‘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 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