Ryley Batt is only young but with three Paralympic Games already under his belt, he is one of the best and most experienced players in the Australian wheelchair rugby team.

Born with a limb deficiency, Ryley does not have legs and required surgery to separate his fingers from each other. Amazingly, it wasn’t until he was 12 years old that he began to use a wheelchair. Up until then, he preferred to ride around on a skateboard with his friends, scraping his hands along the ground when he needed to stop. It was a wheelchair rugby demonstration at school that finally convinced Ryley to use a wheelchair, and he hasn’t looked back since.

Ryley played in competition for the first time in 2002. The following year, he represented his country in Japan. At the Athens 2004 Paralympic Games, he became the youngest ever wheelchair rugby Paralympian at just 15. However, Athens was also a turning point for the teenager. His provisional classification of 2.5 – a “mid-pointer” was overturned and he was classified at the Games as a “high pointer” – 3.5. This required him to adapt to new responsibilities on the court, which has since seen him lift his game to a new level, as he carries almost half his team’s total point allocation whenever he takes to the floor. At the Beijing Games in 2008, Ryley helped his team win a silver medal after a narrow defeat to the USA and in London helped the team win gold, scoring 160 goals during the tournament, including 37 in the gold medal match.

Outside of the Games, he has been just as dominant. At the 2010 World Championships in which Australia claimed the silver medal, Ryley was named tournament MVP. This followed the two International events won by Australia in the lead-up to the World Championships in which Ryley was also named MVP – the 2010 Four Nations Championship and the 2010 Canada Cup. The team’s success continued in 2011, winning the Great Britain Cup and Asia Oceania Regional Championships and the dream run to the Games looked certain to continue until the team was defeated by the USA in the 2012 Canada Cup, just three months before the Games. But, the loss proved timely for the team, who used it as motivation when they went on to win every quarter of every game in London.

Outside wheelchair rugby, Ryley is an adrenaline junkie, loves to ride quad bikes and motor bikes in his spare time and is a passionate motorsports fan.