The blind skateboarder going for gold

盲人滑板运动员争夺金牌

The Outlook Podcast Archive

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2022-02-23

23 分钟
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When Justin Bishop was eight years old, he was diagnosed with a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, and was told that one day he would go blind. Two years later he fell in love with skateboarding, and from then on he and his board were inseparable. As his sight began to deteriorate in his late teens, Justin felt he was in a race against time to fit in as much skating as possible, and when he lost his sight at the age of 25 he feared he would never step on a board again. But thanks to the encouragement of his friend, and a cane with a ball on the end of it, Justin is not only winning medals but campaigning for adaptive skateboarding to be included in the Paralympics. A documentary has been made about his story called One Day You'll Go Blind. This interview includes Justin's own recordings of him skateboarding. Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: June Christie (Photo: Justin Bishop skateboarding. Credit: Ryne Belanger, TNG Agency)
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  • Hello, I'm Jo Fidgeon.

  • Welcome to Outlook, the home of personal stories on the BBC World Service.

  • They say the most successful people are those who aren't afraid to fail.

  • Skateboarder Justin Bishop positively loves it.

  • Yeah, I do love it.

  • Because when you fail for an hour or like even days when you're trying to learn a trick, when you finally get it, that dopamine that just hits the brain, that success that you feel is just unmeasurable because of, you know, how long it finally took.

  • And when you land something, first try, you do it fast, you don't get that feeling of success.

  • Yeah, but failing in your case might mean falling over a lot, hurting yourself a lot.

  • That's not quite so nice, huh?

  • It actually kind of is.

  • I always feel like whenever I get hurt, it just makes me feel alive, you know, Pain makes you feel alive.

  • Justin is a competitive skateboarder and wins medals.

  • But that wasn't the kind of success I was talking about.

  • I was thinking more about when life knocks you off your feet and you have to get back on again.

  • When Justin was 8 years old, he was told that because of a rare condition called retinitis pigmentosa, he would one day go blind.

  • The condition is a genetic condition, so it's been in my family for three generations before me.

  • So it was something that every child kind of had to get checked for, and it skipped a couple generations.

  • And at the time, the family thought, like, oh, it's probably out of the family now.

  • We might be good.

  • But when I got diagnosed at the age of eight, they could tell that it was in my eyes.