Surf world left reeling after big-wave surfer’s near-fatal wipeout

“That was a bad one…Eighteen staples in the back of my head, 15 down my throat, five in my cheekbone.”

Kelly Slater describes the big-wave surfer and, for a while there unbeatable board paddler, Jamie Mitchell as “one of the greatest unknown sportsmen of all time.”

Jamie Mitchell, who is forty-eight, ain’t afraid to look down the steepest run and send it, as they say, although this has often been to the detriment of his physical well-being. 

Yesterday, Mitchell, eating up an early season North Shore swell, wore his 9’10” rhino chaser in the face, almost slicing open one of the famous and very important jugular veins. 

As you know, cut one of the six open and, let’s just say, the morbidity rate is considerable. 

“I had a bit of a rough morning,” Jamie Mitchell says. “ I got pretty banged up. Something like 18 staples in the back of my head, 15 stitches down in my throat, five in my cheekbone, and another couple. But I’m going to be okay. It’s interesting when things go wrong when you least expect it.”

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Jamie Mitchell ain’t no stranger to the near-fatal wipeout biz.

Near-fatal wipeout here at Jaws “It shows how close you are to dying.”

See, also,  see here, and here, here, and yeah here.

Getting banged up isn’t always to a man’s physical detriment. It can also rewire the brain in an unpleasant way.

A few years back, I interviewed Jamie Mitchell about the long-term effects of catastrophic wipeouts and subsequent depressive episodes.

Re: the Jaws wipeout he said,

“I felt like I needed to post about it, it was a gut feeling. Could it be an important issue in the future? With my little experience, then Albee in the Jaws contest, he’s had some real tough times as well, he’s still dealing with it and then I was speaking to Kohl Christenson about it, then Billy Kemper was nearly knocked out in Morocco. You know, it made me wonder. When will we, as surfers, look at concussion and what it’s doing to us.” 

And the danger ain’t just in big waves. 

“How many times in small waves have you fallen the wrong way and you whiplash your head and you get that flash or the stars? It happens a lot. I don’t think we realise that these concussions or mini-concussions maybe add up over your life of surfing. I don’t get depressed a lot, there’s always been highs and lows, but I do tend to get little depressive thoughts more than ever. Is there a correlation to wiping out?” 

Jamie’s got an open mind on the subject. Maybe depression isn’t a side-effect of wipeouts but part of the game of chasing big waves. 

“You go through adrenalin highs chasing swells then you go through an adrenalin dump. If it’s a good consistent season, and you’re surfing big waves twice a month, sometimes I’ll find myself being a little bummed out. And I do feel like it’s happening more and more. But is it just life? Getting older? It’s an issue the NFL is finding out about. It might be nice to have a study on it, get surfers who’ve been concussed tested or at least get people talking about it. Look at what happened to Owen? Look at what happened to Dusty? All those guys that hit their heads hard at Pipe? I betcha they don’t feel a hundred percent. They may never feel one hundred percent.”

Jamie thinks back to his own belting at Jaws. 

“After that wipeout I wasn’t really coherent. I wasn’t feeling good. I wasn’t seeing straight. But I was frantically looking for my escort boat to get another board. Reflecting on that, dude, that should’ve been it for me. I got lucky. I had another bad wipeout because I was already concussed and fell off on a wave I should’ve made. The photo made me reflect on that and if someone sees my post, sees that I admit I shouldn’t have gone back out, but it’ll make others think more before they do it again.”