It’s called place of skulls. It’s the most terrifying venue in Olympic history

Cries rise from the flotilla of boats carrying spectators and rescue teams as they spot the mountain of water rolling towards them roughly 500 yards off the coast of Tahiti. When it arrives, a thick slab of ocean will suddenly surge into the air and fold over on itself. Then it claps down in a movement so powerful that it sounds like a bomb going off.

“It’s not the time to be like, ‘Oh, God…I don’t know if this is going to work out for me,’" says Jessi Miley-Dyer, a pro surfer and Commissioner for the World Surf League. “You’ve got to paddle into it, then pull your head down and go, ‘Okay, I’m going to make this, and this is going to be the ride of my life.’"

To the uninitiated, the idea of holding the surfing competition of the Paris Olympics 9,800 miles from the French capital might sound odd. There’s no shortage of respectable waves on the Atlantic coast of France. But none of those surfing spots can generate the mix of exhilaration and primal fear that gave Teahupo’o its name in Tahitian: the place of skulls.

Teahuppo’s swell originates from winter storms at the southwestern edge of the Pacific Ocean, near New Zealand. It then travels virtually unimpeded for days across deep waters, gathering momentum and energy, before slamming into Tahiti. The pitch of this collision is amplified by the unique underwater topography of the island’s coastline, which is bordered by an extremely shallow reef that suddenly drops off into the ocean abyss.

Daring to surf Teahupo’o requires a willingness to place yourself at the intersection of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. As the wave curls along the reef, surfers have a window of a few seconds to shoot the gap as Teahupo’o collapses behind them, generating a massive ball of foam that spits them out of the barrel.

“It wasn’t even thought to be surfable, really. In the late ’80s, early ’90s, everyone was like, ‘Can we really do this?’" said Joe Turpel, the NBC commentator known as the voice of international surfing competitions.

Some have paid the ultimate price in their encounters with Teahupo’o. In 2000, Tahitian surfer Brice Taerea attempted to dodge the wave by dipping beneath it with his board–a maneuver known as a “duck dive." The wave was so powerful, however, that it still sucked Taerea in, sending him into the reef and causing neck and spinal injuries that ultimately killed him.

Keala Kennelly, known as the Queen of Teahupo’o for her pioneering rides on the wave, got caught in a relatively small but punishing barrel in 2011 that spun her straight into the razor-sharp reef, carving up the side of her face. She was hospitalized with dozens of stitches.

“Looked like such a fun ride," Kennelly wrote on Facebook at the time, “until it ended badly."

The choice by the Paris organizers to rope in such a remote overseas territory was one of the biggest surprises of this Olympics. The sport is only making its second appearance in the Games, after debuting in Tokyo in 2021, and is turning the event into a virtual tour of the world’s most breathtaking surf meccas. Los Angeles in 2028 will have the entire California shoreline to choose from and Brisbane 2032 has the surfing paradise of Australia’s Gold Coast in its backyard.

But France looked a little further asea, all the way in Polynesia.

The last time an event took place so far from the host city was 1956, when the equestrian events for Melbourne Games were held 9,700 miles away in Stockholm—the reason was Australia’s long quarantine restrictions for horses. Teahupo’o is around 100 miles further from the French Capital. Needless to say, none of the surfers made the 48-hour round trip to Friday night’s Opening Ceremony.

“Surfing in Tahiti: people didn’t expect that," Paris 2024 CEO Tony Estanguet says. “I knew it would get the public talking. But it comes with so many advantages. At this time of year, the most gorgeous wave in the world is right there."

For the surfers who still remember a time when most considered Teahupo’o to be a wave too far, the question of how someone might tackle it became one of the sport’s most tantalizing puzzles.

Not only is it considered the “heaviest wave in the world" for the sheer tonnage of water that briefly hangs in the air as its barrel forms, Teahupo’o is also incredibly fast.

When Laird Hamilton, the legendary big wave surfer, traveled to Tahiti in 2000 to face Teahupo’o for the first time, he relied on a colleague piloting a jet ski to tow him into the wave, matching its velocity. The session, which was captured by a photographer and published on the cover of Surfer magazine under the headline “Oh my God," was a clarion call. Teahupo’o had arrived on the stage of international surfing. The sport would never be the same.

Teahupo’o became a rite of passage for the world’s best surfers and a regular stop for surfing competitions. In 2006, it was pulled from the women’s circuit, in part because the wave was deemed too dangerous for women.

Miley-Dyer, who was among the last women to competitively surf it during that era, pushed to get Teahupo’o reinstated in 2022. For the Olympics, both women and men are paddling into the wave, and posting dazzling scores won’t involve the aerial tricks that surfers use to score points on other, safer waves.

Instead, the path to victory involves starting as deep as possible in the wave’s barrel, a strategy that means overriding your basic survival instincts. It involves paddling into the one wave you might just miss—and miss badly, ending up in its ferocious churn. Once you commit, there’s a nearly vertical take-off that sends the surfer into freefall before catching the bottom of the wave and turning sharply into the tube. Then it’s a race against the giant foam ball to make it out.

“There is an element of go hard or go home," Miley-Dyer said. “That’s how you’re going to win Olympic gold."

Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com