Bangladesh isn’t a country built for surfing. The waves are sub-par, the sport is still in its infancy, surfboards arrive almost entirely through donations and hand-me-downs, government support is virtually non-existent, and spending long days in the sun can still carry a social stigma in a culture where fair skin is often prized. Yet against those odds, a small but fiercely committed few are attempting to build the country’s surf scene and will fly the Bangladesh flag at The Asian Games in September.
The team qualified to compete at the continent’s biggest multi-sport stage through the Asian Surfing Championship earlier this year. One of those surfers, Shagor, grew up a few minutes’ walk from the sea in Cox’s Bazar. His mother worked along the beach and a local surfer named Sifat, part mentor, part family, surfed every morning. By seven, Shagor was trailing behind him into the waves. “I always saw him heading out to surf,” he said. “I dreamed about surfing too.” There was no club, no coach, no board back then – just Sifat, his friends, and a stretch of coastline nobody outside Bangladesh thought to look at.
Cox’s Bazar isn’t just where Shagor learned to surf, it’s the only place in Bangladesh anyone can. The town sits on a 120-kilometre stretch of beach, the longest unbroken seabeach in the world, and every inch of it breaks. There’s no reef, no point, no boat trip required – just sand, swell, and a straight beach break running the length of the coast. Locals split their time mainly between two spots: Kolatoli and Laboni Beach, both a couple of minutes’ walk from town. “You can surf anywhere along the beach,” Shagor said.
The season runs from April through December, with a stretch in the middle, roughly June to August, too rough and rain-lashed to paddle out at all. The swell comes off the Bay of Bengal, fed by the same Indian Ocean systems that bring surf to India and Sri Lanka, but by the time it reaches Bangladesh’s shallow, sediment-heavy coastline, most of its power is gone. On a big day, Shagor said, the waves might hit four feet – “but there’s no power. Not like India, not like Sri Lanka, not like the Maldives.” It’s a coastline built for learning, rather than progressive surfing, which makes what Shagor and his teammates have managed to do with it all the more unlikely.
In 2021, after placing third in his first local contest, Shagor spent a month training in Sri Lanka, his first real look at what surfing could be with actual support behind it. “The surfers in Sri Lanka were incredible,” he said. “Even the young kids were surfing better than us.” The lesson stuck: to surf at that level, you need real waves, a real board, a real system behind you. Bangladesh had none of it. “My country has no support – not from the government, not from the local community, not from the surfing community,” he said. “We just have to trust ourselves.”
That self-reliance built into something concrete. Bangladesh’s first appearance at the Asian Games, in 2023 in the Maldives, only happened because the Bangladesh Cricket Board stepped in to cover the trip – a one-off gesture. So when Shagor and his training partner, Manon, were racing to qualify again in 2024, a friend suggested the obvious fix: crowdfund it. They hesitated. “We always felt shy about it,” Shagor said, “because we’re representing our country – why should other people have to pay for that? The government should be paying.” But the government wasn’t paying. So they opened the page anyway, and surfers from Australia, England, Spain, and the U.S. – people who’d likely never set foot in Bangladesh – funded a national team’s plane tickets.
Shagor’s first board wasn’t bought, it was handed down. Sifat, who runs the local club and pulled him into surfing in the first place, gave him a club board to start on. From there, the boards kept arriving the same way: through people. A friend brought him a second hand board from Indonesia. In 2023, an American woman he’d met through the sport sent him a new one. Ahead of the 2025 competition in India, he was gifted one directly by a shaper. “I did really well,” he says of that trip. “Maybe next time, we’ll deserve even more.”
There’s no shop to walk into in Cox’s Bazar, and no factory turning out boards for the next kid coming up behind him. Bangladesh doesn’t have a single commercial shaper, anything ridden on its waves has either arrived in a traveler’s luggage, been shipped in at steep cost, or been picked up secondhand from someone leaving the sport. Two local surfers, Fahad Hussain and Alamgir, have started experimenting with shaping their own boards, but it’s early, informal work – not yet something the community can rely on. For now, a surfboard in Bangladesh is less something you buy than something you’re given, by whoever happens to notice you need one.
Surfing in Bangladesh carries a stigma most outsiders wouldn’t expect, one less about the sport itself than about how it changes the way you look. “People care a lot about appearance here, about being fair-skinned or dark,” Shagor said. In a country where fair skin is often prized, spending hours a day in the sun and saltwater is, for some families, a visible mark against a surfer rather than a badge of it. Add a conservative Muslim community where swimwear norms make the ocean a complicated place for women to enter at all, and it’s easy to see why surfing has stayed a fringe pursuit for so long – tolerated, rarely encouraged.
That’s slowly changing, and mostly through kids. Shagor along with Sifat and the club have spent the past few years trying to draw the next generation of Cox’s Bazar toward the water, not toward competition necessarily, just toward the sport itself, as something to belong to. Among the roughly 130 to 150 surfers in Bangladesh’s community today, close to 30 are women, a number that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Much of that shift traces back to one woman in particular: Nasima, one of the community’s first female surfers, who now runs her own surf club and teaches girls to surf from scratch. “She’s amazing,” Shagor said. “She’s out there right now, teaching new girls to surf.” For the two women who traveled with the national team to India in 2025, both training under Bangladesh’s small but growing girls’ program, it was their first trip outside the country, let alone their first international heat. What Nasima started as one woman teaching a handful of girls to paddle out has become, slowly, a pipeline.
In 2021, filmmaker Elizabeth D. Costa released Bangla Surf Girls, a documentary following three teenage girls from Cox’s Bazar, Shobe, Aisha, and Suma, as they trained to become among Bangladesh’s first women surfers. The film captures the girls navigating family pressure and social judgment, including the threat of underage marriage, a reality that shapes girlhood in Cox’s Bazar far more than most outsiders realize. It was a rare moment of the outside world looking directly at Bangladesh’s surf community, years before the national team ever left the country to compete.
Whether Shagor makes the trip to Japan is still, as of now, undecided. Bangladesh’s surf federation hasn’t confirmed the final roster. The likely picks are down to a handful of names: Shagor, his training partner Manon, and Fatima, one of the team’s rising female surfers. Whoever it ends up being, Shagor says the decision will come down to who gives Bangladesh its best shot. “We want to send our strongest surfer,” he said, “because this is another real chance to represent Bangladesh.”
*Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.
