by 8world cited Surfing Association Singapore as estimating around 200 active surfing enthusiasts, including an increasing number of younger participants.
The association now operates youth-development activities and sends athletes to Asian competitions. Its current youth squad includes shortboard surfers developing toward higher-level competition.
The problem is that enthusiasm cannot replace ocean conditions.
A young footballer can find a field.
A swimmer can train in a pool.
A badminton player can book a court.
A developing competitive surfer needs something much more difficult to reproduce:
a reliable wave.
That is why Spaccarotella wants a proper wave pool
Spaccarotella believes Singapore’s next major step could be a purpose-built wave pool capable of generating ocean-like waves.
She told CNA such infrastructure could make surfing more accessible and help create a larger pipeline of local athletes.
Artificial surfing facilities already exist in different forms, but high-performance wave pools attempt to reproduce repeatable breaking waves suitable for technique development.
For Singapore, repeatability would be the major advantage.
Instead of waiting for unusual coastal conditions or flying overseas, athletes could spend significantly more time practising take-offs, turns and manoeuvres at home.
Spaccarotella pointed to South Korea as an example of how artificial-wave infrastructure can help surfing develop in places without abundant natural breaks.
Whether Singapore eventually builds such a facility is a separate policy and commercial question.
No project has been announced in CNA’s report.
So the wave-pool idea should be presented as Spaccarotella’s proposal for growing the sport, not as an approved Singapore plan.
The ocean has already taught her the harder lesson
Spaccarotella’s relationship with surfing has not only involved medals and travel.
During a 2019 family trip to Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands, she entered the water at a break called Pit Stops as conditions worsened.
The waves grew from roughly four feet to about eight feet, according to The Straits Times.
One eventually drove her into the reef, cutting the top of her foot deeply enough to leave a lasting scar.
The experience changed how she thought about the ocean.
Rather than treating courage as simply paddling into bigger conditions, she came to associate experience with knowing when not to push.
That perspective could be particularly useful in competition.
Surfing rewards aggression.
It also punishes bad decisions.
Now comes the biggest heat of her career
On September 25, the story moves from qualification to competition.
Spaccarotella will enter the women’s shortboard field at the first surfing competition in Asian Games history, with Surfing Association Singapore saying athletes from about 20 other Asian nations are expected.
Her stated target is a podium.
That target should be reported as ambition, not prediction.
There is no factual basis for declaring that a medal is assured—or impossible.
What is already established is the unusual route she took to get there.
A child who first surfed on a Bali holiday.
A first competition where she did not catch a wave.
Months every year spent training overseas because home could not provide the ocean conditions she needed.
A first Asian Championships.
An Asian Games quota.
A silver medal in China.
And now Japan.
Singapore may not have the waves that normally produce an elite surfing programme.
But on September 25, it will have a surfer in the Asian Games lineup anyway.
The next question is how far she can ride it.
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