I think what's going through my head when I'm out there waiting
for a set and waiting for a wave to come is just still, I'm just
present with the ocean and feeling myself going up down.
And I'm just feeling if a set's coming. Floating across the
water, I can feel like the little ripples. If I'm on a good
wave, I can sort of get up into the lip, and I'm floating at the
top of the wave. And it's just being an absolute flow with
Mother Nature.
I lost my vision when I was five years old. And I basically lost
all of my central vision. So I've got big black dots in the
center of my vision. My vision disorder is called macular
dystrophy. I think a lot of people would know what tunnel
vision is, mine's basically the opposite of that. So I've got
nothing in the center at all. And then the outside's really,
really blurry.
From as far back as I can remember, there has always been
the ocean or the water in my life. We were always playing at
the beach, and dad used to take me out and my big brother used
to take me and push me into waves on a bodyboard from about
the age of five. So I learnt to feel what it was like going down
the wave and they, yeah, they'd sort of push me on an angle, so
I knew if I was going left or right.
A lot of the times these days I'm working with amazing people,
like Crispy and they're telling me what's going on. So it's just
spending time with friends in the water and waiting for them
to give me that next verbal cue.
Matt's really good at staying in the pocket of the wave. When you
connect your board to the wave and to your body movements, it
looks so beautiful on the wave. And that's what judges love to
see is big maneuvers and just that read of the waves
My job is to get Matt into the best wave possible. So I'm
Matt's eyes and also working for Matt but then Matt, he has to
still perform and all bring it all together on the wave. So
it's that releasing Matt do what he does best.
So I've always played sport, but never played never never really
owned the fact that I had a disability I wanted to prove to
the world that I didn't have a disability growing up. It wasn't
untill my late 20s that I sort of decided that I do have a
disability and wanted to have a crack at the Paralympics. So I
started racing, I started cycling.
I ended up becoming a world champion, world record holder,
and I won gold medals all over the world for Australia which
was was amazing. Surfing, which has always been my love and it's
been the thing that I would have loved would love to have gone to
the Paralympics for I'm probably would have gone when I was a
teenager. It didn't, there was no competition for people with
disabilities, certainly not in Australia and not globally until
2016 which was when I went to the Rio Paralympics for cycling.
I jumped off the bike and I'm now surfing for Australia and
won three world titles and have won multiple US opens and have
won comps now all over the world and surfing. The ultimate goal
is to represent Australia in the green and gold at the
Paralympics in surfing.