“I heard a splash behind me, next thing I know I’m entangled with a shark,” said Mick Fanning on The Imperfects podcast as he recounted his 2015 shark attack during the J-Bay Open. “It bumped me. It got stuck in my leg rope. It’s thrashing. I am trying to put my board between me and the shark, then, all of a sudden, I get this whack from the tail straight to the head.”
Nearly a decade since the attack that was streamed live during the WSL event in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, Fanning reflected on the incident and the subsequent emotional fallout with the podcast hosts.
“The weeks afterward was the hardest,” Fanning confided. “It would come back to me in dreams anywhere from 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. I’d wake up kicking the sheets off.”
In the interview, Fanning commended the “courageous” act of fellow competitor Julian Wilson for paddling toward the commotion to help despite Fanning telling him to head for the shore.
Fanning explained how, directly after the attack, it took a while for the gravity to set in.
“Even an hour after, my adrenaline was through the roof,” said Fanning. “I got back to the contest site and I saw the footage. I was like, ‘Whoa I didn’t think it was that big of a shark when I was in the moment. When I saw the size of it…that’s when it all sunk in.”
“It wasn’t until I ran into a friend of mine who’s a wife of one of the surfers on tour,” Fanning continued. “I saw her and…I just broke down. Everything just collapsed. I almost fell down. I realized that could have been it.”
Fanning and friends gathered the next day for a party to break the tension, but the mood turned somber as they continued to negotiate the trauma that he experienced the previous day.
“(The party) was almost like going to your own wake,” said Fanning. “One minute everyone’s laughing, the next minute everyone’s crying. It was actually a really fun party.”
The following day Fanning was getting mobbed by camera crews as word of the attack was making the rounds of international media. Even when he took his seat on the plane leaving South Africa, he couldn’t escape the incident.
“A woman’s reading the paper next to me (on the plane) and she’s like, ‘How crazy is that? The kid almost got eaten by a shark in a surfing contest,’” Fanning recounted. “I looked over and there I was on the front page of the paper and I was just like, ‘Yeah it’s pretty heavy.’ I looked out the window and just started crying. It was a hard one to process.”
Back home in Australia, Fanning was able to find support from other individuals who were coping with similar traumas.
“At that time I hadn’t really had anyone to talk to,” said Fanning. “I spoke to my sport psych guy, spoke to different doctors. It wasn’t until I spoke to a friend who’s in the military. He had a similar thing with a landmine – blew the car up – and he’s like, “The way you look at it is, if you see those signs, it’s going to bring up emotion. It’s almost like when you almost get hit by a car crossing the road. You’ve still got to get on with life and still keep moving.’”
“That’s how I’ve looked at it,” added Fanning. “It was an incident. It doesn’t mean anything. It was just something that happened and I’m very fortunate to get away. But it shouldn’t stop you from going surfing.”
Concluding the shark segment of the podcast, Fanning tells an anecdote about his first surf back after the attack. The news show, 60 Minutes, was joining him to document the moment at a remote beach in Australia when Fanning noticed a fin in the water. He took a closer inspection with a jet ski and returned to report his findings.
“We came in and I’m like, ‘Hey guys I’m not making this up but there’s a shark out there so we might want to wrap this up and go and surf somewhere else,’” said Fanning.
They were able to laugh off the shark encounter and move to a new beach with “crystal blue water” where Fanning did have his first session back.
