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At 21, Joel was paralysed below the waist by freak surf. At 43, he’s a world champ
Joel Taylor was a promising young bodyboarder until a rogue wave left him paraplegic. He didn’t get back into the surf for nearly two decades. Now he’s the para surfing champion of the world.
By Tim Elliott
After his accident, “I didn’t respond well,” says Taylor (pictured in Byron Bay). “I’d lost everything I’d ever wanted. I wanted to die.”Credit: Paul Harris
Pipeline, the famed surf break on the North Shore of O’ahu, in Hawaii, is one of the world’s most dangerous waves. Swells march vast distances through deep water in the North Pacific, collecting energy as they go, before colliding at speed with a series of shallow reefs off Ehukai Beach. The reefs are made of limestone, formed tens of thousands of years ago, that are as hard as concrete, riven with caves and underwater canyons and studded in parts with coral heads that “stick up”, as filmmaker Bruce Brown put it, like “overgrown railroad spikes”. Wiping out here can be lethal: a surfer might get caught in a cave, knocked unconscious on the reef, or drown under the weight of the whitewater. The crowd further complicates matters, with scores of the world’s best surfers, including aggressive locals, jockeying for position on any given day. It’s thought that dozens of surfers have died since Pipeline was first recorded as ridden in 1961, with many more critically injured.
On December 7, 2001, professional bodyboarder Joel Taylor paddled out with his friend and fellow bodyboarder, Winston McCall. Taylor, who was 21, had won several state titles in Australia before going on the world tour, where he rapidly rose up the ranks. “Joel was surfing really well, and was in contention for a world title,” says Mike Stewart, an American nine-time world bodyboarding champion who is widely regarded as the greatest surfer the sport has ever produced. “He was right up there.”
The surf was big that day – between 15 and 20 feet [4.5 to 6 metres]. A strong backwash was warping the waves, with a cross-wind chopping at their faces. Despite this, Taylor caught a few good ones and was feeling confident. “I remember I got one into shore,” he tells me when I meet him in his home town of Lennox Head, on NSW’s far north coast. “I was going to go in, but I was standing on the sand, and I thought, ‘I’ll just get one more.’ ”
A six-metre wave came to him. “I was underwater and went to kick my legs to get to the surface, but they didn’t work. I thought, ‘I’ve done something here.’ I knew I was pretty f---ed.”
Joel Taylor
He paddled back out and waited. After a time, a wave came to him. It had a 20-foot (six-metre) face and was moving fast, drawing a phenomenal amount of water off the reef. Taylor took off late, becoming airborne on his descent, and landed in the trough of the wave as if dropped down a well. The lip, which was as thick as a small car, landed a foot from his right shoulder, the percussive shock blasting a deep trench in the water. “I saw dry reef,” says Taylor. “There was no water on it at all.”
In the next instant, Taylor was flipped into an upright position and driven, feet first, into the bottom. “The rest of the wave then landed on top of me.” The impact simultaneously dislocated and fractured his spine, paralysing him instantly from the waist down. “I was underwater and went to kick my legs to get to the surface, but they didn’t work,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’ve done something here.’ I knew I was pretty f---ed.”
Taylor in hospital in Honolulu at age 21. “I’d never seen someone so low,” recalls friend Winston McCall.Credit: MC
He made it to the surface and clung onto his board, trying to keep his mouth above water. Stewart, who happened to be on the beach that day, swam out to him. “I was the first guy to reach him,” Stewart says. “I put my arm underneath to support him, and felt a softball-sized bulge protruding from his spine.” With the help of the lifeguards, Taylor was brought to shore. From there he was flown by helicopter to The Queen’s Medical Centre in Honolulu.
“Whenever you hear a helicopter flying over the water at Pipeline, you know something heavy has happened in the surf,” says McCall. “I immediately thought of my younger brother, Oscar, who was also surfing at Pipeline that day.” McCall, who was sitting beyond the break, got out of the water and raced back to the house that he and Oscar were renting. “My brother was already there, and he was safe,” says McCall. “But five minutes later, another friend came to the house and said, ‘Joel has had an accident.’ ”
Taylor, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, doesn’t immediately strike you as a surfer. At 43, he is slightly built and bald, with a milky complexion and the fastidious, unflashy manner of a maths professor or tax accountant. He is also, according to his wife, Lorin Harvey, a clean freak and pathological perfectionist. Obsessive compulsive disorder runs in his family; his grandfather would bring his own cutlery to restaurants and colour-coded his wardrobe for every day of the week; Joel’s father, Peter, is an inveterate collector (toothpaste lids, stamps, Mr Whippy spoons) and has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of eye baths.
“It’s the same with Joel,” says Harvey. The storehouse of Unite, the clothing company Taylor founded in 2004, is run like a hospital dispensary, with the stock minutely labelled and unfailingly symmetrical. “If there is a gap in the wall of boxes Joel will put an empty box there, just so it looks the same,” she says.
Right now, however, Taylor is looking more at ease – one might even say relaxed. This is likely due, at least partly, to the fact that we’re reclining on the verandah of his parents’ home, in the sylvan, frangipani-scented hills behind Lennox Head. But he and Harvey also appear to be enjoying a more elemental contentment, the fugue of stunned fulfilment that attends a monumental achievement. In November, Taylor was crowned the 2023 World Para Surfing Champion, a victory made all the more remarkable for the fact that, until a year or so earlier, he hadn’t so much as set foot in the ocean for almost 20 years. (Taylor also won Male Para Surfer of the Year at the 2023 Australian Surfing Awards last month.) “After my accident, the idea of surfing was gone for me,” he explains. “So I shut it out of my life.” Then, 12 months out from the World Championships, in Huntington Beach, California, something clicked. “I thought, ‘I want to surf again.’ ”
As comebacks go, this sits somewhere between Tiger Woods and Lazarus, and would be the stuff of national renown had it happened in a more mainstream sport. “It’s pretty wild,” says Stewart. “I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”
Winning the World Para Surfing title in California in November.Credit: Pablo Franco
Joel Taylor, who is the younger of two brothers, grew up one block from the beach in Lennox Head, a long, well-known right-hand point break 30 minutes’ drive south of Byron Bay. He began surfing at the age of seven with his father, Peter, who had imported some of the latest Morey bodyboards from the US, at great expense. “They were pretty special back then,” says Taylor. “At first, we weren’t allowed to touch them.”
Taylor was a competitive kid. “Even playing cricket in the backyard, he was always keen to win,” says Peter. He and his brother Troy would surf together, but Taylor began to take it more seriously when he was 12. “I won the regionals in the under-13s in 1993 and then went straight to the nationals, where I got to see the pros and how they performed, and their lifestyle. It was pretty exciting.” In the end, Taylor underperformed. “But that only fired me up more.”
But there were other demands on his time. The Northern Rivers region, and Lennox Head in particular, had become something of a focal point for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had tapped into the local community of surfers and builders. Peter Taylor was brought into the church in 1973 by his close friend, Bob McTavish, the former surf champion and noted surfboard innovator. Peter met his wife, Desley, in the church. “Desley’s family were die-hard Witnesses,” says Peter. “Her father would have chosen the church over his own children.”
Jehovah’s Witnesses eschew celebrations such as Christmas, which has its origins in pagan beliefs, and birthdays. (The day you die is thought to be more important than the day you’re born.) “It sucked,” says Taylor. “I’d ride to the beach on my shitty bike on Christmas Day and see all these kids with new bikes and new boards, and be like, ‘What?’ ”
“Between the age of 14 and 18, for four years and eight months, I surfed every day of my life.”
Joel Taylor
As young boys, Taylor and his brother would put on a tie two times a week and attend hours-long services in the local Kingdom Hall, the Witnesses’ place of worship. “I also remember going to crazy conventions at Lang Park [in Brisbane], and standing there with tens of thousands of people, and me and Troy thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”
The family left the Witnesses when Taylor was 12 and were subsequently disowned by his mother’s side of the family. “We had no contact with them for years,” he says. But their time in the church had cast a long shadow. Joel wasn’t bullied, exactly, “but people did write me off”, he says. “I felt a bit like an outcast. As a result I gravitated towards underground things like punk rock, skateboarding and bodyboarding.” That sense of otherness, together with his innate monomania, saw Taylor focus increasingly inwards, on what he came to see as his sole purpose – namely, to become the world’s best bodyboarder. He soon became fixated. “Between the age of 14 and 18, for four years and eight months, I surfed every day of my life. I wrote it all down in a diary.” If, for whatever reason, he couldn’t surf during the day, he’d go at night, in the dark – one time at 11.30pm – “just to keep my record going”.
Taylor with his parents Desley and Peter, wife Lorin and children Jay and Sunny at the World Para Surfing Championship in November.Credit: Pablo Franco
At contests, he developed a pre-competition ritual, or what he called “his system”: “I had to put everything on, like my rashie and wettie, and listen to the same songs and look at the same videos all in a certain order, and I thought if I changed any part of it I wouldn’t win.”
He became a formidable opponent. “He was leagues ahead of anyone else,” says Winston McCall, who became friends with Taylor at Byron Bay High School. McCall, who went on to front the hugely successful metalcore band Parkway Drive, was also at that time a competitive bodyboarder. “Joel had composure,” says McCall. “You can only get the score you need if you get the best wave you can, and so you have to play chess with the other rider, to get priority, and also wait for the right wave. It’s a constant pressure cooker.”
“There’s so much that Joel hasn’t been able to control … that he probably used his OCD to gain some control over his life.”
Michael O’Rafferty
McCall was an excellent surfer, but Taylor had something he didn’t. “When I was competing against him, I was like, ‘This is my mate.’ But Joel was like, ‘This is my competitor.’ You could see the switch.”
After his HSC, Taylor went professional. He won several events in Queensland and NSW and was sponsored by surfing labels. “There were plenty of crowds at the contests, and I was signing hundreds of autographs and having my travel paid for, which was great at 17.”
In 2000, at the age of 19, he made his first trip to Hawaii. For surfers with aspirations to greatness, higher rankings and/or ego reinforcement, Hawaii is invariably regarded as the ultimate proving ground. But success, especially at breaks like Pipeline and nearby Sunset Beach, depends in large part on feeling comfortable in big surf. On his return to Australia, then, Taylor relocated to Margaret River, a renowned big-wave spot in Western Australia, where he began training with fellow pro Ryan Hardy. “We surfed every day together, pushing each other in terms of performance,” says Ryan. “But we also did beach running and repeated paddle-out sprints at beach breaks. You want to make sure that when it gets big, you don’t gas out or get cramps and lose confidence.”
By the following year, Taylor was ready to return to Hawaii, where he would, it was widely assumed, begin his ascent to the sport’s top tier. Instead, he broke his spine.
It’s not uncommon to hear of people who bounce back from adversity with what motivational speakers invariably describe as inspiring resilience. Taylor was not one of these people. “I didn’t respond well,” he says. “I’d lost everything I’d ever wanted. I was mentally f---ed and wanted to die.”
After the accident, he stayed in the Honolulu hospital for three weeks. His parents and brother came from Australia to be with him, and his friends, including Ryan and McCall, visited regularly. “I’d never seen someone as low as that,” says McCall. “But we were just teenagers. We didn’t know how to communicate with him.” They brought Taylor a Rubik’s Cube and a Game Boy. “But it was like a bunch of boys coming in with sparklers, trying to illuminate a black hole.”
Taylor got back to Australia on New Year’s Eve, and was admitted to Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney’s east: “Through my window I could see all the fireworks going off, which wasn’t great.” From there he was transferred to the spinal ward at the nearby Prince Henry Hospital, where he embarked on six months of intense physiotherapy. His obsessiveness served him well. “I’d sit on the [Functional Electrical Stimulation] bike for two hours a day, which is the max they let you do, just focusing on making the connection between my brain and my legs.”
With his Male Para Surfer of the Year gong at last month’s Australian Surfing Awards.Credit: Andrew Christie
After five months of maniacal effort, he found he could minutely clench his sphincter. “That gave me a bit of hope.” At one stage, his grandfather sent some Jehovah’s Witnesses to visit him in hospital. “They thought that I was vulnerable and could be brought back into the fold,” Taylor says. “I just told them to f--- off.”
Taylor’s parents also visited, but the relationship became strained. “Joel was so negative,” says his father. “It was understandable, but I found it very hard to deal with. We’d come down and he wouldn’t want to go out to dinner or lunch or do anything.” Taylor says his main source of support was his aunt, who came every night to bring food and check on him.
In 2002, he moved back to his parents’ house in Lennox Head. He continued his rehab at Ballina Hospital, 10 minutes’ drive south. “They did the best they could but they’re used to seeing broken ankles.”
His progress plateaued, and he became depressed. “I realised I would never surf again, that I’d probably not have a family,” he says. “I thought I might jump off Lennox Headland, which is a bit notorious for that. But then I thought, ‘Oh man, I’ll have to push myself all the way up that hill.’ ”
Taylor’s injury obliterated his former self. “Everything changes,” he tells me. “Socially, mentally, physically. You need to come up with a new life.”
Part of that involved starting a business. In 2004, he decided to create a clothing label for bodyboarders. With the money he’d saved from living at home, he put together a range of T-shirts, hats and stickers. A lot of the hardcore punk bands he was listening to at the time had names like No Friends and The Rejected, but Taylor wanted to create something positive, so he called his label Unite.
Winston McCall, Parkway Drive’s singer, wearing a T-shirt by Taylor’s clothing label, Unite.Credit: Getty Images
“Unite allowed Joel to be creative, and kept him connected to the bodyboard community,” says Lorin Harvey, who met Taylor through a mutual friend in 2005. “It gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”
“I didn’t consider myself a surfer any more. I never even set foot on the sand … It made me too frustrated.”
Joel Taylor
Unite has since moved from the bodyboarding world into the heavy-metal scene. “You see people wearing it in Europe, Germany, in Houston,” says McCall, who often dons Unite T-shirts when performing with Parkway Drive. “It’s worn by people who’ve never bodyboarded before, which is pretty cool.”
But Taylor’s accident had fundamentally altered his self-conception. “I didn’t consider myself a surfer any more,” he says. “I never even set foot on the sand, and avoided the beach completely. It made me too frustrated.” For years he still had dreams of surfing – vivid images of getting barrelled and competing again. But then he would wake and find he couldn’t move.
In 2007, he and Harvey moved away from the water, to Bangalow, a small town in the Byron Bay hinterland. “We had a beautiful home that backed onto a paddock filled with horses and cows,” Harvey says. “I thought it’d be a good spot for him to run his business.”
It was, until it wasn’t. Harvey managed a homewares business in Ballina and was gone all day, leaving Taylor by himself in Bangalow. They partied a lot on the weekends and began drinking too much. “Joel felt a bit isolated, and wasn’t doing anything physical,” says Harvey. In 2015, they returned to Lennox Head and the ocean.
There’s perhaps only one thing harder than having a mental illness like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and that’s trying to work with someone who has a mental illness like OCD. “Joel is so used to doing his own thing,” says longtime surf coach Michael O’Rafferty, who worked with Taylor in the lead-up to last year’s world title. “It can take a bit of effort to get him to listen and to change his ways.”
Taylor’s condition governs virtually every aspect of his and Harvey’s life. “The pens that he uses in the shed where he stores the merchandise have to stay in the shed and the pens he uses in the office have to stay in the office, and there cannot be any crossover,” Harvey tells me. “It’s frustrating, because he can be so adamant that something has to be done in a certain way that it can take 10 times as long and not be as effective.”
According to Harvey, Taylor’s OCD grew worse when they had their first child, a boy called Jay, in 2018. (They had another boy, Sunny, in 2022.) She believes at least part of his condition is functional. “I think there’s so much in Joel’s life that he hasn’t been able to control, and especially with having a kid, that he probably used his OCD to gain some control over his life.”
When the couple moved from Bangalow to Lennox, their new house had a pool. Taylor took to swimming in it. The weightlessness gave him a sense of freedom, and drew him back to exercising. In 2018, he heard about Making Strides, a spinal rehab centre on the Gold Coast. “I went there and started training, getting fitter and stronger. Eventually I thought, ‘Maybe I can get back into the water?’ ”
In 2020, with his 40th birthday approaching, he contacted some friends and said he wanted to try surfing again. He and Harvey took a trip, half an hour south, to the coastal town of Yamba, where they met up with some of Taylor’s childhood friends and Ryan Hardy. One morning, they went to the beach, where Hardy put Taylor on a bodyboard in the shallows and began pushing him out. “It was only small, maybe one or two feet,” says Hardy. “Joel’s balance was off, because he hadn’t done it for so long. It was a struggle to get him out the back and he got a little frustrated, because the waves kept pushing him back, and we were trying to pull the deadweight of his body.” Hardy was also worried about his friend falling off. “I wasn’t sure how well he’d be able to get himself to the surface.”
“He got some speed up and got that feeling again, and he was screaming with happiness when he came up afterwards.”
Ryan Hardy
But Taylor was determined. They finally made it out the back and waited for a wave. When it came, Hardy eased Taylor onto it. “You could see Joel’s muscle memory come right back, of how to hold the board, and positioning on the wave. He got some speed up and got that feeling again, and he was screaming with happiness when he came up afterwards.”
That day was transformational. “What really tripped me out was the energy behind the waves, because you don’t get that energy anywhere else,” says Taylor. “And the sense of freedom was huge. The freedom of being in the ocean, the freedom from the wheelchair, the freedom of mind, not thinking about how difficult having a disability can be. Sometimes I’d literally slip off my board, and float around and dive under like a dolphin. It was magical.”
Australians like to think of the beach as a democratic space, open to everyone. But it’s rare to see paraplegics on the sand. I only realise this when I see Taylor’s wheelchair on Skennars Beach, just south of Lennox, looking, with its polished metal and precision curves, so starkly confounding, even defiant, like a silent protest or a challenge of some sort. We’re going surfing, and Winston McCall has come along to help. He pushes Taylor in his wheelchair as far as he can through the sand; when they are about 10 metres from the water, Taylor slips down off the chair and onto the sand, then bum-shuffles toward the water’s edge, with McCall following. When Taylor is up to his hips, McCall hands him his board. Taylor then lies down and slithers out through the shallows like a crocodile. When he’s deep enough, he lies on his board and starts paddling. Bodyboarders wear flippers and rely on their legs for propulsion. But Taylor only has his arms, which means he takes longer to get beyond the break. But when he does, he starts prowling around, squinting in the sun, hunting for waves.
Taylor and Winston McCall at The Pass in Byron Bay.Credit: Paul Harris
Taylor went out a few times after his return to the water in Yamba, in 2020, but had to stop because of COVID-19. Then came the Northern Rivers floods, in 2022, which stopped everything in its tracks. He only began surfing again in earnest in late 2022, a year before the World Championships, and only competed once prior to that contest in August 2023 – at the Australian Para Surfing Titles, which he won. “Joel is a great surfer, and he knows what to do when he gets waves,” says Michael O’Rafferty, who coached the Australian para surfing team. “But [in his previous life] I think he was used to being able to sit around and wait for waves. So it was about getting him to not be too choosy about what waves to get.”
The event, held in Huntington Beach, California, saw 184 athletes from 27 countries competing across five categories, including those for amputees and the sight-impaired. Taylor, who captained the Australian team, competed in the Prone 1 category, for surfers who ride in a lying position and do not require assistance paddling into a wave and getting back on the board safely. I assumed that the competition would have been held in an atmosphere of goodwill and fellow feeling, but it was, according to Harvey, utterly cutthroat. “Some of the guys in Joel’s division tried to put in a protest about him, on the grounds that he was too able-bodied,” she tells me. “But all the competitors are assessed by an international panel of disability classifiers, so it was ridiculous.”
Taylor won by surfing with flair and flow, together with some canny barrel-riding. His “system” also came into play. Harvey, for example, was the only one allowed to touch his board – no exceptions. He had to eat the same breakfast (bananas and a protein bar), listen to the same song before each heat (Anthem Part 3, by Blink-182), and do his daily stretches on the same towel in the same place. “I had to cook the same dinner each night, too [vegetarian spaghetti bolognese],” Harvey says. “Even I started becoming superstitious after a while.”
Taylor was exultant after his victory: he was carried up the beach, roaring at the crowd. His compulsion to compete, and win, had been sated, at least temporarily. (He plans to defend his title this year.) But there was more going on. “I’m proud to be able to have come out the other side of everything and thrive,” he tells me after our surf. “It’s good for my boys to see that.”
Having a disability draws attention, which inevitably attracts judgment. Taylor felt this so keenly that for years, it was like a second wound. “People would go, ‘What’s wrong with you?’. It got in my head, because I was being judged by society’s standards.” Over time, however, he turned the onus around. “Being in a wheelchair, you get to see how other people look at disability, and what it says about them and society.”
He now regards what happened to him as something akin to being reborn. “It’s like I’ve had two separate lives,” he says. “Before and after the accident. I’ve gotten to learn how to drive again, and learn how to surf again. I’ve gotten barrelled for the first time – twice! Now I just want people to see me as a surfer, not a disabled surfer.” He shrugs. “Like, it doesn’t matter. Who cares?”
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