"Look at you!! Wow incredible," writes Kim Kardashian.
It’s one of the loveliest rags to riches stories in surfing. A poor Tahitian surfer, Raimana Van Bastolaer, raised by his grandparents and who was a bodyboarder thrashing around at a tame black sand beachbreak north of Teahupoo until 1996, now earns his keep as the ultimate celebrity surf coach at the WSL-owned Surf Ranch.
Raimana is a man of early middle age, let’s say forty-nine although his timeless island beauty means he could pass for thirty, and didn’t stand up on a surfboard until he was twenty and the Gotcha Surf Team, which included Brock Little, Rob Machado and Martin Potter, left behind a fleet of boards.
Now, Raimana will surf behind the beginner at the Slater pool, steadying them with his hands, issuing instructions, support, and as the wave moves onto the shallow part of the bank at Surf Ranch will compress their hips into the correct lowered stance before pin-dropping off the wave allowing the learner to enjoy a vision that used to be reserved for a wildly select few.
The supermodel Cindy Crawford, whose career peaked in 1987 when she appeared alongside the other OG supermods Christy Turlington, Linda Evangalista and Naomi Campbell on British Vogue, has previously described Raimana as “the Big Blue Pill. He can get anyone up! Even me!”
Recently, Ivanka Trump, the statuesque forty-two-year-old daughter of Donald and Ivan Trump (RIP), and whom you last saw on these pages when she savaged “violent, manipulating” windsurfers on a Lex Fridman podcast, has, too, fallen under the spell of Raimana during a recent trip to the Kelly Slater Surf Ranch.
In a post that was eagerly gobbled up by her eight million followers, Ivanka Trump posted several rides alongside the Tahitian Pep Pill, describing Raimana as “incomparable.”
“Look at you!! Wow incredible,” writes Ivanka Trump’s bestie Kim Kardashian, with subsequent comments from American patriots echoing the sentiment.
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