Aussie lifeguard reveals dark side of Bondi Rescue

It might look like the Bondi Rescue lifeguards have a blast on the beach, but Bruce “Hoppo” Hopkins reveals why they “can’t switch off”.

For the most part, Bruce “Hoppo” Hopkins and his fellow lifeguards look like they are having an absolute blast keeping swimmers safe on Bondi Rescue.

And that’s absolutely true – up to a point. Hoppo, who recently clocked up 30 years as a lifeguard, says that while the globally acclaimed reality TV hit showcases the sunshine and good times on Australia’s most famous beach, there is also a dark side lurking just beneath the surface.

While to the naked eye it might look like he and his excellently named colleagues such as Harries, Maxi and Whippet are “just standing around or walking around the beach”, in reality the intense concentration for signs of danger requires a mental strength equal to the physicality they need to drag struggling swimmers from the surging surf.

“Most people go to an office job and if you make a mistake, you can fix the mistake up,” says Hoppo. “With us, it’s in the back of our mind that if we have a bad day then there’s a good chance someone’s going to die from our mistake.

“It looks like we’re all having fun, which we do, but it’s something that we can’t switch off because we’re looking after all these people’s lives and it only takes a second or two for that all to change.”

Bondi Rescue is returning for another season.

Hoppo says that great strides have been made in recent years to make sure the lifeguards are as prepared mentally for the more difficult aspects of the job as they are physically. The longer a lifeguard is in the job, he says, the more likely they are to have to deal with a body retrieval, resuscitation or drowning. When he started in the ‘90s, such confronting situations were dealt with by “a pat on the back and a beer after work” and lifeguards were scared to speak up for fear of being regarded as not tough enough.

Now, with the help of experts such as Dr David Said, a clinical psychologist with 22 years’ experience with the military, the younger generation of lifeguards are being encouraged to talk about any issues that might arise from being frontline emergency service workers.

“They’re not scared to mention if they are having difficulties with not sleeping at night or things like that,” Hoppo says.

“That’s the big thing, the after-effect, and years down the track, something can happen in your life and it triggers it again. So, we are preparing for that and hopefully that helps everybody in the future. It has been noticeable over the last four or five years how we have turned that around from being ‘toughen up’ to now sitting down and speaking about it and having debriefs after all the major incidents.”

Head lifeguard Bruce “Hoppo” Hopkins reveals the dark side of the job.

As head lifeguard, Hoppo has been front and centre for the six-time Logie-winning Bondi Rescue, which screens in more than 100 countries, ever since its inception in 2006. In that time he’s travelled the world spreading the water safety message and found fans in far-flung places. While dining in Dubai an excited Iraqi man told him how much joy the show brought him in his war-torn homeland. And he admits with a laugh that he was thrilled – if a little confused – to learn there’s a couple who “named their child Hoppo in some Scandinavian country somewhere”.

But last year was the first in 16 years that the fans were denied their annual fix of Aussie sunshine when a combination of Covid lockdowns and a soggy Sydney summer made filming impracticable. But the audiences’ loss was the newly-married Hoppo’s gain – he got to spend a rare Christmas and New Year at home while locked down on his Northern Beaches home.

“I reckon out of about 30 years I have had about four Christmas days off,” he says. “It was good to get a lockdown and not have to get to work and spend a bit more time actually going to the beaches with no one around.”

Lifeguards of Bondi Rescue are back for another season.

Last Christmas Day was another matter entirely – while filming what would become the first episode of the new series, which airs on Friday night, the 54-year-old veteran tore his calf during a rescue. Not only was it a reminder that he’s not as young as he used to be, it was also proof of how brutal his larrikin colleagues can be.

“The body doesn’t seem to have the flexibility it had 30 years ago, so it’s something I’ve got to be aware of,” he admits. “I have heard about it ever since from the guys down there. As soon as you do something to yourself they laugh about it before worrying about getting you repaired.”

Hoppo says that the job can be a mixture of frustration and inspiration. He admits to getting exasperated when swimmers repeatedly ignore the expert advice of the people who are there to keep them safe, swimming into the very rips they have just been told to get out of. But then there are stories like the 10-year-old megafan in the UK who saved a drowning toddler last year having recognised the danger signs from watching Bondi Rescue. Hoppo made the child’s year with a surprise face-to-face meeting in England to tell him what an amazing job he’d done.

The cast of Bondi Rescue.

“That’s one reason why we do Bondi Rescue – getting water safety message out there,” he says. “For a 10-year-old to identify a young three-year-old that was in the water and he alerted his father. Everyone else at the beach didn’t even notice that the young kid was drowning.”

After three decades in the job, Hoppo thought he had seen it all, but even he was a little dumbfounded when Bondi was declared a nudist beach for the day last November, as thousands stripped off for an art installation by world-renowned photographer Spencer Tunick. He declined the opportunity to bare all – “I am a bit too old for that these days” – but says that one his of colleagues was spotted in his birthday suit for the occasion.

“I will leave that as suspense for people to watch,” he laughs, declining to name names. “They had a fair few people there so I have never seen that many nude people on the beach. Normally if someone gets nude, we’ve got to go and tell them to put some clothes on, but it was a bit hard with about 1000 of them. It was pretty funny.”

Bondi Rescue 2023, Friday night, 7.30pm, Channel 10 and 10 Play

Originally published as Aussie lifeguard reveals dark side of Bondi Rescue