Red Bull.com

Born and raised in Tahiti, Michel Bourez is France’s number one surfer. He’s been in demand ever since he became the first Tahitian to beat the Hawaiians on their own turf with victory in the 2008 Reef Hawaiian Pro. It’s a six-star event on the WQS series and as such the win made Bourez eligible for the elite tour.

In 2009, the Spartan finished the second-highest rookie on the tour and in 2010 he took his place among the 44 best surfers in the world in the ASP world tour and claimed a career-best result at the Rip Curl Pro Search in Puerto Rico. His aim is to break into the top five in the next five years, and by the time he’s 29, he expects to be champion.

You wouldn’t want to stand in his way. When other surfers talk about him, they use words like “bulldozer” and “brick shithouse”. He’s the same height as Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning has a couple of centimetres on him, but he carries an extra three to four kilos in sheer muscle. Bourez himself says his biggest asset is his raw power, but he is also supremely agile and pulls off the trickiest moves with fluidity and dynamism.

And the bad news for his competitors is he’s spent the off-season practising. “I’ve been training for the last two months,” he says. “I flew to Austria in January for a week of physical and mental training and then I went to Australia for Red Bull Project Air, to work on my aerials at a camp with Mick Fanning, Jordy Smith, Tim Boal and Julian Wilson.

“That gave me the chance to see how I measured up against the best in the world. Now I am physically and mentally ready for whatever the season can throw at me.”