Break the Boundary: meet the team making mountain biking more accessible

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Break the Boundary: meet the team making mountain biking more accessible Red Bull Australia

Andrew Liddawi has competed in one of the world’s most punishing mountain bike endurance races. He loves technical climbs, rocks, drops and logs, just like a lot of mountain bikers do. Yet Andrew hesitates to call himself a mountain biker or what he does mountain biking.

Why? The founder of adaptive-cycling not-for-profit Break the Boundary thinks that mountain biking’s extreme reputation may have inadvertently dabbed the brakes on the development of its adaptive equivalent in Australia.

“If you say ‘mountain biking’, the perception is that we’re all jumping off cliffs and flying between trees; which is only about two per cent of us. There’s some conflict between what we do as a charity and the more extreme-sporting side of it. When we put in a grant application, we’ll use ‘off-road hand cycling’ [instead of mountain biking].”

Andrew became a paraplegic after “landing badly” and severing his spine (at t10-t11) on a recreational mountain bike ride back in 2008. Eventually, after extensive rehabilitation, he became curious about how he could get back out on the trails again, but the digital tumble weeds rolled past when he searched for adaptive cycling information in Australia.

“The little information that was available online was from the States, UK and Canada – there was no information specifically relating to Australia. I wanted to centralise information, build a bit more knowledge of equipment, resources and trails here.”

In 2012, Break the Boundary began as a website doing just that, but it soon evolved into a hands-on, entirely volunteer-run association which aims to “help people with all kinds of disabilities and impairments access off-road trails”.

Andrew envisages off-road hand-cycling becoming part of the regular mountain-biking scene one day in the not-too distant future, even if the competition side still needs much development because of the convolutions of disability classification.

“There are complex groups, disability variations but equipment as well,” he says. "A kneeling downhill bike does not generate the same output as a recumbent cross-country bike, for example, but it depends on what you’re racing and the ability of the person racing.”

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