Brave Surfer who lost arm in Gaza War to chase gold at World Championships

"If I had to, I would go out another thousand times to fight for the country without thinking twice."

It ain’t easy defending y’turf from homicidal religious zealots, all of ’em armed to the teeth, and none of ’em noted for giving mercy to their enemy.

The surfer Tamir Dudi knows.

He’s already survived the worst day of his life twice: once in a Gaza tunnel-fight where three grenades landed near him and a bullet banged into his leg, and then on an operating table in Austria, where he asked a surgeon to take the arm the war had already destroyed.

Dudi is twenty-six now and the former IDF lieutenant is training toward making the podium at the world adaptive surfing championship in California this November.

Dudi grew up surfing the pretty little beaches around Tel Aviv, then mostly stopped once life intervened, a pre-military prep program at 18, then the army, then a slot in Nahal Brigade’s reconnaissance unit. He was waiting to start a company commanders’ course when October 7 hit. His unit was rushed to the communities ringing Gaza, into fighting around Sha’ar HaNegev and Mefalsim, and into the bloody work of pulling wounded survivors out of the Nova festival grounds, the same massacre celebrated by prominent surfers and celebs in the West.

“I asked the soldiers that whoever was afraid should raise his hand,” he recalled to Ynet’s Shlomi Aharoni. “I didn’t wait for an answer. I told them this wasn’t the time to be afraid. This was the time to save lives.”

Three months later, on January 16, 2024, his unit was fighting in Jabaliya when gunmen did their little Jacks-in-the-box out of a tunnel shaft and tried to ambush them.

“Three fragmentation grenades were thrown at me and I was shot in the leg. I was lying on the ground and saw that my whole body was torn apart, but luckily my team pulled me back and saved my life.”

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A helicopter got him to Hadassah Ein Kerem in Jerusalem and from there began a punishing circuit of operating rooms in Israel, the U.S., and Austria, all up seventeen times under the surgeon’s knife.

“I had severe nerve damage in my leg and arm and understood that I would never return to full function,” he said. “I went through an emotional and physical roller coaster knowing that I had lost my independence.”

For eighteen months, doctors kept trying to salvage both the leg and the arm. Dudi , meanwhile, kept looking for a reason to get through it.

“After a year and a half of hospitalisations, releases and attempts to save my left leg and right arm, I looked for something that would comfort me, something that would give me hope again.”

So he called a pal who taught surfing and asked, bluntly, what it would take to get him back in the water.

“The answer I got was: ‘You’re nowhere near it,'” Dudi said.

By that point his right arm was dead weight, paralysed and in constant pain, with doctors telling him there was no real chance it would ever work again.

Dudi figured, screw it, cut it off.

“I flew to Austria for the amputation. The doctor there told me, ‘You need courage.’ It was done on September 30, the eve of Yom Kippur. I woke up from the amputation with my whole family outside and I was smiling. I believed things would be okay and that I would find a way to get somewhere good.”

Losing the arm made him more determined to surf, not less. He went straight to a Tel Aviv beach and tried to stand on a board with one arm, which turned out to be about as hard as it sounds. Dudi could barely balance, let alone paddle.

“I tried again and again and saw that it was getting better,” he said. “I managed to do it, barely, far from where I needed to be, but there was a direction… I learned to love my body again.”

The real turning point came when he found Surf Park TLV and its wave pool, where he could rack up reps that the ocean wouldn’t reliably give him.

“When I arrived for the first time, I decided that I wasn’t surrendering to any limitation and that I was going back to surfing,” he said.

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A coach there, Daniel Sigura, saw something in him early. “You have the potential to go very far, you just have to keep at it,” Dudi remembers him saying.

Three or four sessions a week became the spine of his new life, eventually leading him to a training camp in California.

“There are endless falls and the question of whether to get up in the morning and why,” he said. “Surfing is a great reason to start the day. The water is healing for me, and after I nearly lost my life, I’m entering this journey with everything I have and with maximum focus.”

Five months into his training, the coaches around Dudi stopped treating him like a rehab case and started treating him like a contender, this in a sport, adaptive surfing, that hasn’t yet made it into the Paralympics.

Billabong and the equipment company Ultra Wave have since signed on as sponsors.

Going into the world championship, Dudi isn’t pretending the field is easy, but he’s not lowering the bar much either.

“If I had to, I would go out another thousand times to fight for the country without thinking twice,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be world champion in November, but I want to stand on the podium. To know that I won.”