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Matahi Drollet is fresh off winning the Tahiti Pro trials with a clutch 10-point ride in the Final. The 25-year-old’s opponent and fellow Teahupo’o local, Eimeo Czermak, also scored a 10-point ride in the sharply contested final. Drollet, however, would ultimately secure the win and a spot in this year’s Championship Tour event with a near-perfect heat score of 19.80/20 (watch the epic battle below).
Tracks correspondent, Ben Mondy, caught up with Matahi last year for an interview that featured in Issue 584. Read the profile-feature below and learn all about the Teahupo’o specialist that will be giving the world’s best (male) surfers pre-event jitters before this year’s Outerknown Tahiti Pro.
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Matahi Drollet: The One and Only
Matahi Drollet is a surfer born into Teahupo’o royalty. Son of an iconic boat driver and younger brother to the legendary Tahitian freesurfer, Manoa. Aged 16, he won the XXL Award for one of the biggest waves ridden at the infamous slab. Since then, he has risen to the apex of the pecking order, mentoring the next generation of Chopes chargers. Thoughtful, patient, but with a showman’s desire to perform, we dive deep into a man that could shape how surfing’s most famous wave is ridden over the next decade.
“I wanted to get a huge one, so I called my brother, Manoa, because I needed the best driver to put me on the best, biggest wave of the day,” Matahi Drollet told Tracks. The day was Friday, August 13, 2021. Two weeks prior, Matahi had dislocated his shoulder exiting an eight-foot barrel at Chopes…on a foil board. We’ll come to that later.
The swell was huge. As big, if not bigger, than the Code Red swell of 2011, the benchmark for maxing Teahupo’o. On that swell, Matahi, then aged 13, had watched the carnage from his father’s famous yellow boat in the channel.
This day though he was the first one out, and beelined it straight to the outside, without even checking the waves from the channel. Shortly after he saw the biggest wave of his life at his local break rear up in the deep water. As the furthest ski inside, Manoa pressed the throttle knowing Matahi was ready. However, fellow young gun Kauli Vaast had the same idea and dropped in down the line. The Drollets, gracefully, pulled out and let him have it.
“Manoa said, ‘Okay, forget that…let’s just wait for the biggest bomb,’” recalls Matahi. “Kauli’s wave came at 9am. I waited nine hours, until we saw a wave the same size or bigger, and I knew it was my wave. So did Manoa.”
About 20 years before, Matahi was playing on the beach with his bodyboard, as he did almost every day. This time though his dad showed up with a surfboard. “I was bummed, but I had no choice but to ride it,” he said. “I remember my brother came out and pushed me on a wave and it all started from there.”
Matahi Drollet grew up at Mataiea, a tiny Tahitian beach village just around the corner from the surfing hub of Papara. His father, Bjarn, who learned to surf in Hawaii after attending boarding school there, had moved his family of five children to Mataiea from capital Papeete in the late 80s.
Bjarn was the first Tahitian to recognise the surf tourism potential and started a boat business driving surfers and photographers to the surrounding reef breaks, including Teahupo’o. A fair proportion of the iconic images of the wave you have seen over the last decades have been taken from his boat.
“I have two brothers and two sisters. Manoa is the eldest, and 20 years older than me,” explains Matahi. “I would go around to his house at Papara and see Kelly Slater, or Andy and Bruce. I didn’t know they were superstars, because Manoa never acted any differently around them.”
In the 2000s Manoa was known universally as the best Teahupo’o surfer of all time. He’d won the Trials of the Billabong Pro Teahupo’o in 2005 and 2007 and finished runner up in the CT event in 2008. “Manoa was the best surfer with the best style,” Michel Bourez told Tracks.
“From two-foot to 20 he was untouchable.”
During that time Manoa’s tow partner was Dylan Longbottom. Dylan had known Matahi since he was in nappies and made his first surfboard.To this day he provides all his paddle and tow boards.
After ditching the lid, Matahi kept surfing and from a young age started to exhibit both the natural talent and fearlessness of his elder brother. “I was surfing the outer reef out the back of Papara, and it was solid,” recalls Bourez.
“Matahi was around 12 and out on this old board with no leash, smiling as usual. A bigger set came, and he looked at me, and the cheeky bastard asked if I was going. It was probably the first time I saw the potential he had.”
In 2012, Bjarn moved the Drollets from Mataiea to Teahupo’o. Matahi’s grandmother already had a house up the reef from the break that was accessible only by boat. The family would spend holidays and weekend breaks at the waterfront house. As they were catching their own food and playing in the sheltered lagoon, they could hear, and feel, surfing’s most infamous break thundering in the distance. Apart from the heritage link, the move also made sense for his sister Cindy, who after studying in France, had come back to run the family boat business. With Teahupo’o now universally known, it was a logical base.
Matahi boarded at his old school during the week and would come to the village at the end of the road for the weekend. An A-grade student he’d ensure that all his homework was done so the weekend was completely free to surf.
“He was a big joker at school, the real class clown,” said his sister Cindy. “He’s lucky he is really smart and able to learn anything by reading or listening just once. Plus, he had Papa on his case, who always made school a big priority.”
In those early years, Matahi’s father and brother didn’t allow him to surf Teahupo’o. He would, however, stay in the boat and closely watch the professionals who had hired Bjarn as a driver. In a further Karate Kid style education, Raimana Van Bastolaer was a close family friend. Matahi would stay with him during each school holiday and spend hours on the ski with him learning the art of driving. It was inevitable that Matahi would surf the wave. Few surfers though have been better prepared for their first shot.
“I remember one of the first times I shot Matahi when he first moved here,” says photographer Ben Thouard . His family let him drive a little dingy boat and he was often surfing alone or with his mates. He would spend every day out there, no matter what the conditions. The knowledge he has already amassed at that wave is incredible.”
“At 14 I had my first tow session at Chopes,” recalls Matahi. “It was only 10-12 feet, but I scored a few big barrels, and I knew from then on I wasn’t going to miss a swell. I was going to dedicate my life to the wave.”
Fast forward two years later and Matahi was ready for anything that Chopes could throw at him.When a huge swell appeared on the charts, he called his brother to see if he would tow him, for their first time as a team. Manoa had done his time surfing the wave, but there was still no better driver. However, just a few days before the swell’s arrival the pair heard the lineup was to be closed for the film shoot.
The shoot was for ‘Point Break 2’. Surfers like Laurie Towner, Dylan Longbottom, and Bruce Irons had been employed as stunt doubles and a full Hollywood production had arrived in time for the biggest and cleanest swell in years.
Lawrie Towner was hurt early in the morning and there was some pressure on the locals not to continue to surf.Yet the Drollets had other ideas. “Manoa said, ‘That’s not the way we do it round here.’ I sat way out outside with my brother, and we just stayed away from it all,” says Matahi. “We surfed for seven hours and scored some of the best waves of my life including that huge one late in the day.”
“That huge one” was easily the biggest wave caught during the biggest swell since the Code Red session in 2011. It would earn Matahi the XXL Biggest Wave Award, making him the youngest ever winner. In terms of scene-stealing, it’s up there with Christopher Walken’s ‘father’s gold watch’ performance effort in ‘Pulp Fiction’.
“I was just following my brother. In tow surfing the driver does 70 percent of the work,” says Matahi simply. “We’d only ever had three surfs together. My first ever on a surfboard. Then, the first time I paddled Chopes, and that day. However, I’ve watched hours of his videos and studied his approach. He’s an inspiration.”
The wave generated huge exposure, which helped him secure sponsors. While The wave generated huge exposure, which harboured plans to study at University and be either a chef or a pilot after he graduated, he soon realised he could make a life, and a living, by surfing the wave closest to his house.
“What makes Matahi different is his capacity to learn quickly and to stay quiet,” says Bourez. “A lot of kids like to talk, but he likes to listen. That Point Break wave proved that, and it was just the start.”
Drollet’s capacity to listen and learn is perhaps the key to him becoming the defining surfer, leading light, and mentor of his generation at Teahupo’o. Photographer Thouard recalls how they both started foilboarding together and within weeks Drollet was supremely confident and already planning how to get tubed at Teahupo’o.
Within a few years, he would execute that plan, providing another Chopes first. While he dislocated his shoulder exiting the barrel at Mach speed, it showed where foilboarding is headed. Like his studies, his surfing, or his guitar playing, everything seems to come effortlessly to the Tahitian.
Looking to find a few chinks in his personality armour, I went back to his sister Cindy. In my experience elder sisters tend to be razor-sharp at highlighting any character flaws. “I’m afraid I can’t help,”laughedCindy.“ In Tahitian, ‘Matahi’ means ‘the one and only’ and he truly is. In our big family we love to say that Matahi is the best version of all of us and took only the best part in each of us.”
After that Point Break swell Matahi doubled down on his commitment to paddling Teahupo’o. Always a skinny kid, he was a late developer physically and didn’t bulk up until later in his teens. The added size helped as he climbed up the pecking order.
“There’s plenty of room for progression at Chopes, especially paddling bigger waves,” he said. “I want to just keep having fun and aim to get the biggest and best waves I can. Everything in my life comes back to that.”
Matahi’s house is now the HQ for all the best big wave surfers in Tahiti. On every swell, the oceanside bungalow transforms into a defacto clubhouse, Jet Ski maintenance centre, safe harbour and doss house. All the best Tahitian surfers, and many of the planet’s most talented chargers, make a beeline for the waterfront pad when Teahupo’o turns on.
On the Black Friday swell, having ridden his one wave just 20 minutes before dark, Matahi returned to find his house flooded by the swell. Sitting out the back the whole day he hadn’t registered the force or scale of the swell; the first to ever swamp his house.
“It was devastating coming home to see my house destroyed,” he says. “But my family was safe, my friends in the water were safe and that’s all that matters,” before adding, almost as an afterthought, “and I rode the biggest barrel of my life.”
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