The 115%: Athletes, faith, and the fragile deal with God

Why the 100% versus 115% debate is more complicated than either believers or skeptics want to admit.

Photo courtesy of the WSL

The beach smelled like fried sausage and sunscreen, a bad mix that clung to your clothes the way salt does after a long paddle. Onshore wind whipped flags into submission.

It's May on the Gold Coast. You'd expect perfectly tempered weather - the kind that makes people want to wear less clothes and more skin - but this morning, too early for my usual daily routine, the air had a sharp bite. Hoodies are zipped high, coffee cups dominate the press rooms, and groms wrapped in towels while their parents check heat sheets on made-in-China iPhones.

The lineup wasn't a pretty sight either. Wind-chopped and messy, the kind of conditions where you'd think twice before throwing anything too ambitious. Yet from the beach, you could hear it - the crowd's sudden inhale as Toledo paddled into a section that didn't look like it wanted to cooperate. He squared up anyway - one pump, two, before he launches.

With a success rate of what feels like north of 90% he lands an air reverse that looked like gravity had briefly signed a non-compete clause.

He screams. Then raises both arms skyward. Not toward the crowd, or the 8k-a-pop tele lens.

Straight up to the sky. God first.

And that's the part that sticks (apart from the landing). Fingers tracing the sign of the cross, head tilted back as if waiting for an answer. It wasn't for optics. It was all impulsive, and it yanked me straight into a question I have been wrestling with for years: what does it mean to play, fight, sweat, and bleed with God on your team sheet?

The 100% vs. the 115%

Here's the math as I see it:

I was raised on brutal arithmetic. Put in 100% effort, maybe you get 100% results - if the market doesn't tank, if the ref doesn't blow the call, if your boss doesn't secretly hate you. It's a fragile compact, and it doesn't take much to short-circuit.

But watch Brazil's surfing generation - the "Brazilian Storm" of Medina, Ferreira, Toledo - and you realize they're not playing by the same algebra.

Without a doubt, they are professionals, and surfing has come a long way in terms of the legitimacy of athletes. They train, they diet, they take care of their recovery, and most tour surfers have a team that tweaks efforts based on performance metrics. But hovering over all of that is the 115% - the invisible dividend they believe comes from God.

Is it mental trickery? Partly. Sports psychologists talk about "externalizing pressure" - the idea that if the outcome belongs to God, then failure isn't proof that you're worthless.

It's a way of shifting the burden of performance from the individual to a higher power, allowing the athlete to focus on their efforts rather than the potential outcomes.

It's just… part of the plan. Less burden. More bandwidth to swing for the impossible.

That's why you see Italo Ferreira, in the final minutes of the Olympic gold-medal heat, paddling like a man possessed, blowing past exhaustion.

Photo courtesy of the Olympic Games

Because he wasn't paddling alone, and part of me envies that, because I don't know, perhaps, I'll never know what it feels like to split the bill with God.

For me, sport is sweat and statistics. Effort in, result out. If the wave shuts down, that's physics. If the market collapses, that's capitalism. It’s not some celestial fine print or invisible partner picking up the slack.

But faith rewrites these terms. A blown knee becomes a test. A loss, a lesson and a win, a blessing.