The LAST WAVE

When Aussie surf star Owen Wright suffered concussion and a brain haemorrhage in 2015, few people thought he’d surf again, let alone win an Olympic medal. And he might not have if his family hadn’t helped him through.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

They start out like any other day – the days that change everything. It was December 10, 2015. Owen Wright was in Hawaii. It was a corker of a blue-sky island morning and the waves rolling in at Pipeline were immense – as high as he’d ever seen there. He had a couple of hours before the competition, and Owen decided to paddle out and catch a few early ones, get into his groove. He caught a “cracking wave, straight off the bat,” rode the barrel like a champion and was feeling “stratospheric, invincible”. A couple of rides like that in competition and he could take out the World Surfing League title.

Then his luck changed.

Owen turned in the channel and was paddling back out through the breakers when a 15-foot-high wall of water landed on top of him with the force of a falling building. He had maybe 20 seconds to catch his breath in the wave’s foamy aftermath, but this was just the first of a 10-wave set, and he was slammed by every one of them.

“They knocked me senseless,” he says.

As white as a ghost, dazed and shaking, the young Aussie surfer dragged himself back up the beach to his room at Rip Curl House, where he collapsed on his bed and phoned his girlfriend of three months, Kita Alexander.

“He was slurring his words,” she says, “and just kept repeating the same thing, over and over, ‘I got flogged’.”

Then the phone fell to the floor and Owen lost consciousness.

He was rushed to hospital where the doctors realised he had suffered a massive concussion and a brain haemorrhage. The injuries would affect his mobility, his memory and his ability to speak.

“I was so messed up,” he says, “and the doctors were saying I could be that way for years.”