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 back-to-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.”
Earl Woods, Richard Williams… to the ranks of sports parents with dubious methods but hard-to-argue-with results, we can now add Rob Wright. Wright senior was a plumber in Culburra Beach on the New South Wales coast, who would start work at 3am so he could clock off early to go surfing. He and his wife Fiona had five children: three boys (Tim, Owen and Mikey) and two girls (Kirby and Tyler). All of them would become highly skilled surfers: besides Owen, Tyler is a two-time women’s world champion and is set to compete at the 2024 Olympics. Mikey, who has a sensational mullet, is also a pro and went modestly viral in 2021 when he was filming the surf in Hawaii and saw a woman struggling. He dropped his phone, jumped a fence and rescued her, captioning the Instagram video: “Hold my beer.”
Rob Wright believed there was no shortage of great surfers, but very few great competitors. And he set about drilling his children: they had no TV and no toys; mornings would start with a family kung-fu session, sometimes at 4.30am. They ate plain vegetarian food, served with no sauce or seasoning, and travelled to surf competitions around Australia on a school minibus. That last detail reminded me of Richard Williams, the rambunctious father of Venus and Serena, whose eccentricities were showcased in the film King Richard, starring Will Smith. Wright laughs, “Watching that Williams sisters movie was kind of triggering.”
The hothousing was intense, but the results were incontestable. Owen Wright was unbeatable as a child in Australia and left school aged 15 to turn pro. In 2009, when he was 19, he beat the surfing legend Kelly Slater twice in competitions, the second time derailing the American’s run to a 10th world title. “Owen’s tough,” said Slater around this time. “There really are no weak points to his surfing.”
Behind the scenes, though, Wright was struggling with the transition into adulthood. He began to find his father’s attention overbearing and he moved in with his brother Tim on Australia’s Gold Coast. He stayed out too late, drank too much and, most mind-blowing of all, discovered chicken parmigiana. But his surfing results were suffering and a pattern was emerging: Wright could live and train with his father and win; or he could go it alone.
In Against the Water, Wright makes it clear that he was his father’s chosen project. How do his siblings feel about that? “I don’t know if they particularly see the favouritism as a positive,” he says, with a broad grin. “The attention was never that great. I was also the one who got up at the crack of dawn and trained and all the rest of it. They were more than happy to pass on that!”
Wright obviously has mixed feelings about his father’s role in his success. The situation is made more complicated by recent developments: in 2012, his mother and father split up; then, in recent years, his father was diagnosed with dementia, which has gradually but relentlessly erased his memory. Wright now lives with his father and cares for him, in Lennox Head, New South Wales. “It’s really cool to be able to be here for him while he’s in a battle,” says Wright. “Especially after so many battles I’ve been through that he’s been there for.”
He goes silent for a few moments. “My dad did so many things that clearly got great results,” he says. “That relationship was the reason I surfed, it was the reason I pushed, it was the reason I rebelled, it was the reason I pushed again. It’s part of the reason I’ve retired. And it’s part of the reason I made it back out of the head injury.”
Wright has been retired from professional surfing for a few months when we speak and he still seems a bit bemused by the concept. On the wall behind him is a photograph of him surfing: he is a tiny figure sneaking out from an enormous wave curling over him. I ask if the picture is particularly meaningful and he shrugs. “That’s off Thirroul [in Australia] in 2015 when I was chasing lots of big monsters like that,” he replies. “I was actually given that by Kita. Back then I never had a single trophy or a single photo anywhere ever. So when she gave it to me I was like, ‘This is not coming out of the garage!’ But now I don’t mind looking at it.”
The Olympic medal has been a major factor in providing closure for Wright. The result – in front of surfing’s biggest ever TV audience – was a triumph of will over common sense: proof, as his father said, that there are plenty of great surfers, but great competitors are something rarer. “Getting the bronze, it felt like when you finally reach that light at the end of the tunnel,” says Wright. “I felt like I touched it.”
Wright’s legacy in surfing, however, is that there is much greater awareness now of the potential for brain injuries. Helmets are more widely used and in 2022 the World Surf League adopted a concussion protocol: at the start of the season, athletes have a test to establish their concussion baseline; if they take a knock to the head, they are not allowed to compete until they return to the pre-season baseline. “Essentially, my accident didn’t need to happen,” says Wright. “But it did. And then from that, it’s changed the perspective of every surfer behind on head injuries and awareness of them. So there’s a positive that’s come out of it.”
But there are confusing parts to Wright’s new life. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t surf, but since his retirement he has started to ask himself some questions: was he following his own ambition? Or his father’s? “I still surf a lot, but I don’t go for big waves any more, which is so different, because I was so used to charging and challenging at the top of my sport,” he says. “It makes me reflect a little bit: ‘Was I just pushed? Or did I want that?’ I think maybe a bit of both. But I’ve definitely noticed stepping out of that, and with my dad’s illness, that I’m not as motivated. I’m not as… entertained.”
These questions have a fresh resonance as Vali, Wright’s six-year-old son, is mad keen on surfing. Earlier this year, he entered his first competition, Board Riders. “He loves it, he wants to do it,” says Wright. “So we go out in the heat, the waves are pretty big, and I push him on to a few big waves. He takes a big wipeout, you see the fear in his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but a couple of days later, he comes to me crying and he’s like, ‘Dad, those waves, they were too big!’”
Wright shakes his head. “I was like, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ And so I look at my wife and I’m thinking, ‘The apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree, has it?’ Then my son looks up at me and goes, ‘It’s OK, Dad. I know you’re just trying to get me to win.’” Wright looks a little bashful: “As a dad you get carried away out there, too. You try and get him the best wave, but really they don’t need that best wave. They are just out there to have some fun.”
Against the Water: A Surfing Champion’s Inspirational Journey to Olympic Glory by Owen Wright (Simon & Schuster, £10.99) is published on 9 November
