Transcriber: Almudena Torrecilla Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I'm excited.
I've got a great story to tell you today.
I think it's cool, and I think it's fun,
but unfortunately I've got to start it at this photo, which is not a cool moment.
OK, but we're not going to dwell on it.
This is me four years ago performing in a stunt show.
I was a professional mountain bike rider of 25 years.
But this photo -
just moments after it, I had a crash.
And in that crash, I sustained a spinal cord injury,
which was devastating to my career.
But what I'm going to do to keep this moving, fun and cool, right?
(Laughter)
We're going to skip forward an hour from this photo
to where I think it started getting cool.
OK, so we're going to skip past the very tense moments with paramedics
and a dawning realisation of what this might mean to me
and a very noisy helicopter ride
to an hour from here,
where I was in one of those MRI scanners, one of those claustrophobic tunnels.
I was all alone for the first time since the accident.
And there were these magnets droning away around me.
I was finally in a place where I could have a think.
What's going on?
And I'll be honest,
I was in a lot of pain around my midriff.
I was kind of hypersensitive, and below that I could feel nothing.
I had no movement, and it was really scary.
Did I say this would get fun and cool?
(Laughter)
It's going to get fun and cool.
But I was in turmoil, in all honesty.
I was thinking all the things
you would expect someone would think in that situation.
How am I going to work?
You know, I'm never going to walk again.
Wheelchairs.
How am I going to be a good dad?
How am I going to be a good husband?
All that stuff.
But I've got to admit something today that I've not really told many people.
Underneath all the turmoil -
I'm already starting to smile a little bit -
underneath the turmoil, there was a genuine excitement,
which sounds weird, but bear with me.
In all the turmoil, I'd been thinking through some scenarios,
like, what is it like in a wheelchair?
What's it like being four foot tall all the time?
All that kind of stuff.
But my competitive sportsman brain was starting to kick in,
and I was starting to think like,
'So who's the best paraplegic in the world?'
(Laughter)
'Who's that guy or girl? It must be a pretty impressive person.
Like what's the world rankings of paraplegia?
How do you get in the top 100 of being a paraplegic?'
I can't help it; that's the way I think.
And I was excited, and I instantly knew, although it was a dumb thought,
it was also a very useful one.
I could feel it had energy, it had movement, it was positive.
And I nurtured it from that moment on.
I kept hold of it.
I knew that it was an important moment for me,
and I really used that energy to move forward in my life.
And let me explain why I was so excited by it
because
I'd been riding bikes for a long time, and often I would get excited by an idea.
It was quite often an idea, as you can see,
that probably wasn't a good one.
Some people would try and talk you out of it,
'That's stupid, man! You might hurt yourself!'
or, 'You could potentially get arrested for riding on bridges illegally!'
and things like that
And the excitement and that energy that I was recognising in the MRI scanner,
that's what I used to use to get past that inner voice that's saying I shouldn't
and the people actually physically saying to me, 'Don't.'
And I would use this energy -
that was a particularly silly bit -
I would use that energy to get stuff done.
So I knew it was important.
I went into hospital after the accident for five months.
I had 12 weeks' bed rest, which is a blooming long lie-in.
That's like the longest lie-in any of us need.
That's probably the longest lie-in in this room.
(Laughter)
Any? No, no. Definitely the longest lie-in.
I also spent that time rehabilitating, getting some fitness back,
getting used to the very basics of what life meant in a wheelchair.
I was also on a ward
with lots of other people who'd had spinal cord injuries,
and I was amazed at the bravery I saw in these other people.
Just everyday people who had this disruption in their life
that they hadn't been expecting.
And it's incredible to see how this human spirit comes through
and finds a way to get back
and progress from stuff that can be devastating.
I'd come out of hospital inspired by that and with that energy.
So I'd come out of hospital inspired and with a mantra, I guess.
I used it a lot.
It was: 'If I'm going to be paralysed, then I may as well be really good at it.'
I may as well just be the best one I can be.
Get in that top 100 is what I was thinking.
It started with the basics, things like this escalator.
(Laughter)
Looks like a simple problem,
but in a wheelchair an escalator is pretty tricky, you need to practice.
Especially going down,
because you have to go down facing the same way you would as up.
So you have this moment of 'Oh, my god, I hope I'm right.'
(Laughter)
And then the security guard chases you down it.
(Laughter)
(Harsh voice) 'You're not allowed on here with wheelchairs.'
'Well, I'm not a pram.'
(Laughter)
So I started with the basics.
But like I said, I really wanted to be as good at this as I could be.
And I thought sport was where I was going to find my niche
and use some of the experience I've had in my riding career.
So I started hunting around. What sports could I try?
And I tried loads of things. I tried handcycling and I tried tennis.
Have you ever noticed that wheel chair tennis players,
they've got to hold the tennis racket and push a wheelchair,
which is like that's two things, so I couldn't do that.
(Laughter)
I could hit the ball on the spot.
What else did I try? Well, I tried basketball.
I couldn't throw basketballs before my accident,
and the chair hadn't improved it.
So I didn't.
(Laughter)
But I did try wheelchair racing, which is what you can see here.
And you've probably seen this on the paralympics, going around a track,
or the London Marathon,
you see these guys, and they're amazing.
And I thought, I had a pretty strong upper body from my riding.
I thought, this is where I'm going to find my moment.
This is my one and only day racing wheelchairs,
just simply because this is a 100-meter race.
This photo sort of annoys me, actually.
It's a 100-meter race.
I'm the person with the black helmet, a little red line on it, blue t-shirt.
I'm lined up ready.
The girl, just to this side, with the pink, purple helmet
and pink, purple 'matching wheelchair', right?
She beat me. She's twelve years old.
(Laughter)
Wait, wait!
(Laughter)
She beat me by 60 meters.
(Laughter)
So kayaking! right? It's a really cool sport!
(Laughter)
I love this photo.
I went hunting around on the internet trying to find something else
after the wheelchair racing disaster, and I found kayaking.
These boats are incredible.
They are super long, really narrow and mega fast.
I managed to get in touch with the coach of the GB team,
and he asked me to come have a tryout.
Like: 'Well come and try out; we've got a space on the GB team for someone.'
Why are you laughing?
(Laughter)
For someone with my disability category, I'm like: 'This is it.'
So I went a long three-hour drive,
very excited.
I took my wife Lisa, and my son Alfie came to see daddy get picked for the team.
And I went kayaking for the first time.
Now, when I got on this boat,
I had a moment of panic,
because, like I said, they're pretty wobbly,
and I was slightly concerned.
And I said to my wife Lisa, who was just at the side of the jetty:
'You know,
I'm a bit worried about this boat, it's pretty tricky to balance.'
I'm about to set sail.
And the coach says to me -
he's holding the front of the boat, just by the jetty -
and he says: 'Don't worry, you just kind of balance it with your core.'
And I'm like:
'OK, some really important information has been lost in our email communication'
because I haven't got a core;
(Laughter)
that's what the wheelchair is about, right?
I don't know why he didn't get it.
But he pushes me out, OK?
I'm strapped in with this big velcro strap so you can't fall out of the boat.
I float out a little bit.
A bit of a wobble and then it just goes 'blum' the other way.
And I'm literally sat in it, perfectly sat, right?
But the bottom of the river's there,
I'm upside down,
and I was just like 'Oh, my god', I'm like looking at mud and fishes.
(Laughter)
I'm trying to rip this velcro thing off my waist to get out of the boat,
and I manage to get out enough to get a breath of air,
just long enough to see my son Alfie looking at me like 'Dad's drowning',
(Laughter)
like that looks bad.
I go back under.
I haven't come away from the boat for some reason,
because my feet are kind of caught up in the boat.
So I struggle my way out, and there's a lot of splashing,
and I'm not making the waves in this sport like I'd planned.
(Laughter)
It's a mess, all right?
I get to the edge and one, I'm freezing and two, I feel pretty stupid.
I get lifted out of the water,
and I'm kind of annoyed because I'm used to succeeding in sport.
That's what I've always strived to do, and this was not that.
I get put back in the boat again.
I'm like, 'Put me back in that boat because I can do this.'
They put me back in, I float out, you probably guessed, 'blum'.
(Laughter)
It was a horror show.
I come back out of the water again,
I'm even colder.
And I'm embarrased to admit now
that it took me four more attempts to realise 'I don't kayak.'
(Laughter)
I'm not a kayaker, OK?
And I come out of that water, and I just felt so humiliated.
I'd gone a three-hour drive to get to this place
with a lot of ambition in my mind and my excitement.
And this was not what I was after.
So we had a very quiet drive home,
but halfway back my son started laughing in the back of the car.
I said, 'What are you laughing at?'
And he was like, 'Did you see that café just next to the jetty
where everyone was inside having coffees from the cold, watching?'
I was like, 'Yeah, yeah.'
And he was like, 'Imagine how that scene looked to those people in there.'
(Laughter)
'Why do they keep putting that poor guy back in?'
(Laughter)
'He clearly can't do it.'
(Laughter)
Terrible!
Mean people, like I'm like, 'Don't put me back in the boat.'
And they're like, 'Get back in the boat!'
Awful!
You know what?
Since my accident, I was never able to get bike riding out of my mind.
I was looking for where I would find use for my skill set,
but I'd always presumed bike riding would be there.
I didn't really know how, but I knew I'd want to do it.
The problem was no one was doing it,
no one was riding two-wheeled mountain bikes who was paralysed.
It just wasn't happening.
So I got thinking how I could do it
and I found the answer watching the Sochi paralympics.
I don't know if you've ever seen these sit-ski races.
They've got like a single ski,
and then they're in this kind of bucket seat,
and they go absolutely howling down snowy mountains
with these crutches on either side with little skis on the end,
and I was watching that, and I thought,
'Why hasn't anyone ever put one of those seats on a mountain bike?
That's what I need, I need something to really hold me securely on the bike
and once I'm rolling, we're golden - it'll be great.'
And I started asking some people in the industry,
you know, 'Could I get this done?'
Some of them were like, 'Yeah, we can do that.'
And other people were like, 'Hang on a minute,
you need a sort of pedal to keep momentum
and obviously stability and stuff like that.'
Valid points.
And I thought: "Well no, actually, because all you need is a hill,
and then gravity is like free energy.
It's so "eco", it's like "let's go."'
They also said things about stopping. I was like, "We'll get to that."
So this is me, right, a year and a half after my accident,
out with my friends on the top of the mountain,
and I can't tell you how amazing this felt to go riding with my mates.
Once I got rolling it was incredible.
What was incredible was the experience I had with my friends.
It was just such a team effort.
And getting out riding on the bikes,
I had that cheek ache for days afterwards because I smiled so hard.
It was an amazing experience, and I got back riding.
And that video we put out on the internet,
and it got millions of views
on Youtube and Facebook and Instagram and that stuff.
It was so much noise, in fact my phone -
I was getting so many notifications, my phone's ding broke.
So many ding, dings. I broke my phone.
So I'm thinking millions of views, right?
'I'd reckon that's like top 100,' I'd say.
'I think I've made it into the top 100 paraplegics, in my opinion.'
(Laughter)
You know, what's important from my story I think is that ...
that moment in the MRI scanner was really important for me
because who would have thought before that moment,
seeing me with that injury,
that some of the best days of me riding bikes were ahead of me.
You know, it wasn't the end of the career, it was just a change in it.
And I've travelled the world since my accident.
I've ridden in international events.
I rode iconic places that I would have never dreamed of going before
and had experiences on my bike that have just been incredible.
I don't think many people would have said that was coming.
So I think there's an important message there.
And I think it's that excitement and that energy that made that possible
because that's passion, you know,
when you're passionate about something, you want to get it done.
When you're passionate about things that you want to do in your life
and decisions you want to make.
It's very easy to put up barricades of excuses
and blockades of reasons why you can't or make obstacles out of disabilities,
but when you've got that passion, and you've got that excitement,
and you let it come through, and you let it steer you,
you can just create a path around all those barriers.
You can achieve great things, and that is what I wish for you guys.
Thanks so much.
(Applause)
(Cheers)