Back in 2004, Clint Kimmins was a promising 20 year-old with a Rip Curl sponsorship deal, world tour ambitions and a penchant for waves of the big and heavy variety. One night in April that year, Clint and a group of friends were at the Tugun Surf Club in Queensland, Australia, celebrating someone’s 21st. A fight broke out with another group of friends, Clint became involved, and he ended up using a broken glass bottle to defend himself, stabbing a man first in the neck and then in the back.

The victim of the two blows, Dru Baggaley, called for a meeting between the two to talk things over. Fearing an ambush, Kimmins suggested they meet in his lawyer’s office on the Gold Coast, but Baggaley insisted on Byron Bay, and the meeting never took place. Charges and a court case followed, the jury agreeing that Kimmins’ first blow with the bottle qualified as legitimate self-defence, but adjudging the second to constitute “unlawful wounding”. In the end he was sentenced to eighteen months, and released after six.

Of the case put forward by the prosecution, Clint said he “spent three weeks listening to a person who’s never met me describe me as a complete thug”. The strategy achieved the desired effect, despite evidence to the contrary given by character witnesses Kelly Slater and Taj Burrow. Kimmins would later describe Baggaley’s version of events as a “crock of shit”, but  Baggaley’s integrity escaped comparable scrutiny.

An interesting and ironic subplot began to develop several years later when Baggaley was sentenced to a maximum of 12 years in prison for the manufacture and supply of a large quantity of ecstasy — around 13,500 tablets, in fact. Baggaley’s older brother Nathan, a three-times world champion sprint canoer and winner of two Olympic silver medals, was also convicted on similar charges, which put a definitive end to his own sporting career, already in decline following a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs in 2005. In 2013, not long after their releases from prison, both brothers were arrested again, accused of setting up drug laboratories in Tweed Heads, New South Wales and on the Gold Coast. Nathan pleaded guilty to manufacturing a marketable quantity of methamphetamine, more commonly known as crystal meth; Dru, charged with aiding and abetting, also admitted to his involvement in the conspiracy.

Kimmins, on the other hand, is these days an elite triathlete, and last October was back in Hawaii not in anticipation of approaching the North Shore winter, but for the Ironman World Championships, held every year on the Big Island. He had been dropped by Rip Curl following his conviction (“They did the right thing,” he says. “I don’t hold any grudges”), and his pro surfing career never took off again after his release, but he’s now firmly back on the right track — albeit a radically different one, dressed in lycra.

“These days a lot of my time is spent on the bike or in the pool,” he told Surf Europe after a session last year at Cape Solander (formerly known as “Ours”), in which Kimmins was reportedly a standout. “I’m currently competing in long course triathlons and training has absorbed my life and surfing has taken a backseat in recent years. I have been meaning to get my ass back in the water more but it takes away from my training, which I’m committed to. But there’s only so many photos you can see of your mates getting tubed all around the world before you get the shits and want to join in on the fun.”