The world watched gobsmacked as the Australian surfing champion managed to fight off a deadly great white shark on live television.

As he was stunningly knocked off his board and dragged beneath the waves, he instinctively punched the beast twice in the back.

“It came up and got stuck in my leg rope,” Fanning explained after he was fished out of the water by rescue crews.

“I instantly just jumped away. It kept coming at my board and I was kicking and screaming. I just saw fins. I didn’t see teeth. I was waiting for the teeth to come at me. I punched it in the back.”

He later added: “I felt like it was dragging me underwater and then my leg rope broke so I started swimming and screaming ... I just can’t believe it, I’m just tripping out.”

It’s the first time a surfer has been attacked by a shark during a world tour event, and we’re unlikely to see Fanning back in the water too soon.

“To walk away from that, I’m just so stoked,” Fanning said.

His mum, Liz Osborne, today spoke of her fear, telling the ABC she “was so scared” that she had lost her son.

“I was so overwhelmed. I just thought when that wave came that he was gone,” she said.

Fanning extraordinarily escaped physically unscathed. However others have not been so lucky, with many killed by the merciless jaws of sharks. But some, all too much too young to die, have lived to tell the tale after losing great hunks of flesh. Here are some of the most haunting.

Sean Pollard

“It had ripped my forearm off and sucked the meat off my bone, like a chicken bone pretty much.” This was the spinechilling way Sean Pollard described the moment he realised he faced the very real prospect of death as he came under a savage attack by two great white sharks.

Mr Pollard shared his experience earlier this year of losing an arm and both his hands when surfing at Kelp Bed Beach, WA, in October.

“The shark came underneath me. I was trying to paddle calmly so I wasn’t splashing around like I was panicking, but once it got directly behind me it charged through the water. Like that’s when it really went in for the kill,” he said.

“It took me. And its eye was right there in front of me. Its eye was the blackest black I’d ever seen, and that’s just a vision that’s, like, burnt into my mind.

“It started shaking its head. Both my arms were in its mouth and it just took me underwater.

“It’s just the hardest thing I’ve ever felt. It was so strong ... and then next thing I popped up and there was just blood everywhere.”

Hunter Treschl

Hunter Treschl was 16 when his arm was ripped off in a horrifying shark attack in the shallow waters of Oak Island Beach in North Carolina.

“We were just playing around in the waves, and I felt a hit on my left calf,” he said.

“I thought it felt like a big fish, and I started moving away. And then the shark bit my arm off.

“That was the first time I saw it, when it was biting up my left arm.”

Despite the loss of his dominant arm, the brave youngster vowed he was determined to “try to fight and live a normal life with the cards I’ve been dealt.”

Bethany Hamilton

Hawaii’s Bethany Hamilton was just a slight 13-year-old when a 4m tiger shark tore off her left arm where she was surfing in 2003.

Her arm was gently dangling in the water as she drifted atop the Kauai waves when “it came, literally, out of the blue”.

“That’s all it took: a split second. I felt a lot of pressure and a couple of lightning fast tugs. Then I watched in shock as the water around me turned bright red. Somehow, I stayed calm. My left arm was gone almost to the armpit, along with a huge crescent-shaped chunk of my red, white and blue surfboard,” Hamilton explained.

Three weeks later, she battled the odds and was back on her board. In 2005, she defied the impact on her balance and won a national surfing title, before going on to win many more in a glittering pro surfing career.

Paul de Gelder

When Paul de Gelder turned to find the powerful whack on his leg was dealt by a bull shark, he immediately started fighting for his life.

“I could see the upper row of its teeth across my leg. Its lip was pulled back and its mouth looked enormous,” Mr de Gelder said of the 2009 attack near Garden Island, NSW.

He began wrestling with the slippery killer before punching it on the nose.

“It started shaking me like a dog would a rag doll. The shark pulled me down under the water, continuing to shake me.

“The second time I went under I could only see bubbles in front of my face.

“I no longer felt any pain. I couldn’t do anything. I was totally helpless.”

And then suddenly, the shark disappeared, but not before leaving Mr de Gelder with horrific injuries. Doctors were forced to amputate his right forearm and leg. After months of struggling to accept his new body, he now acts as a motivational speaker and speaks out in defence of sharks.

Glen Folkard

Glen Folkard recalled spying the “dark shadow” of his ruthless attacker at the end of a dark 7m dark trail of blood after a shark lunged at him.

Surfing at Redhead Beach, near Newcastle, in 2012, Mr Folkard was pulled under water before the bull shark ripped a large chunk of flesh from his thigh.

He said the impact was like being hit by a car.

He then unbelievably leapt back onto his board, screaming, and swam in a frenzy back to shore.

“When I turned around to see where he was and paddle in, I (saw) him and there’s just a blood trail of 20 feet and he was following. He was a dark shadow in the end of the blood trail. He was coming to have a second go.”

Darren Mills

“I was scared. I got it into my head I was going to die from loss of blood,” Darren Mills said, recalling his sheer terror when he was pounced on by a 3m great white shark.

The then 28-year-old was surfing in New Zealand’s Porpoise Bay last year when the predator clamped its jaws around his legs.

“I started punching it on the nose, a sensitive area for a shark, then got hold of its snout and tried to prise it off,” he said. “It must have been on my leg for four seconds but it felt a lot longer.”

Astonishingly, Mr Mills escaped with his leg and said the shark hadn’t “put me off surfing.”

“It was incredibly powerful but I don’t bear a grudge.”

Mathew Lee

In a most recent chilling attack, bodyboarder Mathew Lee, 32, was enjoying his morning ritual in the NSW’s Ballina waters when a suspected 4m great white shark ravaged both his legs on July 2.

Mr Lee was frantically pulled to shore by three men who almost certainly saved his life. They performed CPR while using surfboard leg-ropes as tourniquets to help stem the gushing blood loss from his gaping wounds.

“Lucky he had a full length wetsuit on — that’s probably held his legs together,” one witness said. “But the left leg was a mess.”

Mike Coots

“A surgeon could not have done a better job, it was sliced right in half, like something out of a horror movie.”

This is how survivor Mike Coots remembers the day 18 years ago a powerful tiger shark snatched off his right leg when he was just 17.

The Hawaiian surfer told the ABC the shark latched onto his leg in a “blindsided attack”

“It started shaking me violently back and forth,” he said, as his leg was “perfectly amputated”.

Today, he surfs with a special prosthetic leg, mentors fellow amputees and, extraordinarily, devotes himself to trying to save the species that impaired him.

“I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mr Coots said.

“They predate the dinosaurs and I think they’re in the oceans for a reason.”

Ben Gilliam

No matter what the result, living through a shark attack is an experience no survivor can forget. For Bret Gilliam, watching his diving partner Rod Temple get dragged and ripped to shreds in the depths of the Caribbean 43 years ago is a harrowing memory forever engraved in his mind.

Mr Temple was swooped on by two oceanic whitetip sharks and as Mr Gilliam desperately tried to save him, they plunged further into the great depths of the water.

“With my free hand I blindly punched at the writhing torsos of the animals as they tore great hunks of flesh from my friend in flashes of open jaws and vicious teeth,” he wrote.

“To my horror I saw one shark swallow the remains of Rod’s lower left leg right before my eyes. The other gulped a mouthful of flesh it had torn off.

“I grabbed for his waist harness for a new grip and felt my hand sink into his mutilated torso. There was no harness left to reach for. He had been partially disembowelled.

“The blue water turned horribly turbid with bits of human tissue and blood.
“I watched his lifeless body drift into the abyss with the sharks still hitting him.”

Despite being starved of oxygen, Mr Gilliam miraculously survived. Mr Temple’s body was never recovered.