‘I’ve lived many lifetimes’: surfer Owen Wright’s remarkable journey from brain injury to Olympic glory
Owen Wright and I have been chatting for about an hour when we both know, with resigned inevitability, that we are going to have to talk about the worst day of his life. Our conversation is on Zoom, but even on a video call you can see Wright, a 33-year-old Australian professional surfer, involuntarily stiffen. “It gives me a sore neck,” he says, giving it a little rub. “It doesn’t feel great thinking about it. It’s not clear. It’s patchy. And straight away, that kind of fear and panic comes over me. At the time I felt like things were going wrong. And it’s still like that today.” Wright smiles, but it lapses into a prolonged sigh, “Ohhhh, I don’t know if I’ve particularly dealt with what happened that day.”
So, let’s go there. It was 10 December 2015 and life was good for Wright, who is model-handsome with long blond hair: imagine “Australian surfer” and you’ve got something close. At 25, he was at his peak: earlier in the season, at the Fiji Pro, he had scored backto-back 10s – perfect rides – becoming only the fifth surfer ever to do so. Coming into the final event of the year, at Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii, he had a shot of becoming world champion.
Life off the board was coming together, too. Wright had recently started dating the Australian singer-songwriter Kita Alexander. Early on that December morning, he went out in the water to prepare for the competition that day. “My confidence was stratospheric to the point of tipping into nonchalance,” he writes in his memoir, Against the Water.
What happened next was not that out of the ordinary. As he was paddling out, a huge wave rose up and crashed in front of Wright. He took evasive action, duck-diving under the surface, but not fast or deep enough. The impact felt like a building collapsing on him. He was eventually spat to the surface and then hit by a set of nine more colossal waves. Wright somehow made it back to the beach and staggered back to where he was staying. He fell asleep and woke up in hospital. A doctor looked at Wright’s brain scans and said the damage was comparable to a blast victim in a war zone. It soon became clear he would have to relearn how to walk, even talk. Whether he would ever surf again – at any level – was in doubt.
The real problem, though, was not what happened to Wright that morning in Hawaii. He started surfing aged five and the feeling of being inside a washing machine is a very familiar one to him. When he was seven, he banged his head on a reef, leaving him groggy and with two wounds that required stitches. It also established a lifelong pattern of being fearless, even reckless. I ask Wright how many times he has been concussed as a result of surfing: “I reckon, like, 20 or 30,” he replies, after a pause. “Yeah, the amount of times I’ve had accidents is… extensive.”
Part of the reason we can have such a frank discussion is that Wright has, at least physically, pretty much recovered from being pummelled in Hawaii. He was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and told he would be looking at five to 10 years for a full recovery. But a little over five years after the injury, Wright competed for Australia in surfing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He defied all rational expectations to win a bronze medal and became one of the most heart-warming comeback stories of the Games. Wright is now married to Alexander, who was his carer for months during the early stages of their relationship, and they have a son, Vali, six, and a daughter Rumi, two.
Those are the headlines, but they only hint at what an extreme – and often bizarre – life Wright has lived. Earlier this year he retired from surfing, and his thoroughly entertaining memoir draws a line under the period. “I feel like I’ve lived many lifetimes in the first 30 years,” he says. “If the next part was just doing the school drop, school pick-up, some surf, taking the kids to this and that, supporting my wife, I’d be happy with that. I don’t see the need for me to climb another big mountain.”