Thai cave heroes Richard Harris and Craig Challen: pulling out wasn’t an option

Unimaginable risk, literally life-saving reward; two Aussie heroes are all about ‘having a crack’.

Richard Harris and Craig Challen meet six players from the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach months after the July 2018 rescue.

Aside from the moral horror of overseeing the death of 12 primary school children and their young coach, the improbable rescue of Thailand’s Wild Boars soccer team brought with it the added potential bonus of criminal charges and the destruction of professional reputations.

Despite this, at no point did Australian cave divers Richard Harris and Craig Challen consider pulling out.

“Definitely not,” Challen tells The Weekend Australian. “We would never have gotten over it if we missed out on this.

“It was recognised that there were some potential downsides, sure. But pulling out was never part of our decision-making.”

Having initially eschewed pub­lici­ty, Harris and Challen have now surrendered to the global interes­t in their remarkable role spearheading the Thai cave rescue in July last year with the release of their book, Against All Odds.

READ MORE: The great escape | Bravery of ‘selfless’ rescuers earns joint honour

The book reveals­ how the Depart­ment of Foreign Affairs and Trade had to arrange for the pair to have diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution by the Thai authorities — and that the paperwork was still incomplete when the rescue began.

“When the DFAT guy told me there was a risk I would end up in prison, I don’t know if I didn’t take it seriously or didn’t believe it, or whether I was just being naive,” Harris says.

“But we were literally in our wetsuits about to walk into the cave. I don’t think there was space in my brain to process that.

“I just figured that if that happene­d, it would be up to DFAT to work out how to get us out of the country. That was their job. We had our job to do.”

Challen is a veterinarian and businessman who made such good money as chief executive of a network­ of animal hospitals in his home state of Western Australia that he retired in his early 50s to focus on his love of cave-diving and explore a new-found passion for flying helicopters and planes.

For his diving buddy Harris, who was still working full-time as an anaesthetist both in private practice in Adelaide and at the SA Ambulance Service, the prospect of bungling the improvised, high-risk sedation of a dozen children brought with it grave professional risks.

As he war-roomed rescue scen­arios with fellow divers and debated different anaesthetic proced­ures with other medicos, Harris had many fraught conversations with his doctor wife, Fiona, back home in Adelaide, who was fearful of the consequences should the project fail.

Harris reveals that he had set himself an outer limit as to how many children’s deaths he was prepared to tolerate before declaring he could not continue.

“I said to everyone on the night before the first day that if the first two boys died, I did not think I would be able to continue,” he says.

“I suspected two was my limit. We would all go out and reassess, and ask if there was something that we could change, but if there was nothing that we could change I still don’t know if I would have been able to go back in there again.

“The thing is, the kids were still going to die if we didn’t go back in to get the rest of them.

“But it’s one thing to leave kids to die; it’s another to feel like you are actively taking their lives.”

Harris and Challen have been diving together for 15 years. While they’re not macho or arrogant enough to say it, in this age of technology addiction, social media and helicopter parenting, they repre­sent an endangered species of Australian outdoorsmen who were brought up valuing self-­reliance, resourcefulness and risk-taking.

As joint Australians of the Year for 2019, they have used their position­ to advocate for a winding back of the modern culture of molly­coddling.

They also do a great line in laconi­c understatement, in having achieved something without preced­ent in human history, and treating it as a bit of a lark.

Harris — who reveals he put $100 on Paralympian Kurt Fearnley to win Australian of the Year in the hope he would jinx himself — says he has been bemused by the accolades.

“In hindsight, I should have bet on myself,” he says. “Maybe Kurt would have got up. Winning was a bit of a shock.

“And then the questions came: ‘What do you stand for?’ ‘Umm, I don’t know, er, cave diving?’

“I have never represented ­myself as political or standing for anything in particular. You have all these other people who have spent their life fighting for social justice. And then they give it to us. We felt like genuine impostors.

“But the message I do have is about kids. Getting them outside and off their screens, toughen them up, taking risks. Getting them away from the social media epidemic.”

Challen has used his role as Australian of the Year to advocate for greater personal responsibility and to urge adults to challenge themselves. He believes their own role in the cave rescue was a simple case of “having a crack”.

“There is still room for enthus­iastic amateurs to do stuff,” he said. “Not everything needs to be achieved by a giant organisation worked out to the nth degree on a spreadsheet. Sometimes you can just roll up your sleeves, start at the beginning and get the job done. There is far too little of that going on these days. Any decision is bette­r than no decision at all.

“What happened is less remark­able than people think. We get asked about how we remained focused. The whole team had been cave diving for 20-odd years so when you’ve been doing it for that long it’s not a question of having to block bad shit out of your head. It’s just what you do, it’s as natural for us as walking down the street. With a bit more preparation.”