Bullish sale for down-and-out former world title contender.

The one-time world title contender and Olympic bronze medallist Owen Wright, who was dumped from the world tour one month ago following a series of shock results, has achieved redemption of sorts after selling one of his luxury Byron Bay villas for $6.5 million. 

(The Big O was made real sad by the mid-tour cull, telling the Lipped podcast “It failed the first time and it’s failing again. I’d love for it to never happen again in the future… I don’t know how it’s gone ahead. Every time it gets brought up it gets brushed under the carpet.”)

A little over three years ago, Owen paid a pretty wild $5.1 million for an unremarkable beach shack at 2 Daniels Street, a few hundred metres from The Pass in Australia’s Bryon Bay. 

It wasn’t Owen’s first property play; he’s been buying and selling up and down the coast for the last decade. 

You’ll remember the $1.6 million house at Lennox Head with its indoor swimming pool that meandered through the living room,  the Federation-style house in Byron Bay (a little under a million), the beachfront townhouse at Thirroul (675,000) and the gorgeous mountain-top hideaway (bought for 750k, sold for a million).

Owen, of course, didn’t see a charming wooden home he might squeeze his little family into post-tour, he saw…land, half-an-acre of prime Byron Bay dirt right in the middle of the joint’s biggest ever boom. 

Owen, along with developer Burke Urban, built four luxury villas, keeping one apiece, and put the other two on the market. 

A few days ago, the first of ‘em sold for six-and-a-half mill, a wild result given the brittle housing market in Byron, a shire ravaged by flood and teetering on the biggest property collapse Australia has ever seen.

Stroll through 2  Daniels St, here, buy the other one if you got the change. 

Clarity.

But you are certainly aware, if not out-righted opinionated upon, the “trans people in sport” conversation dominating professional sport. A mere theoretical in our surfing world until a short few weeks ago when Sasha Jane Lowerson smashed her competition to become the first surfer to win both men’s and women’s after a dominant performance at the Western Australian longboarding championship.

Inspiring to many but confusing to others.

Is it fair for those born male to switch and smash females in sport?

Is it proper?

The debate roiled with photographer Peter King declaring “stay out of women’s sports” and the world’s greatest surfer, Kelly Slater, positing that trans athletes should be given their own category.

Well, Lia Thomas, who became the first trans athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship, in swimming, spoke out for the first time just hours ago after declining interviews for months. In the fading light of Lowerson’s glory.

Thomas told ESPN exclusively:

The biggest misconception, I think, is the reason I transitioned. People will say, ‘Oh, she just transitioned so she would have an advantage, so she could win.’ I transitioned to be happy, to be true to myself.

Trans women competing in women’s sports does not threaten women’s sports as a whole. Trans women are a very small minority of all athletes. The NCAA rules regarding trans women competing in women’s sports have been around for 10-plus years. And we haven’t seen any massive wave of trans women dominating.

If you say, like, you can compete, but you can’t score or you’re in an extra lane nine, that’s very othering towards trans people. And it is not offering them the same level of respect and opportunity to play and to compete.

It’s no different than a cis woman taking a spot on a travel team or a scholarship. It’s a part of athletics, where people are competing against each other. It’s not taking away opportunities from cis women, really. Trans women are women, so it’s still a woman who is getting that scholarship or that opportunity.

I very much wanted to ask Lowerson these questions, though was rebuffed, and appreciate Thomas’s clarity but what do you think? Does it assuage your toxic wonderings?

Do you feel those who swam, or surfed, against felt non-dominated?

How then can we then measure waves in German male lower legs?

More questions than answers but I’m, hopefully, discovering on essential quest.

Troubling.

Yesterday found me in quite a state. There I was, in Munich’s perfectly utilitarian flughafen, lightly jet-lagged and tragically without sunglasses. I had, hours earlier, lost my favorite pair of Garrett Leight’s at ballet rehearsal along with my wig and hat. Those were later found, in a pile, just in time for a fine performance, but sunglasses gone and no time to acquire new before flight.

What to do?

Duty free sunglass shopping is rife with potential impulse disaster. With display Tom Fords featuring bent arms that slip right off the bridge of nose or garish Guccis that feel right in the moment but do not reflect the personal brand outdoors.

Well, as luck, or fate, would have it, I stumbled upon a pair of Le Specs while almost falling into that classic Ray Ban Wayfarer trap. They were inexpensive but stylish-adjacent, did not broadcast anything good nor bad and would do perfectly for the quest I was about to undertake.

The German male’s lower leg has haunted me, you see, since it had been discovered as the perfect tool in measuring wave height. Kept me up at night. For decades upon decades, our kind has stumbled over the most basic task. How big are the swells we ride? Shall me gauge in Hawaiian? Meters? Stathams? The World Surf League’s forecasting tool Surfline has made matters that much worse by introducing utter absurdity into what should be neatly scientific.

But then German Sebastian Steudtner broke the official world record for “largest wave ever” and a crack team of scientists stumbled upon the German male’s lower leg as the perfect calibrating tool.

I lay awake in bed, fevered, pondering, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. If the holy grail of wave measurement is hiding in plain sight, in Germany, what else might be there?

After six days, I could take no more, bid my beautiful family auf wiedersehen and booked travel to Deutschland for this most important crusade. And, now, with sunglasses, I am ready to see great and concealed truths that will allow our beloved surfing to reach heretofore unknown states of bliss.

Outside of Germany, things are bad, for our surf industry, and getting worse. In wild protest over its state, and possible lack of waves at the G-Land Pro, a Florida man walked into a local surf shop and made a mess on the floor.

According to the Treasure Island Police Department, Gary Peter Bush, 69, walked into the Surf Style shop, located at 10701 Gulf Blvd., exposed his genitalia and proceeded to defecate on the floor near the dressing room.

Witnesses told police Bush wiped himself with a shirt belonging to the store, creating a biohazard out of the top.

Bush was arrested later in the day after being recognized by the store manager.

According to the arrest report, Bush told officers, “I was at the store earlier to get clothes. I returned to the store to get more clothes. I bought an outfit.”

Troubling.

My next stop, anyhow, shall be the Black Forest where fables spring from the ground.

“That was heavy,” says Nathan Florence.

A couple of days back, Teahupoo was big, skis and boats everywhere, drivers’ faces wet with spray and sweat as they manoeuvred photographers into position to shoot the wave’s extravagant barrel in a game of potentially fatal choreography.

Pretty rare for a boat to go over, or lose a passenger, especially in the hands of the experienced drivers who work the two-lever steering wheels, forever treading an ultra-fine line between deep water and the slightest incline of reef that’ll drag ‘em back into the hole.

In the incident below, Ted Grambeau, possibly the best, definitely the sweetest, surf photographer ever to draw breath, and Chris Bryan, the high-def video gun for hire, for whom the phone tolls every time a studio wants the finest in surf-cinematic vision, are tossed from their vessel, along with their lunch baguette, only seconds after recording an epic ride.

 

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The Tahitian driver is catlike in a scenario that would have most leaving wet web stains on the front of their red bunny pyjamas.