Acero is awaiting surgery after nearly drowning at Spain’s famed lefthander, Mundaka. Photo:Instagram
Kepa Acero is recovering and awaiting surgery following a harrowing wipeout at Mundaka. On Jan. 2, Acero went down headfirst on a wave. According to his telling of the story, posted to Instagram on Friday, things got fuzzy after that.
“The only moment I can remember was under the water, wanting to reach the surface, but my hands and my legs were not taking orders,” he wrote.
He credits his friends Natxo Gonzalez and Nando Arostegi Restrepo among others with getting him out of the impact zone, onto the beach and to a hospital.
“I was told that I had broken my neck, with a broken-shifted cervical and a broken back. Miraculously, the spinal cord was not damaged, so I can give thanks for being able to feel and move my body, legs, and arms,” he writes.
He’s scheduled for surgery on Wednesday.
Acero is known for traveling the globe in search of off-the-beaten-path tubes in places like Skeleton Bay, Namibia. On his website, he writes that he first ventured there alone in 2010 and spent six weeks waiting for the reeling left to break. Skeleton didn’t show that trip but he returned last year and scored.
Here’s Acero’s own telling of the story on Instagram (in Spanish) which received over 1,000 comments in the six hours after it was posted:
