Reigning surfing world champion Tyler Wright has revealed she nearly quit the championship tour after her brother Owen Wright was seriously injured during a warm-up surf at Pipeline in Hawaii.
“I was at crossroads a lot of the time because I could have easily said, ‘I’m pulling out of the 2016 season to look after Owen’, and I wouldn’t have had a problem with that, I would have done it,” she said.
Former world-number-three Owen suffered a traumatic brain injury and minor brain bleed after being pummelled by waves at Banzai Pipeline in December 2015, the day before the Pipeline Masters event began.
In his first major interview since the accident, Owen told Australian Story he asked Tyler to stay with him in Hawaii, because he had a feeling “something would happen”.
“I was like, ‘I feel like I’m going really good Tyler, something is gonna happen, I feel it. Don’t know what it is, you’ve got to stay’,” he said.
Three-time world surfing champion Mick Fanning was out in the line-up with Owen that morning.
They both caught a couple of waves, and then sat on their boards waiting for the next set.
“When the next wave came he [Wright] was probably 10 feet in front of me and we both just duck-dived it, and I got rag-dolled and shaken around a fair bit,” Fanning said.
“I looked back and he was 20 feet behind me. And I didn’t really think anything of it, I just thought, ‘oh, maybe he just got stuck in the wrong spot’.”